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Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

I feel so left behind with an M1 MacBook. Is that on purpose? Am I supposed to feel shame and upgrade to M{LATEST}?

Maybe you're joking? I have an M1 MBP with 64gb of ram and feel zero need to upgrade. Great battery life and handles anything I need a laptop to do.

Same here... It's still amazing, and I have no legitimate reason to upgrade. Could be looked at as a failure of some sort, that they haven't given us a good reason.

Unless your RAM requirements aren’t being met, the M1 is good enough. The M2 is the best of the line so far because the M3 handicapped memory bandwidth for the only use cases that need so much memory.

M4 is tempting and a decent time to upgrade if you’ve had an M1 since 2020 or 2021, but its exact specifications aren’t know for all lines yet.

Is the M3 “worse” than the M2?

On CPU/GPU benchmarks the M3 comes out ahead of the M2 (all flavors in like-for-like comparisons, plain, pro, max). However the M3 Pro and some M3 Max's have lower memory bandwidth than their M2 counterparts.

So a plain M3 is better than a plain M2. The top end M3 Max is better than the M2 Max. For the rest, you have to do a comparison and determine based on your intended use-cases, but for most people the M3 {Pro,Max} will be better than the M2 equivalent.

M3 Pro (and some lower-core count M3 Max) parts have lower memory bandwidth than their M2 comparable. If your workload is highly dependent on memory bandwidth, then M2->M3 on Pro or Max might not be an improvement.

See tables here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2#Variants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M3#Variants

Upgraded to an M3 Max from an M1 Pro. I can scarcely tell the difference.

Think about your needs and what you actually do with your computer, and if there would be a significant difference with an upgrade.

I'm still on M1 and I know that M2 and M3 would not change my experience for my web development work.

But yeah, if you're just going off the maker's marketing materials, then yeah, you'd always feel behind.

The M1 is seriously good. I have a base model M1 with 16GB of RAM, and I've spent approximately zero time waiting while it processes or opens things.

Granted, no gaming or number-crunching (that goes on a server!), just coding, browsers, and Excel.

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