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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a backend dev, I've been using a base model m1 air since it was released, I've never felt it slow down, I still have no reason to update. 99% of people who will buy these entry level machines will not hit thermal throttling or if they do they won't care

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I’m a backend dev with an m1max and 64gb ram. I run golang, various docker containers and an occasional ollama llm plus a few games. This machine still feels like it has infinite resources.

This is similar to me, without ollama. I sometimes fantasize about a new MacBook but even my docker containers offload their hard work to apis, so outside of memory, I do not want for much.

My m1max is getting along quite nicely, I love this thing.

Man, it's wild how we have such different experiences. I have a base level M1 air, and I feel like it chugs along anytime I ask it to do anything even vaguely computationally expensive. Obviously that's not rigorous, but that's my subjective impression.

I also have the cheapest M1 air and the only bottleneck is memory. Once you have too many things open it's not happy. But doing webdev this thing compiles 40% faster than my (older) xeon 8 core desktop machine. It even plays Baldurs Gate 3 (but it takes too much space on the drive lol)

"backend dev" does not say much. What language are you using?

Golang, but does it matter ? What do people do with these entry models anyways ? Users who have high expectations will know better than to buy these, but for the average joe they will be more than sufficient

Fair enough

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