Any reason for not upgrading?
Why is this sort of question always framed as if people have to provide a justification for not buying a new model, as if spending money on the new shiny without any reason is normal or desirable?
We live in a day and age where hardware bought a decade ago still packs enough punch to run most of today's software without any hiccup. Why would anyone waste their cash to replace something that works without having any compelling reason?
For some background in my thinking, it is because today's announcement really focused on Intel users. My semi-educated guess is that Apple did a whole bunch of user studies and realized there are a lot of people out there, like the OP, who haven't upgraded yet, hence the focus. As a result, I'm genuinely curious why this person hasn't upgraded.
And for my own personal experience, the upgrade/switch from intel to m*, is night and day better ergonomics as a developer. It isn't just some shiny new toy or a waste in cash. For the same reason professional mechanics in F1 don't use shitty tools to work on their cars. Or tour de france racers aren't using 30lbs Huffy bikes.
TLDR: I don't give a f'ck if you don't happen to upgrade, that's your choice. I'm just curious about why.
We also live on a finite planet. And then energy savings for many desk jockeys is unlikely to be worth it for a few decades more, if one considers the literal tons of material and energy in manufacturing.
This thread is literally about the decision to buy an M3-based MacBook Pro to replace M2/M1/Intel MacBook Pros. We're talking about hardware launched in the past 4/3/2/1 years.
That's hardly "20yo" anything.
Also, you failed to provide any concrete, objective reason to buy a M3. None at all. Is it that hard to put together any argument to justify the move?
My car comparison was trying to propose an alternative metaphor since comparing a top-of-the-line racing car to a child's bicycle struck me as absurdly out of proportion. Cars are generally maintained and kept in service longer than computers, so I picked 20y out of thin air.
> Also, you failed to provide any concrete, objective reason to buy a M3. None at all. Is it that hard to put together any argument to justify the move?
My point is for most people there is no justification to move. Unless one has a device beyond repair, so old its software cannot be kept up-to-date, or the very rare need for the latest performance then stick with what you have.
Apple has telemetry from macOS. So they knew exactly what percentage of users are still on Intel Macs.
And it's low-hanging fruit to go after them then try and convince existing Windows users.
For the same reason professional mechanics in F1
don't use shitty tools to work on their cars.
That's a fantastically entirely subjective opinion.
That's the point: objectively, there is absolutely no concrete reason that justifies replacing a MacBook bought in the past 3 or 4 years with the M3 ones. None at all.
In fact, it boggles the mind how anyone could justify replacing any MacBook pro with a M3 one by claiming "pros don't use shitty tools", as if MacBook Pros packing an Intel core 7/M1/M2 suddenly became shitty laptops just because Apple released a new one.
Again, what you mean to say is that _you_ cannot think of a reason that would make _you_ upgrade from a 4 year old MacBook to a new M3 one.
> objectively
Do you understand that what you say is literally, definitionally, subjective? It's one thing to make primitive and clumsy generalisations, but quite another to be confusing subjectivity and objectivity.
> it boggles the mind
Starting to believe there isn't a lot of mind to boggle here…
> how anyone could justify replacing any MacBook pro with a M3 one by claiming "pros don't use shitty tools"
I haven't noticed anyone making this argument, but I know many people who upgrade their tools -- whether computers or otherwise -- to the latest and greatest whenever they can, because working faster and more efficiently is a concrete benefit, and it really would take an inestimable moron to, say, argue that late Intel-era MacBooks can do the same things that M-series MacBooks can.
I haven't noticed anyone making this argument
Not that you missed anything of value. A previous poster, latchkey, quite literally made that argument:
"the upgrade/switch from intel to m*, is night and day
better ergonomics as a developer. It isn't just some
shiny new toy or a waste in cash. For the same reason
professional mechanics in F1 don't use shitty tools
to work on their cars. Or tour de france racers aren't
using 30lbs Huffy bikes"
it really would take an inestimable moron to, say,
argue that late Intel-era MacBooks can do the same
things that M-series MacBooks can.
But if you spend some time learning about our industry you'll realize that not all development workflows are identical, and not all have the same bottlenecks, and for many tasks an Intel-powered Mac is not a bottleneck. Surely you can understand that, or aspire to understand that.
