The M2 seems incredible. It is the first thing in a long time that has tempted me to try out a Mac. The price is high, but is the performance worth it? 32GB of unified memory would be nice.
There are a few games that it won't play, and..... that's about it. I'm still surprised at how quickly that happened. Worth a try, the M2 mini is cheap and easy, and the 8gb/256gb config was "enough" for me. I honestly didn't even notice the bump moving to the max 64gb/2tb. Doing it over, I'd probably do an Air with 16 or 24gb and be happy as a clam.
$0.02 :)
I have many 2015 MacBook Pro's. All tour. All are almost permanently on. I replaced the battery on two machines last year. Speakers fine. Screen fine. Are you implying the relatively young M1 Air is so badly made, the speakers, monitors, AND battery have already needed to be replaced?
> my lifestyle involves very rough handling of the machine
No, it's not badly made, GP seems to be a huge exception. Please, read the full comment...
My M1 Air has been around since launch, have traveled with it just throwing inside bags, dropped a few times, sat on, etc., it still works 100% fine without any part swap, and looks almost pristine with just a tiny scratch on one of the edges from a drop.
As for the battery, yeah ideally it'd last longer. But it's seen a lot of physical abuse, tons of full charge cycles, and generally wonked out charging setups so I can't get too upset.
For the monitor I'm honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did. It had been slammed around and crushed far more than what it should be able to take.
And how are you saying you've had M1 devices for 6 years? I don't think thats possible.
[1]: https://www.ifixit.com/products/macbook-air-13-a2337-late-20...
I don’t think it’s just down to macOS because the Intel Mac’s didn’t feel as good. I think it’s likely down to the E cores and moving more of the IO handling processors onto the SoC (according to the Asahi folks anyway)
When my Intel Mac or AMD PC are under load, input struggles to fight with the things taking up resources. And that might be as simple as running Teams which is a resource hog at the most random times.
The Arm Macs never hit that issue for me even when I’m using aggressive loads.
XCode, a Flutter project in Android Studio, a Rails project in Rubymine, a running server/database and 2 different mobile Simulators, Sublime, Safari, Chrome, and 3 different Firefox profiles.
I'm looking forward to picking up a new Macbook sometime in the next half a year, but for now I'm quite delighted when using my Mini which literally boots in less than 5 seconds.
Edit: just wanted to emphasize that sometimes my Macbook Pro struggles without even all of the above apps open.
For regular stuff that's not gpu intensive, it's not really much different to any other system in terms of how it uses ram. What's different is it has a ridiculously fast SSD and can swap without much performance hit.
Relying on your ssd for swap over getting enough memory in the first place seems like false economy to me.
Important to keep in mind you won’t be able to replace that SSD without taking the machine to an Apple Store, and I’m not even sure they can replace the SSD without replacing the motherboard.
So almost no matter how much ram you get, in multi-application day to day workflows it’ll still use swap sometimes just because it can.
If your workflow involves something like giant objects in python or huge data structures that need to be in ram for performance, then you need the ram. But for use cases like 2,000 browser tabs plus photoshop plus Lightroom plus ten electron apps, mac osx “feels” like it has way more ram than an equivalent windows machine.
Being able to use swap is obviously beneficial, and if you're going to use it, it's better if it's fast.
But relying on it in place of regular RAM means you're just artificially shortening the life of your SSD - that's what I meant about "a false economy".
The machine "feeling" responsive isn't the point.
If all other factors are the same, the ssd wear on a machine that's used the ssd heavily for swap is going to be significantly higher.
Using a Mac (or Linux) is deeply enlightening on how terrible the Windows user experience is. From random slowdowns to odd degradation patterns under load, it’s a very frustrating environment.
The only reason I can imagine people putting up with it is being unwilling to change - it takes work to move from Windows to Linux, but Macs are so well rounded, and now with their ARM CPUs, they can offer a much tighter integration between hardware and software.
And, for developers, it’s Unix from top to bottom (well… no X, but that’s another story). WSL is impressive, but it’s still a Linux bolted on a VMS-like OS.
One thing: considering how long Macs remain usable and the fact they are impossible to expand, it’s wise to get more memory than you need right now. Thinking on developing for cluster environments, I’d try to get a Mac with 32 or 64GB of RAM.
For coding, I think ram gets a little overrated sometimes. Many projects would work fine on 16GB machines.
Dammit price discrimination. I realize buying the cheaper option frequently is the better option with Apple prices but they really know how to price in storage anxiety.
We bought the wrong model to start with (13" M2 regular) and spent a week messing around with ours trying to get it to work with our 2 external displays when we rang Apple and they explained the difference between M2 Regular and M2 Pro. If you were buying one for yourself and budget was of no value, note the 13" and 14" are virtually the same physical size, and yet the design and technical capabilities of the 14" model are far and beyond ...
I wrote off the 13" as a loss and paid the difference myself, and now use it as a laptop at home :) Old design, yes, but it was such a nice piece of kit, no way I was gonna send it back to Apple!
For some use cases, you're even better off upgrading the base model M2 Air to 512GB vs upgrading the RAM from 8 to 16GB for a similar cost. This is because swapping suddenly becomes twice as fast.
a failure (or sabotage?) compared to the m1 models that
worked properly without the expensive “upgrade”
My understanding is this: when the lowest-capacity model is only using a single chip, it's because the manufacturer is no longer making smaller sizes. For example, Apple's supplier(s) may not even be making 128GB NAND chips any more or may be discontinuing them soon, so they don't even have the option of using 128GB+128GB instead of 256GB.
Think of it as having one SSD fitted on the low end and two on all other models.
Much improved compute speed + battery life, barely noticeable battery drain. I'm a very happy customer.
I actually liked it. Too bad it’s an evolutionary dead end and never made it to the desktop keyboards.
And I even liked the one without an ESC key.
Regarding the Mac Studio, I had heard complaints about noisy fans. Can you comment on that?
The numbers reflect Mac revenue down -24.2% YoY to date; if it's worth it, the market certainly hasn't voted with their wallets yet.
And then buy a refurbished one on the Apple Card to save a bit of cheddar™.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FNWE3LL/A/refurbished-16-...