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Comment by at1as | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently on a marathon to keep my M1 Pro running until the M7 Pro/Max is available. Not sure if I'll make it, but I'm not eager to pay $6000+ for a decent spec dev computer, until I really have to

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I'm loving my M1 Macbook Air still, and only a few weeks away from six years of use Sometimes it lags a bit when I'm running a macOS VM, and all the coding agent VMs, so I'm kind of interested in going to 32GB of RAM, but honestly this computer is still faster than any of my laptops that came before, even with the visual atrocity of Liquid Glass.

I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.

My son's M1 Air CPU died suddenly. Maybe it was a thermal death from overheating. Not sure. But all the data on it was lost because the storage is soldered on. PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!

(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)

you should be backing up all devices with removable storage or not, SSDs can also die without warning.

Sure, but in this case your cpu dies or ram dies or ssd dies, in all cases you loose data, in an upgradable system you loose data when ssd dies. Different risk factors.

that's just a false sense of security. A machine should be treated as a whole. Separate components only matter economically, not for data security.

My macbook updates my documents etc to my NAS, and the NAS syncs to crucial folders to the cloud (not everything for cost reasons)

You should always assume your device can be stolen, you can spill fluids on it (or a guest), a cat can pee on it, an electric shock may kill it... No matter how great care you take of it, shit happens, data needs to be safe.

The SSD dying standalone vs the system dying doesn't change at all for data security. It's not a different risk factor

It's the same "risk" but a completely different probability for anyone technical because any minor failure is now a critical failure.

I wouldn't choose to buy a car I use every day that's 100x less reliable than a normal car.

Hard drives failing is a far more common problem in my experience. As is theft and loss - one should always treat a laptop as if it will fail at any moment and keep good backups.

If your looking for arguments against soldered storage the facts ssds are wear items and will eventually need replacement is a much better one.

If almost ANY failure means the laptop is basically bricked then even with good backups it means days or weeks before being back up to speed, having a working laptop with recovered data, esp. when working on highly confidential data as agreements can mean you cannot upload the data to a cloud.

If given a choice, I prefer a system where a HDD/RAM/GPU/CPU/PSU/Screen/Port/Battery/Keyboard failure is barely if at all disruptive to one where all of these effectively brick the system.

> A machine should be treated as a whole.

... single point of failure. /s

SSDs are a more common failure point, as is theft or loss or damage.

The point is it shouldn’t matter if the cpu or ssd dies because you have backed up everything already and are prepared for anything to fail or happen to the device rather then “oh the ssd is removable so in these select few situations I can recover my data”

> PSA to make sure devices with non-removable storage are backed up!

Really this should be devices full stop. Also, "backed up" should include no fewer than two backups on different media and in different physical locations e.g. Time Machine to an external SSD _plus_ continuous cloud backup.

The more you people keep harping on this ultra robust backup strategy, the fewer everyday average people are actually even going to attempt a backup.

1/ You're on HN, the audience isn't "everyday average people"

2/ This is like complaining that climate activists were harping too much 30 years ago, and that's why nobody listened

> 2/ This is like complaining that climate activists were harping too much 30 years ago, and that's why nobody listened

this is a serious issue though.

if you harp too much about something, it becomes background noise. people get desensitized.

if you harp about too many things, it fatigues people as well (ever heard of "alert fatigue"?).

so yeah, harping too much, too loudly about too many things is a serious and the society should really start looking into this

(edit: i am aware of the irony of harping about harping)

What would have been the right amount of harping about the environment though? Or is it always going to be a pointless exercise trying to convince/alert people?

Or is the only way to do that successfully, doing it subconsciously/covertly like the state actors are swaying public opinion? :-/

Unfortunately I think the sweet spot is to say it once or twice, go away, and then come back later with "I told you so"

No pain no gain also goes the other way, many times people don't learn until they get slapped in the face.

> "I told you so"

That'll be fun when half the world is migrating due to extreme climate events.

It's getting more average every day. QED.

1. And yet we have someone on HN reminding everyone to even have a backup in the first place so let's not assume everyone on HN can't also make "average people mistakes".

2. You mean the climate activists who used to risk their lives back in the 80s on open oceans instead of gluing themselves to streets? Yeah, the times have changed.

The book “Backup and Recovery” was published on February 6, 2007, almost twenty years ago. I was a technical reviewer for an earlier version of this book, “Unix Backup and Recovery”, published on January 1, 1999. And these books were not the first to advocate the standard 3-2-1 model of backups. Curtis also has more modern books, if you like — such as “Modern Data Protection: Ensuring Recoverability of All Modern Workloads”, published in 2021.

If you’re not adequately backing up your data, then that is entirely on you. After thirty-plus years of this best practice guidance, there is no excuse for that kind of incompetence.

Apple makes this pretty easy with iCloud and Time Machine, but they are far from the only company trying to make this as easy as possible for their customers.

While I was expressing an ideal setup, it isn’t all or nothing. A single backup is still better than none at all.

I suppose I didn’t specify exactly what I would recommend to someone who thinks it’s too hard, so here is that:

1. Install Backblaze. This is basically fire and forget. 2. (1) is enough for most people, but if interested (and on a Mac, which is what I’m familiar with), plug in an external SSD once a week or so for Time Machine. Setup involves clicking on the drive in the setup wizard and specifying an encryption password.

I don’t know about “ultra” robust, but this gives you protection from accidental deletions, natural disasters happening to your computer, hardware failures, and corruption from software bugs. The ongoing maintenance is plugging in a hard drive once a week.

If that is too much effort, just (1) provides natural disaster and hardware failure protection. It helps somewhat with the others but Backblaze only saves versions for 60 days and that’s a tight window to notice subtle corruption of e.g. your photos.

I agree, if it has too much friction it's more likely you will postpone it. Any option, either just a cloud backup tool or a spare HDD or SSD with CCC or TimeMachine is better than nothing. And you have to plan for the most likely case, e.g. spilling beer on the laptop vs the house burning down.

For the house burning scenario, a cheap strategy is having one or two old HDD's in USB cases, located somewhere away from your house, in a place you regularly visit and trust security-wise. Then you can just make a habit of dumping the files there whenever visiting. Most important data of mine is safe even if internet goes down and somebody nukes the city I live in, for zero recurring cost.

if you want to talk about 'average people' go hang out on reddit. How many times have 'average people' been brought up here explicitly to shut down a discussion. It is reductive and insulting

how many good things have 'average people' (and the avaricious wanterpreneurs chasing their dollars) ruined? Nearly everything!

And restore tested.

Yup. That’s the real lesson that Curtis teaches in his books on the subject.

Your backup is worthless if you haven’t actually tested to confirm that it actually works. And you have to periodically, re-test, as well.

Even if the storage is soldered on the data can still be saved if it's not the storage that died and even then, it could be possible to retireve at least part of the data. Get a data recovery specialist.

For Apple devices, the storage is usually encrypted. And the encryption key is on the Secure Enclave, and cannot be exfiltrated.

So, if the machine dies, you can’t just take the SSD and solder it onto another board somewhere. Even if you could, the SSD is part of the SOC that includes the CPU, and the Secure Enclave is part of the logic board that it was soldered onto.

Recovering data from an Apple device is intentionally hard to do. Apple wants to protect that device as much as possible from anyone who might try to steal your data by simply unsoldering chips and soldering them back on somewhere else.