I would certainly agree with a more generalized and reality-based version of what you and the other poster seem to be attempting to say: If your current hardware is bottlenecking you in any way, you should most definitely address that if at all possible. A hardware upgrade that unbottlenecks you and improves your developer ergonomics will almost certainly pay for itself in the long run. That is sane and profitable advice and something I've always done.
> As to this laughable claim […]
This is a response to a specific point which rewmie has made several times. They seem to genuinely believe there is literally no difference between M-series and Intel chips:
> There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2 laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop. Nothing.
> there is absolutely no concrete reason that justifies replacing a MacBook bought in the past 3 or 4 years with the M3 ones. None at all.
> it boggles the mind how anyone could justify replacing any MacBook pro with a M3 one by claiming "pros don't use shitty tools", as if MacBook Pros packing an Intel core 7/M1/M2 suddenly became shitty laptops just because Apple released a new one
I likely disagree with your position, and believe you have made some bad faith arguments, but you're at least compos mentis.
> But if you spend some time learning about our industry
Whoops.
> you'll realize that not all development workflows are identical, and not all have the same bottlenecks, and for many tasks an Intel-powered Mac is not a bottleneck. Surely you can understand that, or aspire to understand that.
Would you mind restating what you believe my argument to be? Because this reads as a patronising non-sequitur to me, and I'm sure you're not intending for it to land that way.
(If you are pushed for time, I'll do it: nearly everyone spending thousands of dollars to upgrade their computer has what they consider to be a good reason for doing so, whether that reason be boosting their self-esteem by having the latest toy, or a mild performance boost in their day-to-day work. You may not find their interpretation of "a good reason" to be persuasive, but there are likely to be many areas of your personal spending which they would see as imprudent or rooted in tenuous reasons. This thread is full of people incapable of understanding the reasons others have for upgrading and making emphatic sweeping statements. Everyone is different. News at 11.)
"There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2
laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop"
The alternative interpretation, that they believed there was no objective difference in capability between Intel and Apple Silicon laptops, was so absurd I couldn't imagine anybody expressing it or believing it. I think I made the correct interpretation but it was definitely an extrapolation on my part and definitely fits the HN guideline of "assume best intentions."
To be clear, the Apple Silicon laptops certainly trounce the Intel MBPs and I think most developers will find them well worth the upgrade for most things -- I just didn't like the assertion that anybody still using an Intel Mac was equivalent to somebody riding the Tour de France in a Huffy.
I tried to, but found it hard given that OP also challenged people to provide "concrete reasons" to upgrade, and said things like "there is absolutely no reason". Everything OP says indicates to me that they actually meant this as evidence for their generalisation.
> The alternative interpretation, that they believed there was no objective difference in capability between Intel and Apple Silicon laptops, was so absurd I couldn't imagine anybody expressing it or believing it.
I agree it's a head scratcher… and yet here it is, before our very eyes, time and time again. I even recapitulated the argument in more reasonable terms ("I think what you meant to say is…"), but they seem resolute in their belief that there are no reasons to upgrade from a "late 2010s" MacBook to a new one.
> I just didn't like the assertion that anybody still using an Intel Mac was equivalent to somebody riding the Tour de France in a Huffy.
Heh, yeah that gave me pause too. I actually think that the example of the F1 mechanic slices the other way entirely: I can't imagine an F1 mechanic not taking an interest in the latest marginally improved wrench, given the narrow margins by which they succeed or fail in competition against other teams, and other mechanics.
You are right that many Intel machines are still highly capable. One could buy an Intel Mac Pro until earlier this year, for example.
But the trigger for Mr/Mrs/Mx "No difference between Intel Macs and the M-series" was another commenter benignly asking someone why they hadn't upgraded ("Any reason for not upgrading?") from a 2015 Intel MacBook Pro.
I said this elsewhere, but it seems like a fair question to ask someone on a computer/programming forum, particularly when the machine in question is close to EOL and has been blown away by a new technology. Don't get me wrong, if this was someone using a 2006 Core Duo in 2012, I'd think it was much of muchness, but the M-series does change things somewhat.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m2_8_gpu-vs-...
To put it in fully objective terms, a lot of development tasks (for many people) are still dominated by single-core performance.
