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Comment by metayrnc | Hacker News Reader

After getting the initial M1 Air, I am still struggling to find a reason to replace it. Still going strong with no hiccups!

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With M1 Air, Apple had to blow us away. People, including me, had hard time believing Apple's claims and many people were coping by looking at the Keynote charts and assuming that Apple must have tricked everyone by not giving proper scale metrics etc.

When people put their hands on the real device, it was slaying almost everything on the market and soon it was clear that this thing is a revolution.

You don't one up this easily. Apple claims 2X performance improvement over M1 Air and I am sure its mostly true but that M1 Air was so ahead that for a lot of people workloads didn't catch up yet.

At this very moment I have 3 Xcode projects open, Safari has 147 tabs open and its consuming 11GB of my 16GB Ram and my SSD lifetime dropped to 98% due to frequent swap hits and yet I'm perfectly fine with the performance at this very moment and I'm not looking for immediate replacement.

How do you manage 147 open tabs and why have them all open at once?

Really bad habit, when I’m into something I open some tabs and if I switch to something else I keep opening new bunch of tabs.

Once I no longer remember the older tabs I create a tab group from the current tabs in case there’s a tab I care about and start fresh.

I have several hundred open on my M2 MBA and have no problem. Maybe it's because I use Brave? I don't know but have never had to think too much about it. I also don't have much RAM (either the base amount or up a little).

I do restart my browser once a month or so, if things ever feel less snappy than normal.

I think the question is why rather than physically how. Surely that amount of tabs is useless because you'll have duplicates, irrelevant things, etc.

In Safari, tabs get small up to a point, then they are scrollable. Sure, there are duplicates but it's usually the homepage of HN or Twitter. I close those when encountered.

It looks like this: https://a.dropoverapp.com/cloud/download/5cda0c76-9398-475a-...

I can't imagine 147 tabs. I have 9 pinned tabs and maybe ... 6 other tabs open if I'm particularly busy. I also turn off my work laptop at the end of the day, because all of my state is restored when this handful of tabs comes back.

Maybe this is just me managing my ADHD, but when I see people with hundreds of tabs open I just can't imagine how they work. Every tab has been mashed down to its favicon and I watch them struggle to find the right one. It seems insane to me.

There are two kinds of people. <10 open tabs and >100 open tabs. Nothing in between.

I think of the >100 ones as people who have completely lost control of their lives. I'm sure they think of me as someone who needs everything to be just so and can't deal with the messiness of real life.

Same. Each year I tell myself I'll get the new one. Each year when the new one comes out I notice that for what I use it for my M1 Air is still completely fine.

The real win for me is that Macbook Pro M1 64 GB are now sold on market places within my price range.

So yea, same.

What do you feel is a good price for that?

In my case, 2000 euro's

Hey, as for OMSCS.

I did some research and I'm deferring for a semester but tbh my motivation is pretty low. As per perception it seems decent but depending on circumstances it's def a much better idea to do an on campus programme.

Hey, thanks for talking about OMSCS :)

This is where I am, too. I have an M1 Pro and I have never loved a computer more. This thing is a beast and just about anything I throw at it is fine. I can't imagine how much better the M4 is. Unless this computer gets stolen or doused with water, I'll probably have it for at least another 3-4 years. Absolutely amazing value for my money.

Nor should you have a reason to replace it. The device is barely 4 years old. There was a time until very recently when laptops would be expected to last 10+ years minimum with minor RAM and SSD updates.

I don’t know when that time was. Hardware and software requirements have been moving fast for just about forever, until actually maybe the past 5 years.

There was never a time when laptops were expected to last 10+ years.

I'm still happily using an 8GB M1 running Firefox in OSX + Firefox/VSCode/NodeJS in a Debian VM. Lots of tabs open. Both OSX and Debian can use compressed RAM.

What software are you using for virtualization? I wasn't impressed with the Apple Silicon options last time I looked.

Yeah that. I only got rid of mine because I wanted the nice mini-LED screen on the 14" MBP. No plans to replace that one any time soon!

My M1 Max Mac Studio also feels very good even though it's probably full of dust and cleaning it isn't reasonable.

agreed, which is awesome, the only thing that worries me is that they will drop support for it earlier than they have to when they want to force people to upgrade eventually. I hope to get 10 years out of my M1

Everyone I know that got an M1 cheaped out on the 8gb model and are now struggling to use a browser with heavy sites and multitasking(zoom) at the same time.

But also apples upcharge on RAM is disgusting, so it's hard to blame them for picking the lowest spec model.

Cries in 4Gb Macbook Air 2013 /s

I am fine(ish) with the above setup, I don't know what you are talking about. 8Gb is plenty for website browsing.

That's a rough era, new enough to have soldered RAM and old enough that Apple felt ok with 4GB in a base model.

It isn't depending on what "web browsing" someone is doing, which can be a pretty wide range now.

1 persons "web browsing" is no browser extensions, a couple of gmail tabs, some light blog reading, and maybe something as heavy as reddit.

While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.

8gb is quickly becoming unworkable for people that fall closer to the latter group.

> While another persons "web browsing" is running multiple browser extensions like grammerly, adblocker, etc. Along with a bunch of gmail tabs, plus a bunch of heavy "web apps"(think: miro, monday.com, google workspace/office365, photoshop online) and then throw 10s-100s of tabs of "research" on top of that.

That's computing, not web browsing. And on not so great platform than that.

well those are really apps, the fact that they are running in a browser does not make that browsing.

Totally an anecdote, but my 8gb M1 runs fine with multiple browsers/tabs, VS Code, and Spotify all open. Usually performance is only an issue for me when working with larger ML models. I wonder why others are getting worse performance? Maybe it's the specific sites they're using?

Could be chrome vs safari or ff

That's me. It's brutal trying to do Unity game dev on this. Constantly run out of memory and can't do much multitasking.

After getting my 2015 macbook air 11' I am still struggling to find a reason to replace it. Still going strong with no hiccups!

Do you use it as a laptop, or is it hooked up as a desktop for the most part? If the former, I'd try one of the M series in the same role and see if you notice a difference in ergonomics.

At this time (and historically), I mostly use it as a laptop, but I have also used it as a desktop for long periods with an external monitor. As a laptop, I love that it's so tiny. It’s working very well so far... but I’m afraid that at some point, I’ll have to switch to Linux or OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I’m still on macOS 11 (Big Sur).

MS Office has already stopped updating, along with some other software (though not much, most still updates without issues). As long as Firefox keeps receiving updates for my system, most things will be fine.

The battery life and performance improvements alone would be worth the upgrade to me at that point.

MacOS up to version 13 runs well using OpenCore even on my 2010 iMac (I did upgrade it with a metal compatible GPU).

Looks like the only issue with your MacBook Air is there may be some metal issues. https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/issues/1...

If those don't look like a problem for you, I'd definitely suggest giving it a try. MacOS 13 should give you at least 3 more years of use out of it.

Going beyond MacOS 13 I don't think is worth it. MacOS 14 is noticeably slower on my 2010 iMac, and there aren't any new features it can take advantage of anyways.

that's a very useful comment, thank you for sharing you experience with older hardware!

I have a 2015 myself and little things become impossible by design, like actually using the new Passwords app with shared data etc.

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