No, none of that. Your encryption key is "magically" synchronized by apple, so that you can add a new device and everything transfers and unlocks without effort (Haven't you noticed?). The encryption key is locked to your account (unlocked by support, takes about 10 minutes - friction approaching zero), not device or hardware (unlike a TEE, TPM).

If you use LUKS or BitLocker (w/o MS backup) you do not have this risk avenue (or recovery - it's your fault).

You're confusing different layers of encryption. The physical storage is indeed encrypted as bradknowles describes. Your iCloud-shareable keys ensure that only you can read your files. The hardware-level encryption ensures that an SSD can only be accessed from the SoC that it's paired with.

That’s pretty expensive though.

Isn't icloud backup on by default??

I'm not aware of any control over what gets backed up.

I'm assuming that all of my local work would be lost. But I'd still have the sixteen million duplicate photos.

iCloud's priorities are not a great fit for preserving my source code repos. Fortunately those aren't very big.

But when my son's Mac dies, his huge Logic Pro projects are toast. And he is a few thousand miles away now.

In Windows, by default, Microsoft tools put projects in ~/source/repos, which OneDrive, in turn, by default won't touch so they'll be lost if the SSD fail and they're not in git.

However, OneDrive doesn't seem to even know how to handle source files (it doesn't even attempt to honor the gitignore), so rebuilding a project in folders covered by OneDrive results in flurries of temporary files being uploaded/updated to the cloud, hogging the bandwidth, with a bonus of locking files, crashing builds, or even reverting changes silently.

One would think backup tools, even if primarily for normal users are still literally made by programmers, at least consider the use case of programmers instead of just ignoring them entirely.

OneDrive, Dropbox etc are not backup tools, they're file sync tools. This really should be common knowledge.

i'm so tired of seeing this discouraging crap - "that's not a backup, LOSER"

file sync is backup against the things most people have to deal with (hardware breaking, theft, house fire, residential lightning strike)

>file sync is backup against the things most people have to deal with

I would say accidentally deleting a file is more common than a house fire, so NO, file-sync is not a backup nor is RAID (block-sync) or clustering (data/state-sync).

A backup is/should be a non-modifiable snapshot of data/files maybe even a state.

I give you an example:

You have a password-safe (as a file). Your computer blows up, but you are safe, because your password-safe is synced on Dropbox....but oh my god what was the password to Dropbox??? Your restore is gone because you forgot to "backup" your password-safe.

However you are not a Loser, being a Admin is a ~lost art and a really good paid one (again).... ;)

> I would say accidentally deleting a file

It goes to your trash can/recycle bin for a while. That's literally what it's for: to guard against accidental deletes. Very few people accidentally delete files from their computer's drive anymore. The only time people do this in 2026 is accidentally formatting an SD card that had their camera's pictures on it or something.

Hey have fun, not me data, not me problem.

I guess I'm not tracking. I put all my source folders in my Documents folder on the Mac, and check the checkbox to have that sync to iCloud. It works quite well.

I also do a bunch of video work with Da Vinci Resolve, and those project files are in the same folder. I don't keep the clips there, those are on an external disc, but that's just because I haven't gone from the two terabyte iCloud plan to the six terabyte plan.

Kind of, but without a sub you only get a trivial amount of storage.

Sure, if there's anything worth subscribing to, it's that first $1 a month for your critical files.

There is no iCloud Backup for Macs, only iOS devices.

There is iCloud Drive sync, but that only syncs your Documents and Desktop folders, but any other files are not synced.

Surprising somehow, to me. One would imagine Apple could make a good amount of money by selling storage and thoughts-off safety for normies? And catch up to what Google offered like then years ago already with ChromeOS.

Yeah I've always thought it was weird, especially after they cancelled the Time Capsule, leaving no official Apple product to back up your Mac. I figured it was because the max iCloud plan was 2 TB and Apple sold Macs bigger than that, but then they increased the iCloud plans and still didn't do it...

iCloud will sync your contacts, Notes, Keychains, and other data on macOS.

This is a not-very-large subset of the ways you can permanently lose data which exists in only one copy. Have a Time Machine. No step two.

> We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.

Cool. How are you backing it up?

Can't a decent shop desolder it tho?

All the data is encrypted and the key is held inside the secure enclave within the CPU. If the CPU fails then the data is unrecoverable.

That's a big ask. Probably only work the few hundred it'd take to do that, then get the data off it, if you had some super important documents // crypto wallet.

Is it really? In China you can upgrade your iPhone storage this way. Sure it's not for your average phone case store, but it's not exactly rocket science either.

Unfortunately not really a lot of places to do this in the US. And unlike shipping new devices from China to US, shipping used devices from US to China and back is prohibitively expensive.

That’s a wipe and restore type option. Because the RAM and SSD are part of the SOC chip that also includes the CPU cores, the GPU cores, etc….

So, afterwards you effectively have a new iPhone with upgraded storage. Which you then have to restore somehow.

That is, unless you can find someone who can de-lid the SOC, remove the tiny RAM and/or SDD storage chips, and replace them with new ones. But then you’d have the same problem that the data was on the old chips, and encrypted. And so you can’t just copy that data over to the new chips, you have to decrypt all the data using the key stored on the Secure Enclave and copy it out in unencrypted format, then once the old chips are removed from the SOC and replaced, you then have to copy back all that data onto those new chips and have it re-encrypted from the Secure Enclave.

Anyone who can do that could just give you a new iPhone with more storage.

Key is held on a separate chip unfortunately

encrypted by both a boot password and a secure enclave held key

Are you suggesting that both keys should be required for decryption?

How would you restore the backup if your secure hardware device is lost/stolen/damaged?

The backup would live someplace other than on the broken machine. It would be encrypted some other way (or maybe not at all, depending on threat profile).

No point in encrypting those family photos burned to disc.

And the owners of the computer can't get the key in the secure enclave? Are they part of the threat model?

“Some person with physical access to the computer” absolutely is part of the threat model.

Some person, yes. The owner, no.

The standard way you distinguish "adversary with physical possession" from "owner" is "do they have the owner's passphrase".

I am not familiar with Macs so I might have been wrong from the very start, but if the owner put the key in the secure enclave then the same user should have no problem at putting the same key in the secure enclave of another Mac. If the user can't write into the secure enclave, then the Mac is protecting the data against the very same user that is supposed to own those data. It is protecting against wrench attacks too but what's the most frequent scenario?

The actual key cannot be exfiltrated from the Secure Enclave. All the encryption/decryption is done inside the Secure Enclave. Knowing the owner’s password is just enough to let you pass data through the Secure Enclave to do the appropriate encryption/decryption operations.

So, you can’t copy that key over to a different Secure Enclave. If you could, then it would no longer be a Secure Enclave.

I mean the most frequent scenario is that the person trying to unlock the device is the one who owns it, yet we still have account passwords. You have to protect against the worst case. There is not a trusted enclave in existence (Apple, Intel, etc.) that will let you read its contents. That’s the point!

How removable storage will protect you from burned down laptop? Do you plan to keep SSD in your pocket while you are sleeping?

The removable storage will presumably not be encrypted the way the soldered storage is

what does that even mean? why would encryption depend on how storage is attached (soldered or plugged in)?

It's unrelated to the physical connection, but the drive encryption used on the built-in drive keeps its keys in the CPU's secure enclave, so dead CPU == data lost, regardless of whether the ssd itself is damaged.

