I'm no die hard apple fan, but you would think I was if you heard me talking about my 16" m1 pro. It's an absolute beast, battery for days, and I've never heard the fan spin up once. It would take a lot for me to even give another machine a chance.
I’m even kinda happy about the notch, because it prompted Apple to add a strip of extra pixels for the menubar to live in, leaving the remaining 16:10 area fully open for use by apps.
The only downside is its weight, but given all of its other upsides I can live with that.
What I really want from Apple at this point is better UX on MacOS. Stage Manager is an interesting idea but, to me, it's not really a fix for any of my problems so I've just disabled it. I've used two 4k external monitors for years on MacOS and the same little annoying bugs plague me. Specifically, I think how MacOS handles full-screen apps is just not quite right. I don't understand why things feel clunky in just this area of the experience. We need what happened in iOS a few years ago when they got rid of the home button and were forced to make opening/closing/switching between apps much more fluid. I need MacOS to feel fluid like that. Then, it'd really be "perfect" for me.
I have baked into my muscle memory the expectation that when I hit the keyboard shortcut to summon virtual desktop number 5, that desktop will show up on the monitor that currently has focus, no matter which monitor(s) it may have appeared on before. This setup is impossible in Mission Control or whatever the multiple-desktop thing MacOS is called. I can choose between:
"Displays have separate spaces" checked: left monitor has desktops 1,2,3, right monitor has desktop 4,5,6, and if I add a new one to left its number is 7. Want to put desktop #4 on the left? You can't except by dragging all the windows one by one, like a cave-man. What happens to the numbering when you add or remove another monitor? It's weird.
"Displays have separate spaces" unchecked: now I have numbered Left+RightMonitorMonstrosity desktops, but if I want to switch the left monitor between "documentation" and "email", while leaving the right monitor on code, I'm out of luck. This setup behaves a bit better about adding and removing monitors, I will admit.
My old Xmonad setup with numbered desktops (which I cloned from my ion3 setup) behaved beautifully when adding and removing monitors. This is to say nothing of having had a Mod4 key solely for my own use, which I ended up using almost exclusively to interact with the window manager.
I can't wrap my head around a film strip of horizontally situated desktops that I swipe through or page through. I can't fathom the idea of making "full screen" change an app from looking like a window to looking like a desktop, and whats more appending the new desktop to the end of the list. I know that MacOS already knows what the windows on that other desktop are going to look like before I switch, so why does it insist on showing some kind of animation when switching (even "reduce motion" changes it from a wipe motion to a useless fade), like iOS does to hide load time? I know about amethyst and rectangle and setting up a "hyper" key with karabiner-elements or qmk or whatever. No amount of it adds up to the same experience that I had with ion3 back in 2006 and I get worked up that I paid into the ecosystem and bought this otherwise-great laptop and I can't make it work the way I want it.
The limitation, which you might be bumping into, is you can't drag the current desktop that's visible on a display, which is sometimes annoying but makes sense. Switch to a different desktop first.
I agree with you about the confusing ever-changing number labels on the desktops. I would really like to assign names to desktops, like "Work" and "Project 1". The GUI has room for it, as the full-screen app desktops already have names.
Or do 8 parallel runs of transforming and merging a massive amount of jpgs into less massive pile of pdfs. Just about fully pegged all of the cores for hours.
What surprised me was how fast everything still was. Without the fan, I wouldn't have known the load the system was under.
I don't know what imagemagick does when you ask it to merge jpgs into a pdf. :)
14 inch M2 Macbook Pro.
Combine it with the Anker 737 Power Bank, and it's a match made in heaven.
Never heard the fan. Stays cool to the touch, which is quite unexpected and pleasant.
Essentially, the RAM is so close to the CPU and GPU that it can effectively be used as VRAM, at least for the M1 and up chipsets as far as I'm aware. That means a 32GB RAM MacBook would be able to run incredibly large (e.g. LLM) networks on-device. Nvidia GPUs with that much VRAM (although they are clearly better at GPU tasks) can cost as much as an expensive MacBook already.
[1] In addition to the non-MBP hardware being clunky, your choice of OS is cutting your steak with a spoon (Windows), or a huge drawer full of tangs, handles, prongs, and spoon-bowl and you spend your time digging around to assemble a knife, fork, and spoon that are the same style and finally give up and settle for "well, it matches if you squint" (Linux). I love the idea of Linux, but I've never actually gotten my system to where I like it, just to where I can tolerate it.
When I looked at adding my ideal RAM and storage onto the base MBP M2 Pro model, the RAM upgrade came to $1634.56 (£1250), and the storage upgrade came to $2876.83 (£2200).
That's enough to be a long term purchase, so I decided to wait for the M3 and see if 3nm makes a big difference.
That's not a very good comparison. Glasses are important for helping the visually impaired, while Apple memory is just an add-on for a luxury computer.
>But as long as you can afford it, a few hundred dollars isn't that much spread over a few years.
It is that few hundred dollars is a 10x markup over market rate (I've checked, and Apple's markups are actually that bad).
>You can get a not-MBP and have a clunky experience [1] but save some money, or spend a the extra few hundred for a MBP with enough memory to be a great experience.
I don't think my experience with my current PC is clunky, and if I get an M1 macbook, I'll be using Asahi Linux instead of MacOS.
Another factor: I live in the UK, where they have a particularly crackpot derivative of the ISO QWERTY layout that well nigh unusable for a programmer. Apple is the only laptop vendor that will allow you to choose your keyboard layout, so when I buy anything else, I order from the US, with all the customs hassles that implies.
I can’t help wonder if the m2 air 15” is the best on the market currently.
I'm so surprised more people don't want brighter screens.
At night my screen looks gorgeous, though I could even go a touch brighter when doing detailed design stuff.
Daytime? I'd go for literally 2-3x brighter if I could. Let alone working outside! Screen brightness is the biggest QoL improvement I'd get vs any other spec bump.
The only things it doesn’t check off is the HDMI out and other ports issues IMO.
I work with my laptop only. No peripherals and I move around a lot. Makes it easier for me to work this way.
I suspect the fan doesn't turn on because it is heavily throttled.