Who would buy a MacBook Air or mini or studio today with its older chips?
They've essentially undercut every Mac they currently sell by putting the M4 in the iPad and most people will never use that kind of power in an iPad.
If you are going to spend $4k on a Mac don't you expect it to have the latest processor?
I write this on a $1,000 late 2015 Intel MacBook Air.
I think for the past 10 years you are correct, but I think we are currently entering the AI age and the base M4 has 38 TOPS (trillion operations per second) and we aren’t going to be able to run the AI models on device with lower latency that they will surely be releasing this summer without a more recent chip, so I don’t think things are as future proof as they used to be.
But that’s not really the point, the point is that I don’t want to spend $4k to buy a Mac Studio with an M2 chip while the M3 Macbook Pro has on par performance and the iPad has an M4. Apple should come up with a better update strategy then randomly updating devices based on previous update cycles.
Obviously, the newer laptops are much more smooth and responsive.