Obviously if you used the same encryption scheme on a removable drive you'd hit the same issue - but most people don't do that, because storing the encryption keys in the Secure Enclave makes your drive effectively no longer removable.

I got a second hand M1 air like two years ago for 200usd with 1tb hdd and 16gb ram. I got it after my intel Air died after about..12 years? (Edit: the ssd died, which is removable… but literally had a plane to catch). All my pros have died within a few years. Air all the way. Never looking back.

> All of my pros have died within a few years

What are you doing to them?

I still have MBPs from 2015 and 2018 that have not 'died'.

Similar experience. In active use in my house:

    2012 MacBook Pro
    2015 MacBook Pro
    2019 MacBook Air
    2020 M1 MacBook Pro

The longevity is incredible.

At least two of these are now on completely unsupported OSes that are no longer receiving security updates (and lots of latest versions of apps won't work). Especially given the uptick in major CVEs of late I'm very nervous about reconnecting any of these machines to the internet :/

That's what Linux is for I've got a 2011 MacBook Pro running Debian and its still perfectly usable(after maxing it out to 16 GB RAM, installing an SSD, tossing the CD drive, repasting the CPU, and replacing the battery). I'm curious to see how long it can keep on trucking, at some point the charger may be the difficult part to procure; it’s not very robust.

It's a great point! The 2015 has been a linux machine for ~5 years, and the 2012 is my wife's laptop, used once every couple of weeks. Trying to get her to upgrade to a MacBook Neo for this exact reason.

Opencore legacy allows you to install newer versions of MacOs on old Macs. Or Linux runs just fine on the older Intel Macs.

no one is going to hack your laptop that sits behind your router at home checking emails and browsing the web

I get that this is hn and we're paranoid about everything, but come on, what CVE is a threat to joe sixpack here where he should drop $2K on a new machine to protect against it?

In 2024 I sold a 2010 MBP that still worked. I beat the hell out of it in college dual booting and cooking the cpu playing Trackmania for 12 hours at a time or running Solidworks, then after I graduated it sat closed behind my stove sharing its wifi connection (my neighbors unprotected wifi) out the ethernet port and into my own managed router for about 4 years. Up until the last days it was running Windows as a host for controlling my old not-network-connected 3d printer. I definitely got my money out of that machine, someone paid $150 for it.

My first gen 5k iMac (2014) is our kitchen machine these days. Still a joy to use. The final gen (2020) model is still my main machine.

I almost wish one of them would konk out so I can get an M series, but then I wouldn’t be on a 5k iMac anymore, which would suck. Love these machines.

Just use. There were two models that had issues with the gpu desoldering, 2012 and 2015 iirc? I was lucky enough to have them. I put the mobos in the oven (180deg for seven minutes?) and that would fix it. For about a month… and then 2 weeks.. and then… I actually have a 2018 that I borrowed from a friend after my 2013 Air ssd gave up, it is still working I think, but its twice as slow, at least as my Air was. Its so weird. The Air stayed ‘snappy’ even after my friends Pro’s would become too sluggish. Maybe because I never update ;)

Sounds like user error tbh.

Its from when they switched to lead free solder. Its a known issue.

Did they really wait that long? I thought most commercial products went lead-free in like the '80s or '90s. I have an old Sony PVM with known issues due to low quality lead-free solder, fixed by reflowing/adding fresh solder. From what I can gather it was released in 1994. In the same vein I'd have expected lead-free to be a bit better by 2012.

Mid 00's, its part of why Xbox 360s were dying left and right.

The last few models of Intel Mac Pro that I used were mostly good at getting really hot.

Dropbox would fire up to do massive walks of the filesystem tree and the fans would take off. I think the thermal interface material on the GPU got cooked at some point. It would be a relatively easy fix, for me a couple of hours, but I chose to fix it with an M1 MacBook Air.

They fare differently in dusty environments, for one. Airs being sealed do well.

The old airs were legendary. My 2012 still runs just fine despite being beaten to hell. Would still be a great dev machine for non-GPU workloads if it weren't for a lack of OS updates. Have been very happy with my M1 Pro as well though.

Another 2012 Air user here.

The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore, but as long as it's plugged in, it keeps chugging along.

I replaced my original in a 2012 pro. The replacement died so I run it without a battery.

Wow turns out there's a whole community of us! Same boat. I usually recycle, hand me down, trade-in but have really had a hard time letting that little one go.

I also have a 2010 air still in service. Replaced the battery once with an Amazon special. It’s due for another but I just keep it plugged in mostly

the 2012 was a really solid generation (the 2010 as well. i still have both, not running osx anymore of course)

> The old airs were legendary.

You gotta be kidding me. The old M1 Air had the "bendgate" where several people, me included, saw their screen die overnight for no reason. Tens and tens of pages of people complaining about it only to be with "you're holding it wrong" answers. Insanity.

I think Apple fixed that mess with the gen after that one.

We're not talking about M-series Airs.

I think differences were greater pre-M1, these days Airs are like low budget config Pros missing the fan. I highly doubt they'd last any longer. Maybe you could argue that with the best CPU/GPU options used in the MacBook Pro it will degrade faster than any Air, but if you spend about the same on each, I expect the Pro to win.

I'd still buy MacBook Airs even if they cost more than the Pros. The lighter weight and the silence of having no fan are worth more to me than the extra performance to me.

I wonder if this is from not trying to get maximum performance, and instead focusing on efficiency? But I've noticed this too. I definitely prefer the Air form factor over larger models as the primary benefit, but the durability seems to be a big benefit too. Fewer ports, thinner shell that seals tighter and can't flex as much due to the curved metal instead of flat surfaces... everything about it just seems like a better design.

Yeah the formfactor, the noise, the heat… even the performance seems better except for what, benchmarks..?

No fans though. I like being able to crank them full blast. I'm not sure this pro would ever actually run the fans all out with my usage with the existing fan curve. Apple always favors it running quiet and hot, but I don't mind loud and prefer cool palms. I grew up with far more noisy rigs.

incredible deal

Yes. The screen broke after one week, but the seller even replaced it for free. They seem to go for double that today now :/

righteous seller

I bought my M1 Pro the week it came out and it was unlike any computer I ever had, expectations, compute, battery life especially. It was just a joy to use and not worry about chargers. I'm so glad they went this path.

you can get a mini pc for about 1000 dollars that you can SSH into for claude sessions

I can't believe it's been almost six years already. I still remember how mind blown I was by that computer, and I still love my M1 Air. I hope I don't need to upgrade for another few years.

I freaking hate liquid-glass UI Apple has "forced" onto us. No freaking way to disable it. I hate it so much.

There's a slider to reduce the liquidity

Big Tech found the wrong slider

Reduce != disable.

Been on HN for many years now, and the one thing that never changes is people posting angrily about small UI changes. It makes me wonder- if things have only ever gotten worse, what was the peak UI? MS DOS?

On the Windows side, Windows 2000 and XP/Vista/7’s Classic mode, though Aero was quite nice. I’m not a fan of the interfaces from 8 onward, and I didn’t like Luna in XP.

On the Mac side, it’s a toss up between the platinum interface of Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X Tiger. With that said, I have a work-issued MacBook Pro running Golden Gate as my daily driver, and Liquid Glass is alright. It’s not what I’d prefer if I had a choice, but it’s not a dramatic departure from previous versions of macOS. A Cheetah or Puma Mac OS X user should be able to navigate Golden Gate with ease, mostly.

