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Comment by stuff4ben | Hacker News Reader

This is good to know. I worry about the longevity of these new M-series processors from Apple since they're so (relatively) new. What is the usable lifespan of a base M1-MacBook Air for example? I guess I'll find out since I just bought one for my kid who is a junior in HS and I'm hoping this will last until they graduate college.

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From my experience with M1, M1 Max, and M2 Max laptops, I think the only real limitation to useful longevity of the M1 machines is configured RAM and Apple's willingness to provide software updates.

A point in its favor is that Apple is still selling the M1 MacBook Air new today as their entry level laptop, which is now 3 years old. And it's still a great machine with better performance and battery life than a lot of competitors and it's completely fanless. I expect Apple to push for dropping new OS support for Intel machines fairly quickly, but the countdown clock on M1 support probably doesn't even start until they stop selling them as new.

My previous Intel MacBook Pro was still perfectly serviceable 8 years after purchase when I traded it in, although it wasn't going to receive major OS updates going forward.

The only time I've had issues with my M1 MacBook Air 8GB is when I temporarily tried using it as a real dev machine while waiting for a backordered company laptop. As soon as you really hit that RAM ceiling due to running docker and big IDEs you really feel the performance drop, but until that point it was perfectly competent, and again this is a fully fanless machine.

I bought M1 Air 256GB with 16GB RAM on release for light web development and professional 2D gamedev on Unity. Still using it till now and it's really really durable hardware and I've been usign it daily for 3+ years.

With so little RAM had to sacrifice ability to properly run VMs, but yet till this day there just no comparable hardware on market.

8GB versions though... Certainly Apple should be damned for selling laptops with 8GB RAM in 2023 when my x220i ran 16GB in 2011. At some point they will all become e-waste due too little RAM or dead soldered SSD because of extreme swapping.

8GB of RAM ought to be enough for anybody right? I'm hoping that's true for someone who spends most of their time in Google Docs or Word and the occasional light web browsing. This MBA replaced a Chromebook which really was on its last legs.

I'm using an M2 Air with 16GB and M1 Mini with 8GB. On the 8GB machine I have to restart Firefox every few days because otherwise it completely fills up RAM + Swap and the entire system starts getting sluggish. It's a very noticeable bottleneck while on the 16GB Macbook I don't really think about memory usage.

I would not recommend the 8GB variant to anyone who plans on using it for more than a couple browser tabs and some light tasks.

> I would not recommend the 8GB variant to anyone who plans on using it for more than a couple browser tabs and some light tasks.

Which is basically all my kids do. Less than 10 tabs, nothing else.

I’m a heavy user often do 50 tabs and lots of apps in the background. 8gb M1 air is really fast for me.

Check about:memory in Firefox. It's not reasonable to run out of swap; that means it's trying to keep something like 40GB in there after compression. You might have an extension or something leaking.

For a while now, the lifespan of Apple devices has mostly been limited by Apple stopping to provide software updates. Most Macs from 20 years ago still work fine today. If some component died, it was usually the hard drive or the power supply in my experience.

Apple Silicon will definitely be the architecture best supported by Apple for the foreseeable future. There is no downside to it in terms or reliability or longevity.

To make a somewhat exaggerated comparison: horses still work fine today, but it really doesn't make sense for people to be using them anymore outside of niche use cases or as a hobby.

Sure, macs from 20 years ago still work "fine", but the reason they aren't widely used anymore is not the lack of software updates.

For context my M1 Air feels as good as the day I bought it and it's just about to hit 3 years old.

I kept my previous 2014 MBP for 6 years and I can't see this one being any different.

Same. The only issue I have w/ my original M1 Air is that I was impatient and got the 8GB model because I could get it into my hands a month faster. But that's not something that's changed over time.

Every new release I drool over getting the new shiny but the reality is that for my personal laptop it's AOK for almost everything I do. Sometimes a bit slow and frustrating due to the RAM but again, that's on me.

I'm running Windows (ARM) virtual machine on M1 Air, and it's constantly thermally throttled. It was hitting 95 Celsius degrees sometimes. I even bought one of those cooling pads with three fans, to make up for the lack of cooling in the laptop itself, so it is now down to 65 Celsius degress. Makes my life little more bearable, but I'm switching to M3 Macbook pro (with proper cooling) ASAP.

Add a thermal pad to connect the heatsink to the back cover and the thermal throttling will go away. Tons of tutorials on Youtube and it takes 5 minutes. I did it on my M1 Air and it doesn't go above 85-90C now.

For me at least the longevity is already far better than the Intel MacBooks Pro. I bought the 2017 and 2019 models and for my use those felt obsolete from day 1, with 2 hour battery life and permanent full-speed fans and CPU throttling.

I have a M1 Pro since release day and I don't see myself wanting to replace this until probably the M5 is out.

My experience with buying lower end intel based Macbook Airs is that they generally last 10 years before we replace them. Usually this comes down to asking if it is worth replacing the battery or better to invest in a new machine. I'm assuming the M processors will be similar.

I’ve got a 16 inch Pro with 32g of RAM and I can see myself using this for development work at least a decade.

I tend to run it with a large external 4k 120hz screen and don’t see the need to upgrade for better IO for a long time and the thing is very, very fast.

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