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.
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)
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.