I am a HUGE sucker for Mac os8/9. I currently have a PPC Mac Mini and a Powerbook G4 that I tool around with occasionally for nostalgia's sake. I used slew of various G3 computers running OS9 as my main personal computers picked from the scrap bin at my dad's job (graphic imaging company) from ~2004 until I went off to college in 2010. I had some kind of modified Mozilla browser (Classilla I think?) that had modern-ish web support.

I've been on the lookout for a good condition G3 beige desktop, that was my first ever computer that was "mine" and I really want one just for the sentimental value.

Windows 2000 / XP in classic mode / XP / Vista / 7. For OSX I'd say High Sierra to Catalina.

I’d go with Tiger (10.4) for peak OS X, personally.

Leopard was better because it introduced spaces. Honestly I think that whole concept (I know windows has something analogous now) was the biggest step change in OS functionality I've seen in my life having started on windows 95.

Expose added in Panther was the last window management feature that changed my day to day usage of PCs.

Expose + Cmd-tab/Cmd-backtick being separated == a gap that Linux/Windows have somehow never managed to close in 20+ years now.

I never used Spaces much.

Apple was actually last to the party on that. Linux had virtual desktops for years at that point, and Windows had them as well through Microsoft PowerToys. I’m pretty sure I was running it on Windows 2000.

I had virtual desktops on UNIXes with X11 well before Linus started working on Linux. They came for free to Linux because they were implemented by many window managers.

Not Linux, the X Window System. The first implementation in a window manager predates Linux by a couple of years. And to no surprise Xerox had them first

The problem is that window management is so atrocious in Mac OS that using multiple desktops is just asking for trouble. Like of you close one window of some software, it will jump to some random other window of the same software on some other desktop.

In the end you’ll spend a significant amount of your time trying to “get back” to where you just where (that alt-tab, a possible savior for this in all other OSs, doesn’t work at all on Mac just adds to the UX mess)

The separation of Cmd-tab and Cmd-backtick is one of my favorite things in Appleland... what about it is broken to you compared to alt-tab?

For me it is that cmd+` only cycles between windows of the same app in the active desktop. It makes it hard to switch back to a window of the app that was put in full screen.

I get that that behaviour shouldn’t just be changed but I would appreciate it if there were another key combination that would allow cycling through all windows of an app.

Eh. I get what it's going for. The Multi-Window application concept and what not.

In the end though I just feel like it's extra cognitive load to have to think about two different shortcuts to do what is in many ways the same thing.

Say, I've got two browser windows open and a code editor open. I'm wanting to flip through the browser windows to check on things while I work in the code editor. In reality I'm just wanting to juggle the three windows, but depending on if I'm wanting to go from browser to browser it's a different shortcut than if I'm wanting to go from editor to browser. And there's a good chance I'll then need to swap from editor to browser, then issue a different shortcut to go from that browser to the other. When I could have just hit the same shortcut twice.

I've just never really encountered a situation where I've felt like it added something, but I'm constantly having cases where its more annoying.

Thanks, that does make sense. Though as a many-windower alt-tab is just often tooooooo big for my tastes to even try to rely on.

The 40-year-deep-history Mac answer to workflows like that with a small working set with frequent cross-app-one-to-other-switching IMO is mouse-based navigation + spatial partially-overlapping windows, but this seems to be an extremely foreign concept to Windows/*nix users that grew up on full-screen-maximize or tiling. So I don't think is particularly likely to be adopted by anyone who doesn't already have it burned into their brains at this point. :) There's a lot of these old Mac bones still baked into the OS (e.g. if you have a folder on your desktop, and double click it, and move it, then close it, it'll open to the location you moved it to next time. And that memory is separate from that for another folder on your desktop. Though some of the follow-on behaviors have changed (opening folders in already-open windows used to behave similarly, opening new windows by default).

The 20-year-history version is my own personal lord and savior: Exposé hot corners.

Spaces and no-mouse navigation are still in many ways comparative afterthoughts to mouse-based/spatial workflows. Though as someone with 30+ year of Mac muscle memories in my head, the switching-windows-vs-switching-app concept and awareness of "where" I am relative to it is pretty embedded.

Firstly backtick doesn't go to the most recently used.

The whole window arranging so you can click on them doesn't help you when you have multiple desktops, close some terminal, and jump to some other terminal three desktops away. Like, arranging windows so you see some part of it always, just so you can click on it to switch back and forth between windows feels like a horrible workaround for broken alt-tab behavior. But there's additional levels of weirdnesses that just make using Apple frustrating and scary, like it's constantly throwing random curve balls. It just reeks disorganization. Which is really unfortunate - 10 years ago or so (when witcher task switcher still worked) I really enjoyed working mac. Back then I was mostly coding in the same windows I guess. Nowadays it's business work, and it's just a pain.

Ehh I'm not to caught up with window management on macos. Bunch of shells open I might use tmux. But otherwise I just keep things in piles organized in spaces, and use expose all to get to whatever I need in the pile. It works much like the piles on my desk in real life so I'm comfortable with it. But it was better in leopard when it was a grid of spaces vs a line of spaces. Less rigidity was nice.

But even then. If you close a terminal, it'll jump to some random terminal on another desktop. It just doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a default, but there's an option to turn off the automatic switching of spaces when switching applications, and it pretty much eliminates the unwanted switches from closing the last window on the current space.

Liquid Glass was not a "small UI change". It disrupted many accessibility aspects of macOS, so much so that Apple toned down quite a few aspects of the design in subsequent updates, even adding a slider to reduce the effect. [1]

The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]

[1]https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...

[2]https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256227663

Yea, I am trichromatic color blind, and it is legitimately unusable for me. I am unable to type on the keyboard. I know there are changes since it launched, by after my ipad updated automatically, rendering it near useless to me, I just disabled updates on my iphone.

I'd say Snow Leopard was peak.

I think the biggest thing isn't really whatever it is but the act of changing and forcing everyone to change into the new ui that is the disruptive part. It is a combination of window dressing changing but also sometimes functions breaking. It is ironic because software written for developers prides itself generally on maintaining compatibility with say depreciated flags, or if things will be depreciated plenty of notice ahead of time. But that only holds for cli software. GUI software and the OS that all goes out the window. Stuff breaks, workflows break, you have no recourse and in fact they might make it genuinely difficult to go back to an older version. Like this part of it is the shitty part. Never mind how it happens to look. It is the forcing effect.

I think it’s also because these UI changes are always designed to improve first-impression and first-usage. They are outright hostile to anyone who wants to go fast and get faster — the power user. At minimum the re-arrangement resets any gains you had, and at maximum its irrecoverable because the UI is now fundamentally designed to slow you down.

This eventually becomes awkwardly precise complaints about information density and general change; but the underlying issue is I want to go fast and the system says no

I think the only real solution to this is to switch to an OS with a backing org that has optimization for power users as a first-class goal. I've been liking Omarchy and NixOS for that. I say this as a Mac user since 1989.

Perhaps it is the annoyance of change for change's sake. If you buy a car and then the interior changes after an update, it'd be pretty annoying, yet that is what is foisted on us.

You're probably less likely to see posts saying "I'm glad they kept the UI the same, I already liked it".

If you consider the transition from macOS 15 to 26+ 'small', I think you should see an optician.

