I think people are excited because it's been many years since any large manufacturer has shown they care about things professionals care about in laptops. IBM used to take care of us but after they sold ThinkPad to Lenovo it really wasn't ever the same. Apple used to take care of us but then the "March of Thin" happened. There are small companies like System76 but I think they mostly just use ODMs like Clevo et al. There are also some near-misses from Dell with their XPS line, they designed them for consumer and tried to adapt them.

This is really the first time in years a purpose-built professional laptop has came out with nice build quality, keyboard, display etc that clearly prioritizes pro users both in form (it's fatter for cooling again!) and function (beastly ARM SOC).

So while it's a low bar it's a loooong time since it's been cleared.

A similar thing happened with the Mac Pro. The old 2012 era Mac Pro was much loved. Then the "trash can" came out which was form over function. Then Apple eventually admitted their mistake and went back to a tower design.

Apple just had an extremely fallow decade in the 2010s (in terms of design) because they were making so much $$$ with iPhone that they stopped caring about the Mac. Jony Ive also left the company during that period.

I wish they had went for a design that scaled down better with the Mac Pro. It's an amazing machine and it's great for professional video production which is it's reasons d'etre but it would have been nice if it scaled down well enough for software engineers. Sort of like how the old G5 did, it was an "pro" machine, rather than a "professional video editing rig".

I suspect the M1 Pro will eventually find its way into a Mac Mini since they certainly have the thermal headroom for it, and the new Mac Pro will get some kind of M1 Supermax.

There's definitely a long-time rumor that a more powerful Apple Silicon Mac mini is in the works. It was expected to come out with the macbooks, but it didn't: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/22/gurman-high-end-mac-min...

If the predictions by Gurman hold true, they have chips in planning which are twice and four times the size of the current M1 Max...

I so hope there will be a Mini with the M1 Max, as this would finally be the desktop Mac, so many people have been waiting for (me including).

I really wanted a cheaper Mac tower ten years ago but most of the reasons I wanted one aren’t really relevant anymore:

The future finally happened in terms of fast external peripherals (especially storage), and I don’t have a burning need for a Mac with upgradable internal storage anymore.

In 2010 I got a $100 graphics card that let my PC do things that the PS3 and Xbox could only dream of. Now for the cost of a “mid-range” GPU it’s possible to get a Switch with a game or two that look fine and run at fast FPS.

One thing: Macs need to cut the Bs and give us upgradable RAM back

Low power, high performance, upgradable RAM: pick two.

RAM slots aren't free; all that extra interconnect length increases power requirements and becomes impractical with large buses. You'd need 8 SO-DIMM slots to match the bus width of the M1 Max models, at much higher power consumption and slower performance. LPDDR RAM doesn't even exist in removable form for these reasons.

For those wondering about the math: a SODIMM channel (e.g. DDR5) is 64 bits. An LPDDR channel is 16 bits. M1 has 8 of those (128 bits), M1 Pro has 16 (256 bits), and M1 Max has 32 (512 bits). That means the M1 is equivalent to dual channel RAM, the Pro to quad channel RAM, and the Max to octa channel RAM, in typical desktop/laptop RAM terms.

Modern embedded SoC integration is insane. Yes, the "two" memory chips you see on the M1 are really 8 discrete dies/chips (4 stacked together inside each of the two packages), and the "two" big fat things around the Pro are actually 2x8; double them up for the Max and that's how you get to 32 channels. Good luck putting that through a connector...

All macs should have 32GB without customization. It’s not so expensive without sockets, and Apple customers deserve the best. We shouldn’t even have to choose.

The “but muh upgradable RAM” folks need realize: computers are so fast now that just making RAM human-replaceable requires such long connectors that resulting speeds are unacceptably low (due to speed of light vs clock cycle time).

Maybe we will see a return of the amiga’s ‘fast ram’ expansion style, with high price, high performance modules designed for specific functions and improvement.

>Macs need to cut the Bs and give us upgradable RAM back

I don't see that happen any time soon, not with their new focus on building the core as a SoC. Maybe with the MacPros, there will be on-SoC RAM and slower off-SoC, but I doubt it till I see it.

> One thing: Macs need to cut the Bs and give us upgradable RAM back

never going go happen as Apples loathes users' freedom. they prefer selling a disposable brick.

More like a vocal minority of users want upgradable RAM. Most people don't even know what RAM is and think it's the thing that stores their files.

> There are small companies like System76 but I think they mostly just use ODMs like Clevo et al.

