Well is it one of the most expensive? MBA baseline could be had for 1000, the one I’d pick with 16GB for 1200. I challenge you to find me anything with such high build quality, screen and inputs, not to speak of a chip that is measurably the fastest and most efficient for any task you still want to do locally. I’ve been away from macs for couple of years, but these M1s are IMO a game changer.

> I’ve been away from macs for couple of years, but these M1s are IMO a game changer.

The interesting thing here is, is it really a game changer in practice for something like web development and every day computer usage?

I'm not here to start a mac vs windows war but I have a 6 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU (4 cores, no HT) with 16gb of memory and a first gen SSD.

I use this workstation for full time development / ops work on Windows with WSL 2 / Docker, etc..

Everything is still pretty damn fast and it feels no different than the day I put together the machine.

Opening Chrome from hotkey to being able to type takes a second. Opening a terminal feels instant. Working with Vim and 50+ plugins has no type delay. Disk I/O feels good. I can keep multiple VMs running, run multiple Dockerized large web apps in various web frameworks, open 20+ tabs in a browser and a bunch of other stuff and it doesn't break a sweat. Sometimes I forget that I have image editors and other stuff open in virtual workspaces too.

I also do a lot of screencast recording / editing. The only part of my workflow that feels sluggish at times is rendering videos but that ends up being a non-issue because if I need to export 75 videos for a course I queue them up before I goto sleep and it finishes before I wake up the next morning. For 10-20 minute videos here and there I just render them before doing something where I go AFK (showering, eating, going outside, etc.).

I guess what I'm getting at here is, I'm not sure how a faster CPU will really help that much in my day to day besides crushing benchmarks.

Are folks running non-M1 MBPs experiencing slow downs in their day to day where they feel compelled to get one with an M1? Where do you see and feel the performance wins in practice?

Not sure about current Intel MBPs but I have been forced onto ThinkPads for last 2.5 years, currently on an X1 yoga. IMO this whole experience, coupled with Windows 10, is really crappy. TouchPad driver has issues with sleep mode, with no manufacturer fix on the horizon since multiple years. So my organization's solution was to disable lower power states. Now even in standby it drains battery in 6 hours or so. Screen is still 1080p, and even if it was higher res, windows still has scaling issues in places. Settings are all over the place - since some update, the only place to make sense of your language /keyboard list is Powershell. People give Apple shit for their QA but I think most of them have not used Wintel in the last 10 years.

> People give Apple shit for their QA but I think most of them have not used Wintel in the last 10 years.

I assume a significant amount of long-term Mac fans give Apple shit not because they're comparing to other ecosystems, but to an ideal of Not Sucking.