Like GP, I despise the new design. I'll say the old design was pretty peak design. Windows looked like windows. Buttons like buttons. With accessibility tweaks (for transparency and borders) I could make it very, very usable.

This new thing is a crime against UI. Every icon now sits in a circle, and takes up % more room as a result. Because … it's pretty? It isn't pretty.

I upgraded my laptop thinking I was going to develop an app and that I'd need to be on the latest design. I ended up developing a TUI so I needn't have bothered. Every time I see my partner's laptop, still on Sequoia, I shed a little tear.

Mac OS 7.6.1 was peak Apple

It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure Appearance Manager and the corresponding unreleased-but-leaked Hi-Tech theme was 8.5-or-so-and-up-only, which means I must reject 7.6 on aesthetic grounds ;)

It was great if you could tolerate an application crash taking down the whole operating system hard.

Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!

I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.

I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.

No, it was Windows 3.11

NeXTSTep

Small?

The way things are going you will be able to run your favorite flavor of Linux on those pretty soon. It will be the best of both worlds: the best hardware and a good OS. Hopefully Apple doesn't take steps to block it.

Whats so forced on you? I'm on still on Sequoia and no one forced me to update to latest OS. Everything still works and I get security updates.

They're going to force us soon. When getting a new device I don't think you can install an older version either.

> No freaking way to disable it.

Um. https://imgur.com/a/ydt3MN5

Liquid Glass is more than just the transparency. There are many other changes that cannot be disabled that way. Not to mention the overall lag compared to Sequoia (I skipped Tahoe entirely so I had a direct knife-edge transition). 27 is less bad than 26 but Liquid Glass doesn't make anything better than prior UI and makes several things worse, even if you turn down the transparency.

I imagine that the UI changes since Sequoia regarding the giant buttons and whitespace are because Apple plans to release a touchscreen laptop (most rumors say it will be announced tomorrow) so they've decided to make the UI touch friendly at the expense of bloating the UI for everyone who doesn't have a touchscreen. Microsoft made this same decision with the Windows releases after 7.

The rumors also said it would be announced today, so we'll just have to see. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, after all.

Press event is tomorrow. I don’t think a touchscreen laptop is a good idea, but I guess we’ll see whether Apple can do a good job with it.

A touchscreen laptop is only a good idea if it can also be used like a tablet (with a detached keyboard). Otherwise it's useless.

Why? My SO has a Windows laptop with touchscreen, touchpad, keyboard and mouse. She uses the mouse but sometimes pushing a button by touching the screen saves time. If you think about it, by the time you reached for the mouse and started aiming for the button you already pressed it with your finger. The touchpad reduces the travel of the hand but not the time to aim. Hitting something with a finger is always faster. She is missing that on her work laptop.

> The touchpad reduces the travel of the hand but not the time to aim.

This is likely true for casual users, but for veterans this is a skill issue. My touchpad accuracy/speed more than matches most folks touchscreen accuracy/speed.

It may also reflect the quality of the touchpad. For a Windows laptop, it's virtually guaranteed to be of lower quality than something offered on an Apple laptop.

Pointer acceleration is also incredibly important for trackpad precision and I've only seen GNOME get close to as good as Apple.

> If you think about it, by the time you reached for the mouse and started aiming for the button you already pressed it with your finger. The touchpad reduces the travel of the hand but not the time to aim. Hitting something with a finger is always faster.

Depends on how accurate you need to be. How fast/confident you can be at hitting with a finger can easily drop off a cliff.

Reaching up to touch the screen is slower than reaching down to the trackpad. Also consider trackpoint.

Skilled users can make the reach and the motion one. You don't need to stabilize your palm on the rest to use the trackpad. Same way I don't need to use F and J for the keyboard (and kinda wish I could remove those annoying bumps)

I give you an example on this page of comments, so you can check if my informal results apply to you too.

I am moving my finger on my touchpad to move the pointer to more or less match what I am reading. I am always close to a Reply button or a vote one. There is no point reaching for the screen with my hand and touching those links. Furthermore they are way too small to be pressed with a finger. They are probably too small for a pointer too, but that's another issue.

Hoever, when I open an empty tab, type new in the URL bar and FF completes it to the URL of this site, and I press return, I usually end up with a Login link in the top right. If I reload the page (ctrl-r) I am logged in. For some reason either FF is not sending the session cookie or HN is not doing what it should on a cold session. This is also another issue (sorry) but let's say that I want to login. My pointer is far away from the login link. My fingers are not on the touchpad. Is it faster to move my right hand towards myself, touch the touchpad, slide the pointer to the link or moving that very same index finger to the link and touch it? My laptop does not have a touchscreen but when I used a tablet with a mouse and a keyboard I reached for the screen many times. Of course a mouse is less efficient than a touchpad, except for games, but I also miss the touchscreen sometimes.

And I would use if to press the reply button below this line I am typing. Let's see where the pointer ended up while I was typing... At the top right corner. Moving it to Reply and clicking is slower than touching the screen.

> I am moving my finger on my touchpad to move the pointer to more or less match what I am reading.

I do that too. I tend to "park" my cursor near where I am looking, or near where I anticipate clicking next.

> let's say that I want to login. My pointer is far away from the login link. My fingers are not on the touchpad. Is it faster to move my right hand towards myself, touch the touchpad, slide the pointer to the link or moving that very same index finger to the link and touch it?

Entirely depends on your relative proficiencies and preferences, I suppose.

When I had a touchscreen, I used it with a trackpad and a trackball. All three input devices had utility to me, so why not? These days I sometimes use a laser mouse rather than trackball, but same story (though my MacBook doesn't have touch now). I always prefer trackpad to scroll wheel for scrolling, for hopefully obvious reasons (range of motion and precision are both way better). I do know I got use out of the touchscreen even though I can't think of a hard rule for it. It's probably just nice to have on a case-by-case basis.

I totally agree: having several different input devices is the best scenario.

Personally I would not use the touchscreen very often, but I would use it sometimes to press buttons and maybe even to scroll. Maybe the resize handle in the bottom right corner of the text area I am writing now is a large enough target for a finger. On a laptop: raise a finger, drag and go back to the keys? Probably. With a desktop computer with a keyboard far away from the screen? Well, the mouse is also far away from the hands so who knows.

I never have a real use case for a mouse but sometimes I follow a link from HN to a game in which a mouse would be better than a touchpad: move move move click click move click is great with a mouse and terrible with touchpad of all kinds. My mouse is in a drawer somewhere.

I am a fan of touchpads with physical buttons. I think that only HP is selling them anymore, on very few ZBook models (maybe a 16 Fury?) and Lenovo still has them in laptops with their stick in the middle of the keyboard. However the Lenovo buttons are at the top of the touchpad, where the thumb rests if the index finger operates the stick. The thumb rests below the touchpad when operating the touchpad.

Thinkpad fans will tell me that those buttons are close to the space bar, were thumbs rest all the time and they are right. Their little stick is very conveniently placed but I never manager to operate it as efficiently as a touchpad, which required zero training. My old ZBook has both the stick and the touchpad and two rows of 3 buttons, and I've never learned to move the pointer with the stick, both Windows and Linux.

I used touch on Windows to test multitouch and pen input support in a familiar environment. Less hassle than grabbing a tablet, setting up remote DevTools, etc.

Yeah I think this is probably right. I use a 13" MBA as my primary machine so space is crucial and Liquid Glass wastes it.