The M2 has roughly 2x single-core performance, which is going to be absolutely awesome if you're spending a lot of time waiting for the CPU. But if that's not really a bottleneck, and the things you do are already completing at a speed that doesn't disrupt your flow state or otherwise consume significant amounts of your day.
I'm working (on my 2018 MBP) on some Python software that does science stuff. The single core perf delta between my CPU and the M2 is even smaller for a lot of tasks, more like 50% instead of 100%. And I'm not doing anything that would really benefit from more than 6 cores.
I'm currently planning an upgrade, but it's just not a pressing need as $2K-$3K is a significant investment for me at the moment.
I can't imagine an F1 mechanic not taking an interest
in the latest marginally improved wrench
My position is not that there aren't good reasons to have not upgraded from a 2015 Mac, or that I'm having trouble imagining what they are, but rather that it's a reasonable question to ask of someone in this specific forum.
> F1 teams have mandated cost caps…
We're not really arguing the point here. OP was not trying to pass an exam about the specific details of how F1 teams operate.
They were extending the analogy to make a counter point. That's a good faith thing to do.
I believe that OP's intention was to suggest that professionals who work in fields with high demands for performance, like professionals who are passionate about their work, are likely to invest in new and improved ways of accomplishing their work, even if it's only a marginal gain. (e.g. the marginal gain of moving from Spotlight to Raycast was worth it for me).
Discussing cost controls in Formula 1 moves us further away (IMO) from that universal truth they were trying to cast a light on.
> if their current wrenches are completely sufficient
… you are not making an honest argument, because it is entirely subjective as to whether their current wrenches are "completely sufficient".
The dog I have in this fight is not upgrade cycles or Intel vs. M1, it's "argue the fucking point without descending into high school rhetoric and logical fallacies".
It's surprising to me that you think that cutting-edge racing mechanics don't have objective criteria for these things and that it's all some sort of subjective dark art. But it's a bad analogy to begin with and it's not my analogy.
The one thing I do admire about the person who offered it is that they are at least trying to persuade by offering different lenses through which to interpret their perspective, instead of repeatedly shouting THERE IS NO GOOD REASON TO UPGRADE LMAO.
That nails it on the head.
That said, if anyone would like to send me $4000, I will absolutely upgrade to a new 14" Macbook in a heartbeat.
The newer 16 inch MacBook Pros are half a pound heavier than the Intel one.
That said, I was actually thinking ergonomics in terms of performance of development. The thing is so fast that commands complete faster than I can deal with them. My IDE can keep up with me. I can run a ton of apps and it doesn't slow down or glitch. It doesn't get nearly as hot and there is rarely fan noise. The screen is higher quality. The speakers sound better. Magsafe is back! The button for my fingerprint works very well. No more stupid touch bar. Function keys!
I could keep going...
Ideally, I'd consolidate these older systems into one new Mac mini, or even a Mac Studio.
I'd like at least 64 GB of memory, at a reasonable price.
The latest Mac mini maxes out at only 32 GB of RAM, if I'm remembering it right.
I think the latest low-end Mac Studio could be upgraded to 64 GB of memory, but the last time I priced it, this upgrade cost more than I'd been expecting. It also put the overall cost above what I'd prefer to pay.
While I'd like to keep using a Mac, it's looking more and more like I'd be better off just building a PC, where I could likely get comparable enough processing performance, but far more memory (and storage) at a lower cost.
I spend 8-10 hours on my Macbook every day. The amount of time I've saved / productivity I've gained by things just running faster and by being more mobile (much longer battery life) is huge compared to the $2000 price tag.
Frugality is good but there are some things in life (depending on your personal circumstances) where it does in fact make sense to upgrade for clear benefits.
I spend 8-10 hours a day coding on my 2018 MBP (web apps - Postgres and Rails or Python) but almost none of that is really CPU-bound in my case. The meat of my work, the actual coding and iteration, is not limited by the aging CPU.
The one thing that's painfully slow is rebuilding Docker images, but we don't do that too often. Less than once per week.
I actually am upgrading soon, but it is not going to make an amazing difference for me in terms of productivity in my current work.
You see, this is simply not true. At all. By far.
