Since the move to Apple Silicon you are realistically never more than 12-18 months away from a new chip generation in a MacBook. An M1 is still plenty good for the vast majority of workloads, especially if it's an M1 Pro/Max/Ultra.
Actually probably the best thing to do is wait until the M4 machines launch then bag a good deal on a clearance M3.
That’s actually a nice side effect of all the *rumors pages. The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products. I keep on using my previous products while saving money and planet and being excited about what future holds.
On the contrary, I think that the reliable update cadence in modern electronics means that people should generally all but ignore future product roadmaps.
When you actually need to get a new device, just get whatever the up-to-date thing is.
OK, ok, I suppose that it's reasonable to check the rumor sites to see if you should delay by a month or two. But not any longer than that.
It's much harder with PCs, where you can get, for instance, new Thinkpad's with anything from 11th gen Core i all the way to new Core Ultras. And, now, ARMs as well...
I was inline to buy a 128GB M3 MAX, know that I know the M4 exists and already shipped in the iPad, it lets me know that the whole M4 pipeline has already started and what the perf numbers are, absolutely means I will be waiting. I survived yesterday without it, I can survive tomorrow. And now I can budget in the AMD Epyc bridge that covers that span.
I think Apple has been pretty good about hitting the right cadence with processor perf increases. They are making up for lost Intel time. The M6 is going to make us loose our minds. Apple is going to bring back "this is a munition" ads.
Both the M3 and the EPYC will be useful for far longer than the time it takes Apple to have the M4 on their next-gen laptops. Computers last a lot longer than they used to. I have a 10 year old Mac Mini that’s still comfortable to use, and, while an M3 Mac is a beast, it’s not that much faster than an M2 (or an i7) to create a qualitative change in my workflows. What is possible now was already possible last year. It’s just faster now. I get a higher return on investment with better keyboards and screens.
> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.
For myself, I like to think of it as applied procrastination. I could buy that new thing I want today.. but something better will come along in time, so I can afford to put it off a while longer yet..
> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.
Spot on!
Back in the nineties, Intel managed to push competing RISC architectures (UltraSparc, MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC) out of the market using nothing but promises that Itanium was going to blow them all out of the water.
And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapdragon (or Ampere) sales.
>And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapdragon (or Ampere) sales.
sales of what
i actually can't think of a single competing product. admittedly i don't keep up with laptop news but still, i haven't heard of anything yet that can meaningfully compete with the m1 from four years ago
Microsoft just announced some lackluster arm laptops that they claim can compete with M-series chips. The question is what windows programs are gonna run on them...
Some people have been running Windows 11 for Arm on a VM in Apple Silicon. It has an automatic transcoder that translates most x86 code at start. It seems to run many apps well. Microsoft claims these new machines have a better transcoder. This might work.
For me at least, the best possible outcome of this is that Windows handheld gaming devices become more power-efficient. That might be an advantage over Linux-based handhelds for a while, unless Valve decide that Proton needs to also be an architecture emulator. The chip efficiency wins must surely be tempting in this form factor.
> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.
You may have heard of the 5-minute rule - "Will doing this take me less than 5 minutes? If the answer is yes, do it now." An adaption of that to reduce impulse purchases is - "Do I really need this product right now? If the answer is no, don't buy it."
And on the flip side I am generally hesitant to buy first-release Apple hardware. Over the 20 years I've been buying Apple kit I've generally found it to be exceptionally robust but newly released hardware has had enough bugs (either hardware or OS) that I just sit back and let other users find the issues first. But I do simultaneously have the same issue: if WWDC is coming up within a month or two I'm not going to be buying any hardware because there's a good chance that something new will be released or the hardware I was going to buy is going to get a refresh or a price drop.
I do this technique too, and it's a great time for it. The OLED screen on the new iPad signals that Apple devices are moving to a better panel. If you've been waiting for the right time to move off an Intel Mac and onto a SoC Mac, it's now. Pick up a refurbished M2 MacBook. They're in the sweet spot for support, power, and cost.
The next one will probably have an OLED screen; so if you wait til then, your refurb M1/2/3 will be on Apple's short list of devices they don't want to support. (And you might have panel FOMO.) Or you'll have to pay the premium price for the latest model.
These machines are great. I still use my 2015 rMBP as a secondary. It's a little slow now but a couple years ago I was still running Solidworks (in Bootcamp) on it with minimal issues.
My wife is still using her 2012 MBP. We maxed out RAM and gave it an SSD in 2016. She uses it for video editing and music production. The thing look like new. Completely ridiculous. Only downside: no OSX updates since I don’t know when.
You might find OpenCore Legacy Patcher[1] worth a look. In many cases, it allows later-that-supported Mac OS versions to be installed on older Macs.
As a data point, I still use a 2013 Mac Pro as my primary desktop, and I've been using Sonoma on it for several months, have been able to install all Sonoma patches over-the-air on release without incident, and have only experienced a single, trivial problem: the right side of the menu bar occasionally appears shaded red, in a way that doesn't affect usability; switching applications immediately resolves the problem (the problem appears to be correlated with video playback).
video encoder/decoder support and performance has order of magnitude improvement in M series, I am surprised that didnt sway you.
