Comment by at1as
17 hours ago
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
17 hours ago
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
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.
> 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.
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How removable storage will protect you from burned down laptop? Do you plan to keep SSD in your pocket while you are sleeping?
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Isn't icloud backup on by default??
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Can't a decent shop desolder it tho?
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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?
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.
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.
> 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'.
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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.
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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.
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incredible deal
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.
My worry is mostly storage. SSD do not last forever
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
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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?
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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.
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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.
> No freaking way to disable it.
Um. https://imgur.com/a/ydt3MN5
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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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
Still running my M1 Pro as well, no plans on upgrading for the next few years
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I'm also on an M1 Pro, trying and failing to find a reason to upgrade other than wanting a "shiny new toy".
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
> 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?
Here are the numbers that got me buying a used M1 Max for LLM work.
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!)
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Still with macmini m1 8gb here. still working OK taking care of space and RAM.
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.
They will pry my M1 Pro Macbook from my cold, dead fingers.
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.
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.
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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).
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
And, here I am with my 2012 macbook pro, still thinking if its worth upgrading.
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!
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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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!
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.
Standard issue at our company. There's just some apps that are huge, especially legacy ones.
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.
M1 Max, 32GB, 1TB; still not feeling the need to upgrade, especially when the upgrade is as expensive as they are now.
same
If the rumours are true (about AI capabilities) it’d be best to wait yes.
which rumours?
The M7 will the much better for local LLM inference. If you can afford the memory.
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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.
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.
My M2 pro is perfect still other than the fact that the 16gb of RAM is killing me.
Right there with you
still rocking the m1 studio, shows no signs of stopping
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.
Why wouldn't it make it?
Mine is running great and it has 24/7 use.