I have a cheap Intel laptop released 8-10 years ago. It shipped with 8GB of RAM and 4 cores. I bought it on a clearance sale for around $500. I use it still to this day to work on webapps, including launching half a dozen services with Docker Compose. The only time I experience any type of slowdown is when I launch IntelliJ.
I also have new kit, including a M2 MacBook.
There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2 laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop. Nothing. The only issue I have with my old laptop is battery life, and that's just because I don't bother replacing it.
Please do point out a single concrete example of "productivity gains" that I would get by spending $2k on a new laptop.
My spouse has a 12y old laptop that has had pretty much everything (but the soldered GPU) upgraded - CPU, memory, HDD->SSD, CD-SSD, WiFi (to support 5GHz), keyboard (replaced), fan & heatsink, battery (replaced, might rebuild one w/ LG's 18650 MJ1). Unfortunately pre-Sandy Bridge memory is capped at 8GB, so it shows its age - still an amazing thing.
[…]
> The only time I experience any type of slowdown is when I launch IntelliJ.
I can't tell if you're a serially dishonest interlocutor, or whether your fetish for making very emphatic generalisations with lots of intensifiers makes you seem like one, but once again this is very weak reasoning. You have yourself pointed out something you cannot do with your Intel laptop which you could with an upgrade.
> Please do point out a single concrete example of "productivity gains" that I would get by spending $2k on a new laptop.
You can run IntelliJ smoothly and have no battery life issues. (Literally from your own post… it's just so sad to see this utter lack of self awareness.)
Similarly, buying cheap used cars only works because someone else bought them new.
And not because it's shiny, fun and lets her socialise with her friends.
I don't know how you managed to read the comment you responded to as suggesting that.
For example as you passed 2016-2019, not only did you have the butterfly keyboard mess but each generation reportedly got hotter and thus louder.
My 2015 was quieter/cooler than my 2019.
So if you’re happy it may turn out that even though the newer machine has better performance it feels like a downgrade for other reasons.
(I don’t think that’s the case here)
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/butterfly-keyboard-vs-scisso...
The M1 dropped both times by in the region of 30 minutes, could do multiple rounds on a single charge and didn't make a tonne of noise while doing so.
The amount of time savings you get from the improved CPU perf is quantifiable, and you can assign a monetary amount to that time.
Now if your use case is not performance (cpu, battery, etc) limited then of course there's no reason to upgrade, ever really, but that would apply to any laptop or pc not just Macs.
OP didn't frame it any way at all as far as I can tell, but either way it seems like an entirely reasonable question to ask of someone on a forum which is largely comprised of computer and programming enthusiasts who has not upgraded their daily driver for nearly a decade.
> as if spending money on the new shiny without any reason is normal or desirable?
Every single person who spends their money on "the new shiny" has a reason. You may not find the reason edifying, but that's irrelevant to your stated argument.
> Why would anyone waste their cash to replace something that works without having any compelling reason?
As you were doubtless aware when you specifically constructed a straw man argument predicated on an entirely false premise and laden with your own subjective judgements about "waste" and things that "work" and "compelling" reasons, nobody does this.
I suspect what you really mean is that you believe people upgrade their machines without what _you_ consider to be a good reason. You think people are too quick to upgrade when their machine isn't the very latest, or when it's got a dent, or when it's slowing down a little.
If you'd written what you really believe -- that people should not upgrade as rapidly as they do -- you'd probably have pulled on the thread for a further 0.02s and realised that everyone has different values and priorities, and you likely "waste money" in others' eyes across multiple line items of your annual budget. So it's terrific luck, really, that the internet's various competing interpretations of a "compelling reason" can't stop you from spending your money however you'd like.
Are professionals expected to mindlessly throw money around at the new shiny without having absolutely no compelling reason to do so?
I think my post was rather straight-forward: people buy things only when they feel there is a clear upside to it. If you made that purchase 2 or 3 or 4 years ago, you need a very good reason to just throw it away and buy a new replacement. You need to at least make a valid case for it, otherwise you are just wasting your hard-earned money for nothing at all.
> Every single person who spends their money on "the new shiny" has a reason.