My worry is mostly storage. SSD do not last forever

There were so many dummies out there saying those early M1 macbooks were doomed to fail early coz of high SSD swapping

Apple with their SoC really changed a lot of people's minds about hardware.

you can probably get the battery replaced for a better speedup

Donate $3k… to some charity that’s going to use it to justify their COO’s $200k/year salary. GTFOH!

Stay strong! I went from an M1 to M5 generation, and it was a nice bump, but I could have gone another year without any significant impact on my quality of life/work.

Same. Only because I broke my M1. Performance wise the M5 barely feels any faster to me in 90% of tasks

second this anecdote

My M1 MacBook Pro has been the best hardware investment I’ve ever made. I had planned to update it in 2025 at the four year mark, but it’s still going strong so I don’t see a reason. The new plan is to go to the Apple store the very day that it dies.

My M1 Pro has been great, certainly doesn’t feel like a 5-year old computer.

I’ve been a Mac user for 20 years and it’s wild to think how slow my 2003 PowerBook G4 or even my 2008 MacBook Pro felt after five years compared with my 2021 M1 Pro.

My 2013 Core i7 took almost eight years to get to where the previous ones were at five, and if it weren’t for local LLMs pushing me toward an upgrade in the next year or two, I have to imagine my M1 Pro could be my daily driver well into the next decade.

M1 Air guy here... I'm not looking for a replacement still. Almost 6 years now. Runs butter-smooth. Best tech purchase I ever made.

Have an M1 air as well. Got a Pro m5. For daily coding tasks, and general web browsing the M1 air still holds. I'm going to pass it on to my kid. Reminds me of the honda we have that we'll also pass down.

The M series MBAirs, and ofc the M1 originally, are hands down THE BEST laptops ever made. I have a maxed out MBP ofc but the Airs are unbeatable quality and price/performance.

I think the M1+ MacBook Airs will be regarded eventually like the original Macintosh originally the iPod, or the introduction of the original Air and the creation of the product class that came to be known as “ultrabooks”. It really changed everything about laptops to have a fantastic keyboard, speakers, screen, trackpad, hinge, and 12+ hour battery life… for $1k.

Still running my M1 Pro as well, no plans on upgrading for the next few years

My 16" M1 Pro personal laptop is literally just as smooth for 99% of tasks as my work M5 pro. It's crazy how well they built these. I mean the screen on this and the speakers are superb. And you can find these for like 500-800 bucks 2nd hand. I just hope they give us a few more years of MacOS updates.

I rode a 2009 MacPro5,1 (¡galliently! into the future, with capable GPU upgrades) until Jan23's M2Pro mini debut (which I still use as my main Mac).

Apple Silicon is certainly incredible (I also have a base-model M4mini, but it severely lacks RAM/ports so I don't really use it much/eWaste); my only Silicon-purchase-regret was buying a beautiful new 2024 MacBookAir (15") – heavily discounted $850@CostCo – but with only 8GB of RAM (it is functionally worthless, other than for watching it destroy your SSD with page-outs as you casually stream YouTubies...). In 2024, only 8GB of RAM (soldered onto the board because fuck you)!

Macbook Pro 14" Max M1 (64GB). Best Apple device I've owned and worth the investment at the time, especially given the prices now. It's still pretty great for being as old as it is. Have no intention to pay inflated prices, I'll ride it out.

I'm wondering what decrease in performance you were expecting from a five year old computer? It isn't like the processor suddenly gets slower simply because it's older.

I suspect if you used an average 5 year old PC and current PC, there'd be very little noticeable difference between the two outside of LLMs

My work gave me an m4 MacBook Pro. I could barely tell the difference between my personal computer and my work computer.

generally agree, although mine's battery health has been sitting at 80% for what seems like ages now.

Same, and I dual-boot Asahi as well.

Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.

I've held back an OS update or two, specifically because I'm worried about performance dropoff on the old chip

But with all of the AI-discovered exploits I think it'll become more important to keep everything up to date

Apple makes security updates available for the last few major OS versions, and even backports really bad ones further back on a case by case basis.

I've been using my M1 Max 64 GB for 5 years now and it's pretty zippy once you rewrite some slow software. I have an M4 Max with 128 GB but I never ended up migrating to it. That's how good it is.

I do enjoy the fact that if software annoys you, it’s easy as hell to simply generate a better version.

you should, I was surprised how seamless migrating was. I just connected both devices with a usb c cable, waited an hour, and everything was moved. Including application settings etc... It was completely painless. Just needed to login to some new websites etc.., but it took me less than 30 minutes of my effort to migrate, mindblow (total time was 2 hours because it copies all your data, but you don't have to stay with it)

Which software have you rewritten for speed?

Not op here, but I rewrote the file manager giving claude only two goals: cold startup below 100ms and 30mb nikon raw preview also below 100ms. One night in a loop and it hit around 20, 30ms respectively. My macs now feel uber fast.

Text viewer, password manager, console/browser hybrid, specialized text editors, household agent, task manager, kb, that sort of stuff.

only the M1 Max can't do nested virtualization (needs M3+)

I'm always surprised that devs need such high spec machines just for developing software. Unless you're developing games or scientific computing software or similar, I din't know what the power would be used for.

My dev machine is an i5 of some description about 6 years old, that's about all I could tell you off the top of my head because I've never worried about needing slightly faster compiles. (Ignoring running local LLMs of course. Currently they can't compete with Opus 5.5)

>scientific computing software

In my experience with this, most of the work happens on a HPC cluster. Your actual machine just needs to work as a thin client.

The power is fun sometimes.

In all honesty though, more devs need to test their software on a cheap netbook from a decade+ ago. If everybody did that, software would be so much better. I heard rumors of a DOOM that was optimized that way and as a result reaches something like hundreds of thousands of frames per second on modern hardware.

The IDEs for Android and iOS dev are heavy plus devs tend to run a lot of VMs so extra ram is nice.

I'm developing an inference engine and need access to the latest Neural Accelerator features, and therefore need to keep up to date with the Apple releases. M1 through M5 Max 128GB. As a broke bootstrapped un-funded startup founder this is extremely tough to afford given the price increases and all.

I had an M1 Max machine with 32GB of memory and upgraded it to an M4 Max machine with 128GB of memory for local AI model experimentation.

It's sad that M5 (and M6) are so much faster at prefilling and other LLM-related operations, but I'm happy with the computer I got and will keep it at least 3-4 generations.

They really have radically improved the situation for prefill speed! But the generation speed is behind enough that you'd notice. An M4 Max is a great choice I think.

Ah, my bad. I got those confused. Yeah, from M1 Max to M4 Max has been noticeable, but M5 seemed to improve even more in a single generation beyond M3 to M4. In any case, having 128GB of memory (before memory prices went up!) was a great choice.

Also M1 Pro here. Any reason why you're planning to upgrade at M7 Pro? I still don't feel the need to upgrade, as much as I wish I could justify it.

I like to factory reset my devices every couple of years, it really gives them a new lease on life. My M1 Pro feels as smooth and fast as the day I got it.

I think the rumors are the M6 and then later M7 Pro/Max will be put into a new chassis with a touchscreen and no notch.

Hmm ok. I'll keep an eye out. New chassis is interesting and no notch is cool. I don't care for the touchscreen idea at all.

