Buy the hardware when you need it. Better hardware will always be coming.
Is your 6 years old laptop still good enough? Wait. Do you want/need a new faster laptop with an exceptional battery life now? Get a MacBook pro M1.
Is your 6 years old laptop still good enough? Wait. Do you want/need a new faster laptop with an exceptional battery life now? Get a MacBook pro M1.
Second generation usually has the bugs worked out.
Apple has done an impressive enough job with the M1 that if I really needed a new computer right now, I might make exception -- the reviews have been phenomenal -- but barring that, I'd wait for M2.
Perhaps irrelevant to this discussion, but with non-critical things, I also often buy used. It's eco-friendly. I wouldn't buy a used /work/ computer, but for something like school or entertainment, there's a lot of upside to buying used:
* You can find teardowns on iFixit if you need to fix something.
* Someone has figured magical Linux kernel commands to disable NCQ to prevent some oddball crash.
* All the bleeding-edge stuff is supported; drivers are in mainline.
* If there's a keyboard design issue, fan failure, etc. people will have discovered it.
* In a lot of domains, you can also get upgraded/off-lease corporate/industrial equipment, which tends to be cheap and a few quality brackets up. Companies will offload old AV equipment, off-lease laptops, lab equipment (oscilloscopes, etc.), etc. A 5-year-old professional 1080 camcorder will wipe the floor with consumer 4k equipment.
Buying older stuff, you also spend around 1/2 to 1/3, and it's no different from having been born 2-5 years earlier. If you were born in 1990, you'll get the same equipment at the same age as someone far wealthier than you born in 1985.
Except for expiring Android phones and Chromebooks. Google like landfills.
The M1 is essentially what would have been the A14X for the iPad. I don’t consider it first-gen technology. macOS for ARM is first-gen but it seems to exceed expectations across the board.
I suspect that something like a M1X, an M1 scaled with additional cores and more memory capacity, will target higher TDP Apple laptops/desktops/workstations. More of the same continuous innovation, a good thing, in my opinion. Many of these decisions are pure marketing; a cheaper MacBook Air with an A14 makes sense to me technically as does the 13" MacBook Pro offering both low-TDP M1 and high-TDP M1X.
A departure from the existing continuous innovation might be a Neoverse-style chip like the Graviton for desktops/workstations. The current big.LITTLE architecture of the M1/A14 makes perfect sense for mixed use devices.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization
It's already here. No updates to software or hardware needed.
Both of those are available on M1. Virtualization was even demoed in the keynote discussing the switch to ARM.
The big plus of Air is that it is completely passive and silent. As such it will last longer. Depending on the dust level one may need to open the notebook each 6 months or even more often to vacuum clean and to avoid any throttling due to dust accumulation.