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Comment by lycos | Hacker News Reader

It's very tempting, but my MacBook Air M1 has been great and performance wise any improvement is probably barely noticeable in the day to day that I'd end up feeling like I just bought a new chassis. Which could still be nice.. although most of the time it's in clamshell attached to my monitor. I'll have to sleep on this!

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For M1 owners, just wait for M3. It should be on TSMC 3nm which will be the next true node shrinkage.

M1 owner but since 2020, so probably the among the longest users.

I'm tempted.

I also think 3nm is going to beset with production problems, I don't think it's coming around anytime near.

I am reading that alot of users had issues with the 8gig model. If you have 8gigs, did you experience any perfomance issues?

I did - I believed all the '8 gig is fine' stuff at the beginning, and didn't like how much Apple charged for RAM. But for my work anyway it often starts having stuttering and slowness issues if I have too many things open. Otherwise it's quite fast.

hm okay so i will maybe get the 16 gig version better

I have the 16 gig version since 2020. Overall its the best machine I have ever owned but even then, maybe in 10% of the cases when too many chrome tabs are opened, VSCode and a bunch of other apps are in, I can sometimes notice the slow down but its not super critical.

I did have severe issues with Kernel Panics, the laptop would just blink a pink pixelated screen and restart but that has been fixed.

Yeah, I have the M1 2020 with 8gigs and 512ssd. I encounter some issues when I use it for development.

I had 16g though. 8g would be horrible.

I expect M2 pro/max/ultra to be on 3nm. TSMC projects first customer product to be shipping end of the year. That matches Apples update cycle and we know Apple always is the first one to snag the new nodes.

Please post more of this. I need an angel on my shoulder whispering.

I have a 16" with the Max chip, and yet . . .

Don’t worry there will be daily rumor stories posted here about the subject along with daily stories about how great recently announced X is. Your challenge is to sail between Scylla and Charybdis.

I mean to be honest if you have a 16' M1 Max, there is no reason to upgrade for the next 2-3 years..

The performance improvements will be marginal at best and in any case, what good is a machine if you can't keep it more than a year?

I just ordered my 16' Max and am not willing to upgrade for a while.. it's not even worth the wait for the M2 Max pros, since it will be basically the same specs and you'll have to wait more than a moth to get it anyway so why delay further?

If you have cash to burn however, then I guess it doesn't matter..

Lol same here

I bought an M1 Air the day of the M2 announcement. $780 shipped on ebay for a mint laptop with 3 battery cycles. Battery life will be about the same, screen is good enough, 20% multicore boost is not worth an extra $450. M2 does look great though.

Looks like M1 prices have dropped even more since I bought.

Are you using the Air for development? How does it hold up?

Docker performance isn't great compared to what I'm used to on windows, but it's usable. Experimental docker features that are billed as potentially increasing performance by huge margins completely break my bind mounts. My stack fits very comfortably in the base 8 gigs of RAM. Some of my dependencies have bugs in the ARM builds that make me use docker overrides to x86 containers instead of aarch64.

I also had to troubleshoot some errors where dotenv operates a bit different between macOS and linux.

Overall, feels slower than what I'm used to. Community has a few rough edges to work out in an Apple silicon world, but half my growing pains are just moving to macOS in general. https://captionsearch.io is my "try new tech" project so it's part of the experience.

Also on the fence. For me the reason to upgrade would be the 24GB RAM option: more tabs. I'll wait and see what the hands-on reviews say. Not sold on flat slab either, the wedge is very practical. The M1 MBA is going to be hard to beat.

I'm in the same boat and opting to wait. Sure it'll be a nicer machine, but I don't think we'll really feel the upgrade.

One thing that bothers me about my M1 Air is that they still haven't fixed the "stuttering cursor" bug...

Agree. Apple haven't added support for a second external monitor so the extra features are more performance and more battery. The performance of the M1 is incredible so it is not clear why to update.

Just recently bought a 2020 Intel air. It's very powerful and responsive. Would I notice a difference with an M1 or M2? Maybe, but I doubt it would be enough to justify the investment.

That's a good thing! The fact that the original version is still going strong is a (huge) selling point for Apple.

I am glad to see a class of device meant to last upwards of 5 years.

I've been using my 2013 MBP for nearly a decade. Finally replaced it with a M1 MBP a few months ago.

Honestly the 2013 still works great for what I do (web, videos, and dev work that doesn't involve spinning up multiple VMs ;) ), I figured it was time to upgrade and the supply chain issues don't seem to be letting up anytime soon. I might replace the battery in the old one. I'm hoping to get at least another decade out of the M1 machine, hopefully more.

Are you sure that you can watch today's VP9/AV1 YouTube videos which would be software-decoded on a 2013 MBP without spinning fans incessantly?

I am sure you cannot since I also have a long-in-the-tooth 2013 MBPr, and YouTube can definitely heat it up.

I'm in the same position with an M1 Pro. Although the new screens do look nice for dark mode...

As an M1 pro owner, the big non starter for the M2 air is the lack of the high refresh rate screen (pro motion or w/e), I've really gotten spoiled by it.

maybe I will convince my boss to get me the new one, and I will give the m1 pro to my teammates :)

Other than that I agree (though, as I have stated elsewhere, this is good. less landfill). The m1 pro is just insane - I sold all of my other machines.

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