M1 Max 64gb here, running Qwen 3.6 35b (unsloth 4bit) and it's plenty usable, and cheap used. Best bang for buck.

heyyy same, checkout kapitsa as the inference engine, gets 145+ tokens/sec

https://github.com/nace-ai/kapitsa

this machine just keeps getting better and better in the inference world. the memory bandwidth is too good, newer macbook pros aren't that much faster in memory bandwidth, many are slower. not enough to upgrade yet as they're mostly horizontal upgrades, the improvements in other areas are adding up like wifi bandwidth and protocol, NVMe speeds, webcam

if they do the M7 correctly: which is just everything their current models do plus way faster memory bandwidth and much greater memory possible 192GB+, then it will be a really great and timely upgrade

Here are the numbers that got me buying a used M1 Max for LLM work.

    M1 Max 400GB/s
    M4 Pro 273GB/s
    M5 Pro 307GB/s

Only Max are worthwhile for LLMs. An Ultra is just two Mac chips on a die, but I think they're just used in Mac Studio.

I'll check it that inference engine! Thanks!

Edit: it doesn't give numbers for unsloth/Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B 4bit, but I'm using mlx-serve right now and getting petty good numbers (and it took a while to tweak everything properly!)

it has just a few models it can download, it's really qwen and apple silicon pilled

it has unsloth on the list of 3.6 35b variants only on the 2-bit unsloth UD-IQ2_XXS GGUF variant

I'd say let it down 4-bit Qwen 3.6 35b again and see what how it performs in both benchmarks and your preferred conversational and agentic harness

it's Kflash verifier is competing against MTP and Dflash2, thats where the additional novelty is

> improvements in other areas are adding up like … webcam

Has the webcam changed or improved in the last couple years? It seems to still have the same webcam specs as the M4?

no it’s stuck there, M1 has a 720p cam with a smaller sensor thats noticeably bad in low light, and the refresh has occurred twice to 1080p with larger sensor and 12MP but cropped to 1080p for audience tracking

The cam did improve with the M4 but sadly still not as good as a phone. Considering iPhone camera bumps, MacBook displays sadly might not be thick enough for a phone camera.

Happily running my M1 Max, but have recently been annoyed at my decision to go with the off-the-shelf 32GB version at the time. I recalled telling friends at the time that the ridiculous memory bandwidth should offset that, so I ran some tests on memory pressure while running all my mess and, well, whaddya know, everything is actually tickety-boo. No memory pressure for the most part. And this is with big rust projects, Orbstack builds and runs.

The engineering that went into the M1 was amazing, I truly think that now, an M1 Max was the biggest bargain ever in my entire computing life. £3,299.00. In contrast, the 64GB i9 I bought only two years before was £4,149.00.

The “on-device AI” with the standard M6 seems to be slightly faster than the M1 Max of five years ago. All the rest seems to more or less match. Hope the M7 Max is yet another leap that serves many users for years to come.

The M1 Max MacBook with 64 gigabytes is still a great machine and fairly affordable on the second-hand market.

(Returning an i9 to wait a few more years on the M1, any M1, was absolutely worth it)

Got an M1 Max 64gb for $500 last year from a tech company inventory sell off. Had just 2 battery cycles, basically brand new. Been loving it.

I gave away my base spec (8gb ram, 256gb ssd) M1 air just a few months ago and it's still working fine, I just needed something higher than base spec for work but the new owner of the M1 loves it, for general purpose use it may as well be an M5.

I do wish they had removable storage though, I originally got that Macbook as it was the cheapest way I could try out MacOS and M1, once I decided I liked it, I was stuck with 256gb or spending all that money (and then some) again. This time, I went with 1tb.

They will pry my M1 Pro Macbook from my cold, dead fingers.

I have tried an M4 Macbook a while ago but my M1 Max Macbook still feels plenty fast. Hope to keep that for a long time.

I have a M1 pro for personal use and an M4 pro from work and I don't notice any difference switching between them. The M1 is still more than enough for most computer usage.

The only reason I upgraded from an M1 Pro to an M4 Pro is because I wanted more RAM. The processor itself was still plenty fast.

Yeah. M1 Max with 64gb remains more pleasurable than my work M5 with 48gb.

I have an M1 Pro as well but my next computer will be a split setup mainly because I realized that I'm most often working / focusing on hard things while at the desk and just browsing / checking in on things when I'm away from the desk so I'm thinking something like:

- a low end Macbook Pro or Air

- Mac Studio, mid-to-high specs

Why not just continue to use your m1 pro as your low end client? Save a couple hundred.

that's the plan for now, I just haven't had the M1 Pro slow down/hang/lag enough to give it up. It's a mid-range M1 Pro with 32GB of ram, works for me for dev work, I don't run any local LLM or resource intensive things on it. Battery only has 250 cycles on it so it's not like it dies off-charger.

I have M1 Maxes (one for work, one for home) that perform as good as new, as far as I can tell. Only thing they lack is an Nvidia GPU. I might pick up the new uber-studio though tmw when it launches (presumably).

I'm with you. Typing this on a 2021 m1 64gb. I keep thinking it's time to get a new one and I'd really like 128gb but justifying the spend is REALLY hard. I've had m5/128gb for a few weeks at a time and it's an upgrade for sure, but not $6k+ upgrade.

Haha same here. The M1 Pro is such a powerful machine and it still works great. I did buy a MacBook Air M5 for non work, and I think it’s about as fast as the M1 Pro, but the latter has 64GB of RAM so I can actually work. Will probably request a new one next year though, it’s time.

Why would you need a $6000 computer for dev work? For toying around with local models I would understand.

For the ability to run our full server-side application stack locally, including all services and as much of the test suite as possible, as well as the profilers, debuggers and telemetry tools to debug issues. Way faster to develop when you can have a change running live in about 3 seconds instead of 5 minutes, run targeted tests in seconds and a full test suite in a few minutes.

That's fair, I've never worked in a domain where I need to run that locally. Is there a reason to not just SSH into a workstation that can run it?

Not op here, but: i have a build box i ssh to, but when on the go: planes, taxis, etc. its annoying to constantly have to connect. Slightly. Having a fallback, fast local laptop is a convenience. Tho I do travel a lot - usually >100 flights per year.

1. I have team members who live and work in very remote places, SSH-ing from there is possible but terrible.

2. We're all in the on call rotation and being able to reproduce a bug from literally anywhere is valuable.

3. We all spend at least a few weeks a year traveling for work, and hotel/conference center/random office wifi can be terrible.

We do have cloud based builds and some dev environments we can "check out" as needed for running stuff async or certain tests that can't be run on a laptop (e.g. Nvidia GPU specific functionality, certain functionality that requires a real server network instead of a local virtual network, large scale tests)

When I was in the market for a new machine, I had the same attitude. As I was about to hit "Buy" on a standard issue $2k MBP, my wife said, "What if we got you a top of the line machine?"

I replied that it would make no sense unless I was going to start running local inference or training my own models locally...

2 years later, and this MacBook Pro M4 Max w/48GB is the best $4k I've ever spent!

Standard issue at our company. There's just some apps that are huge, especially legacy ones.

Big test suites. I have one project hitting 35 mins on m1 max, vs around 12 min on the m5 max, vs. 7 min on the linux box I keep in the basement. Unit tests, integration tests, headless browser with webgpu stuff.

I saw a decent listing for a 16" 16gb m1 pro macbook the other day, and i was seriously considering spending those money.

