Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
I grabbed a 14" M1 Max mbp shortly after they were announced about 4 years ago, and it's still my main rig.

My company gives me a pretty healthy stipend every 2 years for WFH tech items and I haven't been able to justify using it for a newer mbp, as solid as the m4/m5 improvements seem to be. CPU simply isn't a significant factor for my next upgrade. I'm waiting for things like wifi 7, 5g cellular, notch-less oled display with face-id, design updates, etc before I part ways with my current mbp.
 
Still using the first gen M1 Air. (Base Model)

Still does everything i need it to do and is fast as ever. But the battery is getting bad.

Will likely upgrade to the Pro, if it gets the rumored Tandem OLED screen.
M1 to M6 should be a great upgrade.
That's exactly my plan-- M1 Air to M6(?) Pro, whenever it gets the tandem OLED.

... going to turn on the 80% charge limit, to hopefully get more cycles out of it.
 
I remember being blown away by the M1 Air. I loaded up a timeline on fcp with 8K footage from my Red camera and I could actually play it back. It was min blowing. It started to struggle when editing anything longer than 5 minutes, but still. Then I swapped it for a 14» M1 Pro that I still use to this day
 
5 years already and it’s felt like a white knuckle racing rollercoaster the entire time. The sheer performance of the M1 and then the continuous stacking boost each year since has been insane. Biggest shakeup to CPUs since the x86-64 hit the scene.
 
Johny Srouji hopefully is one of the highest compensated execs at Apple. Probably the most valuable contributor in history across all companies (apart perhaps from SteveJ). Apart from one or two keynote video appearances, he and his team labors without any plaudits. Interesting that when Apple built the space ship, he insisted that his group be in a separate building. "Go Johny Go." Imagine Apple with iPhones running Qualcomm, and Macs running Intel. Again, likely the most valuable Apple Exec ever (apart from SteveJ). GJG, NSC
 
M1 Max is still over kill
For many things, certainly anything I do. From the table the M5 is a clean twice as fast as the M1, and little more than that for graphics. Too bad they didn't have power consumption listed.

This laptop is storage limited, not CPU limited.

My first laptop was a Powerbook 180c. 4 MB RAM, 160 MB HD. If I remember it was about $4000. How far we've come.
 
Moving away from Intel to Arm / A-Series was a huge jump as we all know and I still love the platform. Since then, improvements have returned to be incremental similar to how the AIM alliance PowerPC chips and later Intel. All great stuff, but I do wish Apple had patched things up Nvidia so we could have the option of tapping into that pipeline for some critical applications.
 
During the same time period, all other competitors, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm and MediaTek, have achieved a MUCH MUCH larger performance jump than Apple.
If by "performance" you mean "generated enough heat to power a small country", yeah, sure. But as far as efficiency, and real world usage (Nvidia and possibly MediaTek aside), yeah, not so much.
 
  • Like
Reactions: navaira
I still use my MBA (2021) quite a bit and it still does everything I want it to do. I just really hate this Tahoe Operating System. The icons look sophomoric, the music app is horrible, and it just felt like change for no reason. I tend to like change, but the change needs to be good and this was not good.
 
I expected issues, glitches, compatibility concerns when Apple moved from Intel to own CPU, as well as then difficulties to further evolve and keep with others that have a larger customer base. I was wrong.
You got lucky. I’ve encountered USB and display/dock compatibility issues with AS
 
I find it surprising that Apple claims “6x faster cpu/gpu” when the Geekbench benchmarks show about a 2x improvement. Which is still not bad and translates to 20% a year or so (disregarding compounding effects).

I’m still using my M1 iMac for most things, when I’m behind my desk. It seems to be keeping up very well, no need to replace it yet.
 
  • Love
Reactions: max2
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.