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Comment by kingkongjaffa | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I’m on an M1 and it’s still outstanding.

The only motivation to upgrade is battery degradation or getting more RAM to run larger LLM models locally.

I upgraded from an M1 to an M4 MBP recently and although the performance gains were mostly incremental, the matte screen (fucking finally Apple) is really nice and a good reason to upgrade if you ever plan on using it in a brightly-lit area. It’s a must-have.

I put a matte protector on my M1 Air and it’s been great as well (though probably worse in direct bright light).

> the matte screen (fucking finally Apple)

and a slightly better screen in terms of response time, which is nice since ghosting is very present on all of them

Are they still using MicroLED? I can't stand the bloom in dark conditions on my M2, it's horrendous!

It's still MiniLED but I believe there was a subtle change on the M4 series that means it's slightly better about it.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/11/15/apple-quietly-gave-the-m4-mac...

It's mini-LED backlighting, to be pedantic.

I welcome your pedantry. I stand corrected, though I can’t edit the post any longer.

Localized bloom is vastly preferable to the alternative, which is the uniform bloom of a backlit LCD display.

I run an M4Pro Mini, connected to an LG 49" ultrawide. I have an M1Max MBP, collecting dust, upstairs.

Frankly, the MBP is still an excellent machine, but I don't travel, anymore, and this big honker that is as wide as my desk, has me spoiled.

I switch to 45" UWQHD myself.. slightly taller with bigger pixels for work and enjoy it immensely. I've had a few issues where my vision got dramatically worse a couple years ago so even my 32" 1440p was a struggle at times.

With this display, it's similar to two 4:3 aspect displays in my typical use... my IDE or Code pinned on one side, my browser or another app on the right.

Overall, it's been pretty great.

Hmm... I guess someone thought that I was boasting about my setup.

It's really not a big deal. I know quite a few people that have much nicer rigs; especially gamers.

I was really just saying that the MPB has a processor that still rocks, several years later, but the large screen that I use (which is actually not as impressive as some of the gaming screens), has me spoiled, and using a laptop screen feels cramped.

I was so bummed when they removed the matte screen option many years and glad to see it back. My next one will definitely be matte.

Get Al Dente Pro and set your battery to 80% and do a full cycle once a month. It'll extend the life tremendously. https://apphousekitchen.com/aldente-overview/

>Get Al Dente Pro and set your battery to 80% and do a full cycle once a month

MacOS does that natively. My battery rarely charges above 80% because I "almost never use it on battery so there's no need."

> MacOS does that natively

Poorly, mine still hasn't learned, after 3 years, that it spends 99% of its time connected to a Thunderbolt charging monitor. And regularly discharges itself over the weekend because it failed to fall asleep properly.

Does macos have sleep problems these days as well? I had the impression it's usually pucca due to hardware-software vertical integration in apple land.

Mine does, yep. After almost every long weekend the battery is dead if I don't shut it down entirely. It's probably because it's a laptop that stays always closed, connected to a Thunderbolt monitor, and on/off are done via the monitor, so sometimes something gets mixed up, but even then it's pretty bad.

I like how it's normal in the Apple ecosystem to pay 11€ yearly subscription for extremely basic features that come by default, for free, on most other laptop vendor/OS combos.

Don't forget SSD degradation since it's not a user replaceable part and you can't do true external boots (it copies to the internal storage). That's my biggest worry.

SSDs aren't exactly known for high failure rates, especially if you're staying within their expected endurance. Sure, you can kill one by running fluid simulations of one, but any sane use case doesn't even come close to what you'd need to kill one with any decent level of expected endurance.

The only ones I've heard of dying are from brands I'd never trust in the first place, or from bad firmware, and my impression is that it's usually the controller dying, and with the controller being part of the chip itself on Apple Silicon, it's not gonna die without taking the rest of the machine with it, and for the most part, they just aren't.

The M1 is old enough that we'd know about it if the faliure rate was abnormally high.

> Sure, you can kill one by running fluid simulations of one, but any sane use case doesn't even come close to what you'd need to kill one with any decent level of expected endurance.

So you can't do any serious work on a Mac ?

If fluid simulations are included in your definition of serious work, then you can't do serious work on any machine with less than at least 128 GB of RAM, probably more, be it Windows, Linux or Mac. Your SSD will be killed by excessive writes no matter the OS or what specific hardware you've chosen. You can probably get enough RAM on some of the highest end Macs to not have to swap to disk for fluid simulation of any decent size, although I haven't looked into that. 128+ GB of RAM is a big ask no matter your platform.

No widespread failures have been reported on M1s. SSDs often exceed their expected lifespan, especially when spec’d generously. But, monitoring tools can misreport, so be cautious drawing conclusions from early TBW readings.

So, when choosing a Mac, opt for higher RAM and SSD capacity to reduce swap pressure and spread wear.

If you are cautious, monitor TBW, but interpret the data with healthy skepticism.

Last, but not least, backup regularly!

I upgraded only for large memory (upgraded from 16G M1 to 48G M4). Battery life was still outstainding when i upgraded.

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