Still rocking an M1 Air - 2020 build. 8GB ram. No slowdown or deterioration at all. Battery health reports the battery max capacity at 84%. Best computer I've ever owned, by far.
Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.
However, I live with Activity Monitor open at all times. The computer constantly grinds to a halt, and I have to force quit apps at least 10 times per day.
Not really Apple's fault though, just most apps use around 4GB of RAM these days even when they're idle. Some use upwards of 16GB.
I've watched the computer slowly get obsoleted over time, not because the hardware is too old, but because software just get's worse every year.
Install Linux to unleash the full potential of your M1 (or to liberate any other system with a BloatOs, like macOS or Windows).
I resucitated and saved from the landfill a laggy and almost unusable laptop with Window 10, 4GB RAM and a Celeron processor, how?... Installing Manjaro (Arch), XFCE and kernel 6.18.
ZSwap and MGLru do wonders with memory and cache management.
It's fast enough with Thorium SSE4. I can easily open 15-20 tabs.
I use it as daily driver.
AI has greatly increased the number of security bugs found on a weekly basis (which is great) and we're getting one of those one-shotted and then immediately abandoned open source "projects" every day (which is useless).
And yet there is no indication that any of this new software development capacity is going into improving the quality and efficiency of the software we use on a daily basis.
Why is widely used professional software not getting better and more efficient if bug fixing is supposedly so much cheaper now? Is it not worth putting any effort into optimisation at all?
I think the reason could be that AI can only do more of what we have done manually before, i.e. more lowest common denominator code.
Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?
I doubt its coming, at least not within the timescale OpenAI or Anthropic would like to believe. If we were close, then we'd see the fruits of that, which like you said, we are seeing the opposite currently.
The bottleneck was never writing code, and it still isn't. Writing code is like 15% of the job, but the labs can't tell investors "Yeah we make everyone only 15% more efficient" and still be able to raise trillions in capital. Whatever AI accelerates, the bottleneck is still code review, comprehension, and security debt.
Vibe coded slop gets abandoned because non-devs were never going to be able to use AI to make commercial software beyond an MVP. Once your app needs multi-tenant auth, session invalidation, concurrency handling, API changes, graceful degradation under load, etc. natural language prompts will fail. You still need a mental model of how things work.
When building a house, lowering the cost of bricks and getting them delivered faster does nothing to speed up the rest of the process that still relies on engineering discipline.
One problem is that you need Firefox because safari doesn’t peppery do ad blocking. But once you have 20 tabs open or so, it uses 5GB GB ram. But perhaps your also need safari for something else. That’s another 5GB of RAM. Then once you count a finder replacement (2GB ram), and some office stuff (probably 1-4GB for each app window), 16GB of ram are almost as sluggish as an old windows laptop. Add MS Teams, and the thing is brought to it’s knees. And Mac OS has a lot of quirks and the window management is atrocious (alt-tab doesn’t switch between app windows, a bunch of apps to get alt-tab behavior don’t work properly either).
I feel like more and more that Mac Users are being forced by the atrocious window management to only have one window open per software, so then the system is fast. Problem is when you have multiple tasks going on in parallel, then you need many windows and desktops.
I think most true native apps don't have these issues. Unfortunately there is very little incentive to build on the macOS platform these days, which is where I point more of the finger at Apple. UX, UI, & DX are all quite a bit worse for Mac native.
ublock origin lite is on the app stores (both mac and i-devices), and works reasonably well.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
Different folks different strokes as they say.
It’s like the claim is “get a Mac and you’ll never see a slow down ever again! Just as long as you run software that won’t make the whole system come to a crawl”
With Windows you can as well just restart the whole machine, once it touches swap it won't stop thrashing ever.
The battery indicator is starting to show a decrease in performance. It won’t hold a full charge, but even when I’m without a direct power connection, I can still have it running for nearly 4 hours with Wi-Fi, 6+ without.
You should be able to deeply tweak how window management works, but Mac won't let you do that.
I'd run Linux on the hardware if it wasn't a hack.
Not involved in dev of this, just a happy user
I just don't get on with OSX, I can use it, it's "fine" but it never feels like home the way Linux always has, mostly because I generally run with defaults for everything but when something does bother me I can poke it on Linux until it's how I want it to be.
Linux simply assumes you know what you want and lets you have it, Apple assumes they know what you want and based on how much love OSX gets from some folks they seem to get that mostly right for those people.
