With M1 Air, Apple had to blow us away. People, including me, had hard time believing Apple's claims and many people were coping by looking at the Keynote charts and assuming that Apple must have tricked everyone by not giving proper scale metrics etc.
When people put their hands on the real device, it was slaying almost everything on the market and soon it was clear that this thing is a revolution.
You don't one up this easily. Apple claims 2X performance improvement over M1 Air and I am sure its mostly true but that M1 Air was so ahead that for a lot of people workloads didn't catch up yet.
At this very moment I have 3 Xcode projects open, Safari has 147 tabs open and its consuming 11GB of my 16GB Ram and my SSD lifetime dropped to 98% due to frequent swap hits and yet I'm perfectly fine with the performance at this very moment and I'm not looking for immediate replacement.
I can't imagine 147 tabs. I have 9 pinned tabs and maybe ... 6 other tabs open if I'm particularly busy. I also turn off my work laptop at the end of the day, because all of my state is restored when this handful of tabs comes back.
Maybe this is just me managing my ADHD, but when I see people with hundreds of tabs open I just can't imagine how they work. Every tab has been mashed down to its favicon and I watch them struggle to find the right one. It seems insane to me.
There are two kinds of people. <10 open tabs and >100 open tabs. Nothing in between.
I think of the >100 ones as people who have completely lost control of their lives. I'm sure they think of me as someone who needs everything to be just so and can't deal with the messiness of real life.
I have several hundred open on my M2 MBA and have no problem. Maybe it's because I use Brave? I don't know but have never had to think too much about it. I also don't have much RAM (either the base amount or up a little).
I do restart my browser once a month or so, if things ever feel less snappy than normal.
In Safari, tabs get small up to a point, then they are scrollable. Sure, there are duplicates but it's usually the homepage of HN or Twitter. I close those when encountered.
Same. Each year I tell myself I'll get the new one. Each year when the new one comes out I notice that for what I use it for my M1 Air is still completely fine.
I did some research and I'm deferring for a semester but tbh my motivation is pretty low. As per perception it seems decent but depending on circumstances it's def a much better idea to do an on campus programme.
This is where I am, too. I have an M1 Pro and I have never loved a computer more. This thing is a beast and just about anything I throw at it is fine. I can't imagine how much better the M4 is. Unless this computer gets stolen or doused with water, I'll probably have it for at least another 3-4 years. Absolutely amazing value for my money.
Nor should you have a reason to replace it. The device is barely 4 years old. There was a time until very recently when laptops would be expected to last 10+ years minimum with minor RAM and SSD updates.
I don’t know when that time was. Hardware and software requirements have been moving fast for just about forever, until actually maybe the past 5 years.
There was never a time when laptops were expected to last 10+ years.
I'm still happily using an 8GB M1 running Firefox in OSX + Firefox/VSCode/NodeJS in a Debian VM. Lots of tabs open. Both OSX and Debian can use compressed RAM.
agreed, which is awesome, the only thing that worries me is that they will drop support for it earlier than they have to when they want to force people to upgrade eventually. I hope to get 10 years out of my M1
Everyone I know that got an M1 cheaped out on the 8gb model and are now struggling to use a browser with heavy sites and multitasking(zoom) at the same time.
But also apples upcharge on RAM is disgusting, so it's hard to blame them for picking the lowest spec model.
Totally an anecdote, but my 8gb M1 runs fine with multiple browsers/tabs, VS Code, and Spotify all open. Usually performance is only an issue for me when working with larger ML models. I wonder why others are getting worse performance? Maybe it's the specific sites they're using?
It isn't depending on what "web browsing" someone is doing, which can be a pretty wide range now.
1 persons "web browsing" is no browser extensions, a couple of gmail tabs, some light blog reading, and maybe something as heavy as reddit.
While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.
8gb is quickly becoming unworkable for people that fall closer to the latter group.
> While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.
That's computing, not web browsing. And on not so great platform than that.
Do you use it as a laptop, or is it hooked up as a desktop for the most part? If the former, I'd try one of the M series in the same role and see if you notice a difference in ergonomics.
At this time (and historically), I mostly use it as a laptop, but I have also used it as a desktop for long periods with an external monitor. As a laptop, I love that it's so tiny. It’s working very well so far... but I’m afraid that at some point, I’ll have to switch to Linux or OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I’m still on macOS 11 (Big Sur).
MS Office has already stopped updating, along with some other software (though not much, most still updates without issues). As long as Firefox keeps receiving updates for my system, most things will be fine.
If those don't look like a problem for you, I'd definitely suggest giving it a try. MacOS 13 should give you at least 3 more years of use out of it.
Going beyond MacOS 13 I don't think is worth it. MacOS 14 is noticeably slower on my 2010 iMac, and there aren't any new features it can take advantage of anyways.
