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Comment by marinhero | Hacker News Reader

This makes sense. Amongst my friends, a number of them maxed out an M1 machine not just because of the processor but also because of the improved I/O and new form factor. The M1 machine ticked so many boxes that the purchase decision was not solely pushed by the CPU. The machines are so good it’s hard to justify a new one!

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Same here. I maxed out the M1 14” MacBook Pro as soon as it came out. It was a huge upgrade in every way. The M2s look great, but the only real difference is a slight bump in horsepower.

I’ll wait a release or two before upgrading. Apple haven’t lost an M2 sale because they’ve done anything wrong, they’ve guaranteed an M3 or M4 sale because they nailed it. It’ll take a while for that success to show up in their books though.

Yep I maxed out the 14" M1 and Its incredible

I’m working with a maxed out M1 MacBook Pro and I can’t imagine it being obsolete any time soon. Apple might not sell me a computer for several years, but I spent far more than I would have otherwise. Assuming all goes well, I’ll probably do the same thing when I do buy again.

It won't. My daily driver is still a mid-2010 iMac.

When apps like Blender stopped working on my mid-2010 iMac is when I jumped.

My two 2015 vintage Macs are fine as browsers but wanted a fairly loaded Apple Silicon MacBook with a big SSD for various reasons.

Cybersecurity. You are 10x more likely to be hacked than someone running a modern OS with browser+os-level zero days patched. At least run Linux on it.

Why do you think they haven’t updated the OS and browser?

Also, how can you patch a zero day?

Apparently according to online sources, the latest OS supported on a 2010 iMac is macOS Mojave, and the latest security update for Mojave was released in 2021.

Later versions of macOS can be installed on older hardware than is officially supported by Apple, by using OpenCore Legacy Patcher: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

Same here. I’ve wanted a MacBook Air since the core 2 duo days but the processor was always too slow and RAM too small. The fanless M1 air was exactly what I’ve wanted for 15 years.

> and RAM too small

The current default is 8GB and max is 16GB. It isn’t too high even now considering it’s 2023

I’m the tech guy in my circle and despite my wishes most of my friends and family get the standard 8GB models. Beside one friend that had a crazy memory link, most of them don’t bat an eye. If Safari, Word, and Excel open they don’t mind too much.

8GB is fine at the moment on MacOS. The standard is still 8gb for most non-performance laptops and there are legions and legions of corporate HPs and Dells with 8GBs.

Really, 8GB is only a problem if you use multiple Electron apps or heavy Webapp tabs (full-fat Gmail, Google Docs) at once or use lots of VMs, which is something most people don't do unless it's for work (or not at all, unless they're tech nerds, in the case of VMs). Otherwise, they'll have 1-3 heavy webshit things open at a time, generally, which fits OK in 8GB.

It's when you've got two or three needlessly-heavy web "dashboards" and Gmail and Slack and Jira and Notion all eating 500-1500 MB each that 8GB starts to feel cramped.

I think 8gb is totally fine if all you are doing is full-stack JS development, with some light backend stuff thrown in (Python rest service, maybe even running postgres locally).

I occasionally run my tech stack on a 12' MacBook with an Intel m3 processor to make sure that I haven't gone overboard with tooling, mostly to ensure international, developing country open source contributors don't have to struggle opening local servers and such on their machines.

Max is 24GB on M2 Air. It's a great machine but pretty expensive.

Every iOS programmer needed to make the jump. Coding directly on ARM rather than an x86 emulator of ARM is a huge deal.

In addition, Apple obsoletes Xcode for new phones quite regularly. Once the M1 was out it and working fine it was clear that support for x86 would get killed post haste.

> The machines are so good it’s hard to justify a new one!

I imagine Apple will have to accelerate planned obsolescence (maybe dropping from 7 to 5 years of OS and security updates) to make analysts happy. ;-/

More seriously, I've gotten 7+ years of use out of multiple Apple devices. Though my 2014 iPad Air 2 is probably going to be retired from the internet once iPadOS 15 security updates end.

Also I expect a minor boost for Apple if Apple Silicon based Mac Pro machines (and perhaps pro iMac models?) turn out well.

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