I can't speak for others, but my preference for macOS basically boils down to "it's a *nix system that can run the commercial software I need, with a lot of nice little attention to detail features" I'm trading friction in some areas, for the removal of friction elsewhere.
Plus macOS has little niceties like readline key bindings in every text field OOTB, pleasant font rendering (on retina quality displays), and all the "ecosystem" features. I use universal control between my mac and iPad daily, AirDrop, universal clipboard, and airpods auto device switching, etc.
I don't pretend it's a perfect OS, it's far from it, but I willingly accept the tradeoffs and find ways to work around them to get the other features I want.
Swift Salamander: https://salamander.codesurfer.ch/ Rascal: https://tryrascal.org/ or brew install --cask chang-07/tap/rascal Forel: https://github.com/lab421/forel or brew install --cask lab421/tap/forel Hyperkey: https://hyperkey.app Vorssaint: https://vorssaint.com Wick: https://trywick.co Wisp: https://sulemaanhamza.github.io/..
Anyone have any experience of it?
I can vouch for Aerospace, it brings i3 windowing to MacOS well.
I’ve not found anything that works as smoothly for Gnome. So I keep going back to macOS with Rectangle to solve its UX issues.
It's a hack in a good way and this is a really bad reason to not run Linux.
Best computer I've had in a long time.
Apple - the absolute kings of planned obsolescence. Who else could do it so brazenly AND have a bunch of zealots who will now reply to this defending them and attcking anyone who points it out.
Any industry not involving a computer they'd be in big trouble even with their massive (legal) bribes to politicians and fortune spent on legal teams.
There’s absolutely no reason a maxed out MacBook Pro from 10 years ago shouldn’t be able to run something like the ChatGPT or Claude app, because those seem to think they need a newer version of the OS and Apple has decided that a 8 core 3.8ghz i7 with 32gb of ram is obsolete
I know that in some ways Apple is better than their hardware-making peers in terms of supporting current OS on hardware made a few years back. But compared to other software vendors, say, Microsoft, they are terrible.
Golden Gate runs on 2020 and newer macs.
Windows 11 runs on 2017 8th-gen Intel CPUs and better.
Windows 10 is supported even on PCs from 2006 with 4GB of RAM - and importantly, a ton of modern software (e.g. Chrome) is still compatible with Windows 10.
The comparison may be relevant since it seems Apple is incentivized primarily to move hardware, whereas Microsoft seems like they want to promote Windows as a stable, non-fragmented platform you can trust, both as a consumer and as a developer. One of their worst-received OSs was the one that basically forced most users to buy a new PC -- Vista. (And to a lesser degree, the TPM 2.0 requirement in Win11.)
You sure can't do it with an iphone. I own one an iphone 15. Was beautiful when new. Even now it has started on the path of suck. Apple have "upgraded" it to have a more frustrating touchscreen because they clearly think I should give them more money to keep the experience I bought. They are not cheap.
Apple are the absolute kings of planned obsolescence.
Zealots going for silent downvotws because there is no case they can make to the contrary. Not what downvotes are for, says HN but we're all used to HN being used like this by now.
It is ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Go pick up an iphone 6 and try to do anything with it and then tell me that is how awful the ui was when it was released to apple orchestrated media fanfare. Or any older ipad. Imagine if that ui extreme sluggishness, random delay and the button moving just as you hit it is what they were showing off at launch. The laughter would have haunted them all the way to the accountants telling them their options were now worthless.
Apple latency degradation is not worth discussing with anyone who says it isn't happening. You can't solve whatever issues they have.
I’m only using it as a travel machine now, trying to hold on from upgrading it until I can get an Air with OLED display - hopefully coming in <24 months…
I used to have Netflix, Civ 5, and a Simulator running with no visible slowdown. Nowadays Safari + Simulator is enough to make everything less snappy; and I no longer keep WebStorm open either.
Anecdotal, but I do think they’re releasing heavier updates. Can’t imagine the M1 on macOS 26 does very well.
The M1 airs were available for sale as recently as march of 2024, so you have at minimum another ~3 years of replacement parts availability ahead of you. The timer starts from the last offering for sale, not when you bought your computer. Software updates might be more limited, we'll have to see. 6-7 major updates is about average for the Airs[2], but 8 and 9 isn't unheard of either and we're already at 7 for the M1s
They were however right about one thing, out of warranty repairs are only warrantied for 90 days from Apple.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Air#Supported_operatin...
With Linux, a device can stay snappy far longer than Apple provides updates to MacOS. That's why my personal computer is old Thinkpad, I can thankfully use work-issued Mac for anything that requires more power.