Not just that, for high res stuff or modern codecs like AV1 or h265 is probably not supported at all in a 2012 device without updates for so long?
Even if support was possible it would be software encoding and even short clip it can take hours to render ?
I would happily use an older device for development a lot of dev work especially if not frontend or UI usually i can use any laptop just as a terminal, but UI or video editing I wouldn’t be able to.
I can't help but reply every time this thread comes up. I'd still probably be using my 2010 if it wasn't for a series mechanical failures. Paid to replace the keyboard once (85 screws, didn't need to do that to myself), but third battery crapping out, trackpad not clicking (probably due to swollen battery) and the MagSafe connector getting loose and glitchy was the end of it. Though I did just boot it up because my phone is somehow still supposed to sync music from it.
If the battery is swollen, get rid of it as soon as possible. Swollen battery == ticking time bomb, and I'm not joking about the bomb part. These things can, do and will explode randomly.
Overall, my 2020 M1 MBP is infinitely better than the 2015 MBP I had before, it's not even close. Battery life, thermal output, speed, noise, neural engine (for ML workloads). It's an utter workhorse that just marches on, no matter what I throw at it. I haven't even considered upgrading to another more current Mx version because this one just.. works. Best laptop I ever owned.
I just want to echo this experience and sentiment. I absolutely adore my 2020 13” M1 mbp, for all the reasons you list. I do ML workloads and Linux builds and I’m starting to think they forgot to put fans in mine because I’ve never heard them! Despite the annoying limitation of 1 external screen, it’s up there with my 2007 13” mb (rest in peace) as being the best laptop I’ve ever owned.
I recently upgraded from a 2019 Intel Mac to a similarly-specced M3 Mac, and it really is night and day. My battery life is more than doubled - I can run IntelliJ and multiple Docker containers on battery for more than my whole work day, when before it would barely last a couple hours with that load and be slow while doing so. The fan hardly ever runs while on my Intel Mac it would run constantly.
I can definitely say there's a downside. I sometimes take the bus home, but it can get chilly at night. Previously, I would fire up a little python script that saturate all the cores, to warm my lap. My old Intel was plenty warm to keep me from getting too uncomfortable. I can't even feel my M2 through my pants, and sticking it into my shirt makes me look like an idiot.
Battery life is insanely better. If you have not used one of the M series laptops it cannot be overstated how much better the battery life is. It is worth it for battery alone.
But beyond that they are also incredibly fast and run cool. In the MacBook Air there is no fan and on the Pros they barely ever spin up in an audible way.
The fans literally never come on for my personal M2 MBP 14" or on my work 16" M1 (it helps that the heavy lifting of running stuff and compiling happens on a dev server)
During work from home during Covid I was still using an Intel MBP and video conferences invariably caused the fans to kick up to the point where using noise cancelling headphones and not the built in speakers was necessary for sanity.
I went from the last Intel i9 16" MBP to an M3 Pro in the last month at work.
I think it's saving me an hour a day and the fan has never come on, the the laptop has never felt warm, and the battery life is just mind blowing.
I run docker & compilers all day. The i9 would run the fan 75% of the time and had to throttle down any time it was on battery power and it was lucky to last 3 hours on battery.
The way to exit that loop is to convince yourself that the next one will bring a truly lasting difference. Which is why I'm still waiting for GDDR7 GPUs with my 4GB RX 480.
It entirely depends how long you keep your devices. I try to keep my iPhones until release year + 6, so I would need the price of a previous version to be reduced by more than 1/6th on a new version release, which is usually not the case.
Similar to cars, most depreciation happens in the first year.
So owning a device for 6 years between age 1 and 7 will generally have a lower cost than owning a device between age 0 and 6.
For Apple products it’s generally feasible to effectively buy first hand devices aged 1+ because they’re still available for sale (at least in some retailers) after a new edition is released.
That’s a good strategy with most things that aren’t prone to mfg variability . For cars having a launch version there are a lot of initial manufacturing defects that need to be worked out.
Maybe it uses the camera for gesture recognition so you can air-write each letter one at a time? Air-quotes will be fun... air-tabs, not so much. "Space, but <widens arms> BIGGER!"
If anything, they'll probably use the "studio" branding (or more likely just have it under the iPad line, since they have desktop chips in them now anyways)
I just bought a second hand M2 Air in perfect condition and it feels faster than my M1 Max in a really beautiful body for travel. I’m not certain it matters that much anymore to be honest. What are you using it for?
So if you can 'limp' along towards the autumn/winter/Christmas, then it's probably worth the wait to get the M4 (or pickup an M3 when the price presumably drops to clear inventory).
I just bought a refurbished 16in M3 pro, no regrets at all. There's always a new one around the corner, it's really just about whether your setup achieves what you need it to.
Look at real world differences between M2 and M3, it's not a massive jump at all.
I do cross platform app development and the machine is excellent for that. Glad to have it now rather than waiting months for a slightly better system
