It is a good battery life for a PC laptop but it is still significantly behind of M1 based Macs while also having significantly lower single core benchmarks compared to M1. And the performance difference is even bigger when both laptops are on battery power.

Microsoft is almost always a generation behind with tech in surface products it's ridiculous because they look so appealing otherwise. I just feel like I'm buying last years model on launch.

That is really a problem only if you watch tech news. In reality people use computers for years, so having a 4 or 5 year old tech doesn't really matter that much.

Developers should be upgrading on 2-3 year cycles max - the leap in performance of 2 generations noticeably impacts performance and unless you're doing some really trivial stuff - performance matters.

Check out Chrome build time benchmarks between 3/4xxx and 5xxx series (or any dev tool related benchmarks). 10-20% off your iteration cycle is noticeable - and that's a single generation jump.

Increasing iteration speed is a big productivity boosts, seeing professionals with 5+ year old devices is just ridiculous to me, you spend 8+ hours on that device - investing 2000$ for an upgrade every two years is not that much to ask.

Developers may have a reason to upgrade (many don't as ssh isn't going to get any faster-er with a fancy new CPU), but they constitute the part of people that read tech news. This is a minuscule part of general population.

Compiling Chrome is a nice benchmark but in reality dev cycles are quite smaller (or you might want to optimize your toolchain).

Finally, it's quite common for developers to forget the kind of hardware their users are running on. Then they produce software that only runs well on the next gen hardware. If you develop on a beast, then at least test whatever you are producing on a 3-4 year old machine to see how it will work for the clients.

Personally I'd like if developers stayed a couple of generations behind on their computers, so the rest of us aren't forced to upgrade regularly to keep software running at a decent speed.

It means the usable life is shorter, so even if it’s fine for a while, you need to think of it as a much more expensive device per useful year.

Sadly, with the current trends I think the device will be more likely rendered by an irreparable hardware failure before it reaches end of life due to speed.

I mean that seems inevitable.

I have a 2014 retina iMac. At some point in the next few years, I’ll probably replace it with an M series iMac, and then put Linux on it. It’s hard to imagine that it will ever really reach end of life due to speed at that point.

I haven’t really felt this way with the Surface Book. The first gen was rough, but I’ve been using an SB3 for several months now and have nothing but praise for it.