I have a 16" m4 max from work (36gb) and is an incredible machine (build quality, incredible display, overall feel). I also have a private macbook neo which should be similar to M1 in terms of performance but it's limited to 8gb of memory.

The neo/M1 performances are sufficient for my needs (for private computing) and chances are the M1 pro actually performs better than my neo (if anything for the more abundant memory).

I might to back to the listing and try to haggle the price even lower, considering a new generation of macbook pros has just been announced.

My M1 screen just cracked :( Debating to get it fixed (it’s a 32GB 2 TB machine). Crazy that I likely will spend 500€ to get a super old machine repaired just so au do not have to spend >3000€ for a similarly equipped new one.

Doesn't the high resale value of Macs not make it worthwhile to hang on to your old one as long as possible?

Also why would you have to spend $6000? You can get a refurbished 16-inch M5 Pro with 48 Gb RAM and 1 Tb SSD from Apple for $3000.

That's funny, I bought the config you are describing, but with nanotectured 14" instead of 16 new in July from microcenter for 2700 after tax.

And, here I am with my 2012 macbook pro, still thinking if its worth upgrading.

Are you on the model with the CD drive or the high resolution "thin body" version? I graded the ram in mine and put in an SSD, and it still works beautifully, but I'm now on now on Linux with it, and have been for some time.

My M2 pro is perfect still other than the fact that the 16gb of RAM is killing me.

IMO Apple knows a ton of people are doing this, especially with the rumors on memory bandwidth aka LPDDR6X bringing huge generational uplifts[0], which is why it seems they haven't brought down trade-in values from a few weeks ago, at least for my base spec M2 Pro MBP - Still $835. Pretty compelling to do that and pay just over $100/mo for a year to get a M6, given I've already gotten >3 years out of it.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681392

I think I'm on the same computer, the M1 MBP with the touchbar right? I was eyeing an upgrade for a while but now that I've transitioned to running agents on a home server instead of locally, I think I'll be putting my money into a ram upgrade for that box instead. My macbook is basically a dumb terminal at this point, the only reason for an upgrade would be battery life. I might get an air or even a neo if this thing dies.

I'm still running a 4 year old M1 Max 32GB Mac Studio as my daily and really haven't found anything that it shows sign of slowness/age with.

That said I don't do any local AI or 8K video editing type stuff.

On upgrade I could probably live on a moderate/high spec Mac mini since the only reason I went Studio originally was the resolution/number of displays it could support.

Same here! M1 Max going strong. I'm curious to see what they put out tomorrow but spending over 5K in a machine is a pretty rough pill to swallow

I figured my direct family could use an extra Macbook, so I decided to "peel" my M1 Pro away as a gift to my mom. It stays close, I can use her unused space as backup, provide ad-hoc Tailscale to her (way smoother than with her crufty Windows machine), and I get a nice upgrade to my current workflows.

Having said that, I did plan on sticking it out 7 years. Ended up bailing on an M5 Pro!

That’s what even low spec computers used to cost, not even adjusted for inflation. I don’t think spending $200-400/month on a hardware budget that enables me to earn 50-100x that is that onerous, we just think “six grand for a laptop???!?” But it’s ridiculously cheap for what it is. We wouldn’t be similarly shocked at a $6k car, for example.

Indeed, pricing has gone a bit out of hand. I got the top-of-the-line MBP when I was starting my PhD at the end of 2013, for something like $3,200. You couldn't get a more expensive consumer-oriented laptop at the time. It's mind-boggling that the equivalent purchase today costs around twice as much.

I also have a high spec M1 and was delaying upgrading, but eventually I needed more RAM.

My M1 is still fast and enjoyable, but I regret to inform you that the M5 actually does feel faster in day to day use. I thought for sure I wouldn’t notice, but the difference is there.

When I do large builds the difference is also bigger than I was expecting.

Me too, running a 16 inch M1 Pro. So glad I went for 32GB as that'll add to the longevity. Providing no hardware failures I can see at least another 4-5 years. It's been running silky smooth up to now even with the Golden Gate update.

I’m hopeful mine survives until RAM and SSD prices return to Earth. Unless I drop it I suspect it will. It’s still going strong. Maybe the M8. Hopefully chips and local LLMs have developed to the degree that local inference will be good and fast.

I just bought a m1 Air with 8GB as secondary device to the m4 mbp that my employer provides since they dialed up the spyware lately. I should have bought a m4 Air last November but I hope the m1 holdes until the rampocalypse is over.

Still with macmini m1 8gb here. still working OK taking care of space and RAM.

If the rumours are true (about AI capabilities) it’d be best to wait yes.

I'm hodl with my 2018 Intel mbp for a truly local model capable machine.

which rumours?

The M7 will the much better for local LLM inference. If you can afford the memory.

Oh interesting, any more info on "how"?

With a three point plan, I suspect: memory bandwidth, memory bandwidth, and more memory bandwidth.

How useful would that actually be for local inference, when the bottleneck is, essentially, always memory size? I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 64 to 128 GB. That ought to be enough for almost all uses, like Qwen3.8-Flash-Next at a decent quant.

Memory size is a bottleneck, but I have found that speed is very important for getting actual work done. Running a big model is great, but if you're getting 10t/s you're going to be spending a lot of time waiting.

> I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 64 to 128 GB. That ought to be enough for almost all uses

This will be the “640kb ought to be enough for anybody” Bill Gates quote of our era.

You can order a 128GB MacBook Pro today -- though point taken, memory size probably does belong in the three part plan :-)

Plus with more low precision compute… to help with the memory bandwidth!

More ASIC Mat-Mul too.

Just replaced the keycaps on my M1 for the second time to make it feel new-ish again.

Still a great machine, shame those keycaps wear so badly (developing shiny greasy-looking patches)

I think it's things like this that are a great argument against soldered ram. Especially with memory shortages.

(Obviously there are other reasons to solder like performance)

I have an M1 and an M5 MBA. For the most part, the M1 is doing extremely well, but imo this is the year where M1 is showing its age.

I'm also on an M1 Pro, trying and failing to find a reason to upgrade other than wanting a "shiny new toy".

my intel to M1 Pro upgrade was like stepping into the future, still on it and my only motivation fro swapping computers is i dropped it from my lap when i fell asleep after a long day with the kids, and the n key hasn't worked for a year

authorized repair shop says 4 days to fix it and it's my only laptop, so i go without :(

M1 Max, 32GB, 1TB; still not feeling the need to upgrade, especially when the upgrade is as expensive as they are now.

same

Im on that same cycle. M1 pro max still running strong though. 3 cycles might be hard though...

M1 Pro here as well. I will buy M6 Pro Mac Studio o Mac mini.

Why wouldn't it make it?

Mine is running great and it has 24/7 use.

I mean, you don't have to. Do you need a Mac? I make mobile apps and Xcode is only on macOS so I definitely need it but most people don't, there are Windows and Linux options that are great for fractions of the price.

I think he wants a machine that can do local LLM

The $2000 version is 10 X better.

Exactly on the same boat: I don't see a big improvement until I can run a decent LLM on my machine. But I'll wait for it to reach the $2500 price tag.

Until then, then M1 Pro will be fine for my usage, which is already more advanced than most.

My ideal scenario:

- 2027 the AI bubble bursts

- 2028 new memory factories reach the production stage and fail to meet demand, so we have a glut of memory and rock-bottom prices.

still rocking the m1 studio, shows no signs of stopping

Right there with you

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