It used to be the case I would swap MacBook parts out more when laptops were simply clunkier maybe 10 years ago (added a SATA SSD back in 2010). But lately with 16 GB RAM being fine for most developers even, NVMe SSDs being standard, Macs still being lame for GPGPU tasks besides mining cryptocurrency, and a lot of compute intensive tasks simply put into the cloud ... I can’t really say I need to do many hardware updates on a Mac besides perhaps the battery anymore. What really helps me most now is battery life and better screens to reduce eye fatigue, and that’s basically what Apple has done fairly well compared to the PC laptop market.

I’m kind of curious to see how usage goes for AWS Graviton 2 instances in the future as Apple laptops transition and there’s less friction to deploy along ARM based tool chains and artifacts.