Why was OP framing that question on whether no reason was needed then, and instead people had to justify why weren't they wasting their money on the new shiny? Why is being new and shiny such a strong rationale that the onus of not buying is placed on not buying?
These are simple questions. In fact, all it would take is provide a single compelling reason why it would be a good idea to waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro when you already own a M2/M1 Macbook Pro, or even a late 2010s Macbook Pro. Hell, why on earth would you even waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro if you already have a M2 Macbook Air?
If you cannot answer this question, why would it be anything than absolutely foolish to pretend that people should justify not buying a M3?
Once again you're loading an incredibly tawdry straw man argument here with your own inane value judgements. The only difference is that this time you've undermined your argument with a typo: it's otherwise as self-evidently vacuous as your original comment.
Just look at this epistemological nightmare you enumerated with apparent sincerity:
> why on earth would you even waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro if you already have a M2 Macbook Air? If you cannot answer this question, why would it be anything than absolutely foolish to pretend that people should justify not buying a M3?
Putting aside haplography (I guess if your argument is just begging the question a dozen times it gets hard to write coherently), it seems that you're literally incapable of considering that other people have fundamentally different values and priorities to you.
Read this sentence you wrote:
> In fact, all it would take is provide a single compelling reason why it would be a good idea to waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro when you already own a M2/M1 Macbook Pro, or even a late 2010s Macbook Pro
It is axiomatic that there can be no "compelling reason why it would be a good idea [sic]" to "waste" money on an M3 MacBook Pro. It's a waste of money, so there cannot be a good reason. What you presumably intend to write is: "I cannot think of a single compelling reason for a person to upgrade to an M3 MacBook Pro if they already own an M2, M1, or late-2010s MacBook Pro."
And that's it. You can't think of a reason. People in this thread have given you both examples of reasons to upgrade, and clear-eyed explanations of why your inability to suspend your disbelief in this area is not the incisive general argument you think it is.
Much of the work I personally do will be made significantly faster by upgrading from the M1 to the M3 Max, which I will upgrade to. I upgraded to the M1 from an Intel Core i9.
You might think that this is a compelling reason -- wanting one's work to be faster and more efficient. You might not. It doesn't matter. It's a good enough reason for me to upgrade, and that's the rub. Everyone has a reason to upgrade, you just disagree with how compelling those reasons are. And again, the great news for everyone else is that your handwringing serves only to make you seem enormously judgemental and narrow-minded. You remain free to spend your money as you wish.
Upgrade policies aren't driven by new requirements, or performance improvements. Some companies have mandatory hardware replacement policies which mostly serve to allow their tech support staff to standardized on a small number of devices. Getting a M3 MacBook Pro replacement just because your employer doesn't want to maintain an Intel MacBook Pro is hardly indicative that a M3 is worth spending money on, let alone replace a M2 or even M1 MacBook Pro.
The new Magic Keyboard ( or Scissor 2.0 ) just doesn't suites me. 1.0mm Key travel is so so much worse than the 1.3/1.5mm old scissors on my 2015 MBP.
I actually dont need the seamless, ultra large trackpad. Which gets false positive from time to time. This has never been the case on a sane trackpad size.
My Workload is memory limited, and rarely CPU limited. Upgrading wouldn't bring a lot of benefits unless I have more memory, and Memory upgrade is expensive.
Did I mention keyboard or trackpad?
I just had a battery swap on this MBP earlier this year, hopefully it will last another 4 - 5 years or whenever I cant update Safari. Although I guess I could still use Firefox.
would be my guess
If one is that concerned about someone exploiting an OS level security flaw to exfiltrate their online banking credentials (wildly unlikely), they should just be doing that stuff in a VM or similarly isolated environment anyways.
For a while, yes, but the browser being up-to-date doesn't make an EOL OS safe to expose to the Internet.
> If one is that concerned about someone exploiting an OS level security flaw to exfiltrate their online banking credentials (wildly unlikely), they should just be doing that stuff in a VM or similarly isolated environment anyways.
Just doing sensitive stuff in a VM isn't good protection at all, since a malicious host can trivially compromise the guest.
It can, Ubuntu runs just fine on it
https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/384 is still open. :(
https://docs.docker.com/desktop/release-notes/#4250
I have been using it for a few months (in beta) and it works great !