Yes. I remember seeing several Clevo models in their offerings. Like most laptops, they have really bad thermal management and atrocious manufacturer software.

I have a 4800H with a 1070 mobile GPU, 32GB ram, 512 nvme and 1TB sshd. I paid about $1000 all in for that ($800 laptop plus ram and storage).

The m1 stuff has "tensor" cores and allegedly a faster GPU - that is, it's faster at some things my GPU handles for me, such as h264/h265 encoding.

Why should I get rid of my laptop and use the apple instead?

Ignore the 140W PSU!

Hey, if what you have works for you then by all means keep using it. Less e-waste is always a good thing. If this new machine can save you time, maybe it's worth an upgrade. My last upgrade brought my compile times down more than five minutes, which makes it absolutely worth the cost. It looks like one of these new MBPs might do that again, so I'm going to get one.

Another thing to consider is that it may be marginally easier on you to develop on an ARM machine if you're planning on deploying to ARM servers, though this depends heavily on your workload.

From my experience, Apple has a premium on overall quality and longevity. It's hard to quantify or benchmark, but it adds up over time.

I bought a Zephyrus G14 a year ago with high stats, but I often get weird issues where I have to restart my computer or find some fix online. And there are some build/design quirks that are a little annoying. I already want to replace it.

I also have a Macbook Pro from 2015 that I only switched because I wanted a better GPU. It still works fine and looks great. I don't think the G14 will be so great after 6 years.

My wife has been using Macbook Pro 15" 2015 that we bought in 2016 rather heavily. The only significant problem is overheating due to dust accumulation that requires to bring it a local non-apple repair shop for cleaning once in a year. Another problem is that after 4 years the speakers started to produce clicking sounds and had to be replaced. It was about 100 Euro in the same shop.

We also have Macbook 13" 2018. The famous butterfly keyboard on it got broken after a year. It was repaired cost-free, but it took for Apple reseller 2 weeks to do that. And then overheating was terrible even after a dust cleanup. It was necessary to use a cooling pad under a heavy use. When I got a newer laptop on my job I tried to sell it for a reasonable price, but it turned out the resale value was much lower than I expected. So we keep it as a sort-of spare/guest machine.

> From my experience, Apple has a premium on overall quality and longevity. It's hard to quantify or benchmark, but it adds up over time.

I agree. If you know how to hack, of course hardware lasts longer. I think i have a Motorola PPC[0] mac somewhere that boots BSD

[0] totally 603e

The M1 Max / Pro is likely faster in every way compared to the $1000 laptop you bought, mostly by significant amounts.

It also costs at least 2.6x as much¹ so the question becomes "do you get a 2.6x productivity gain as well?"

1. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...

configured with 32GiB RAM and 1TB SSD for $2599

> It also costs at least 2.6x as much¹ so the question becomes "do you get a 2.6x productivity gain as well?"

Wrong question. You're comparing different values. Even 5-10% productivity gain can offset the 2.6x difference.

> Even 5-10% productivity gain can offset the 2.6x difference.

I think this heavily depends on what you're gaining. I think for a lot of tasks or scenarios it's not worth it. Especially around things like video encoding.

For example if you're a solo worker and you need to batch render 10 hours of video and your computer is essentially unusable for that time you would do this action overnight. If rendering everything finishes in 5 hours instead of 6 hours that doesn't matter because you're sleeping. If you need to render a quick 1 off video that takes 10 minutes there's a bunch of semi-productive things you can do while that finishes and it finishing in 9 minutes instead won't make a noticeable difference.

Now you might say if you're a professional video renderer you'll want to render videos during business hours as fast as possible in which case if you're operating at that scale you wouldn't use your daily laptop to do the rendering. You would remotely render it on a dedicated server (this is how most "pro" places work). This way you can comfortably edit video #2 while video #1 is rendering.

Even 6 year old hardware that costs $800 all-in can give you sub-100ms code reload times in most Rails, Django, Phoenix, Laravel and Node web apps even with Webpack or esbuild running -- even running within Docker on Windows (WSL 2) or native Linux. Also all major code editors can run well without input latency. That's a decently large amount of "pro" web development use cases. Unless you're doing hardcore continuous compiling in a spot where you expect to do this sequentially on your main laptop I can't really see a 10% gain being worth a 2.5x+ cost increase for most dev work.

For video editing the productivity gains are mainly in the editing, not in the rendering. Rendering time is more like a performance metric. More responsive editing process, effortless real-time previews - these are the real gains.

For sure but a 10% gain isn't a gain if you already reached your target goal of smoothness.

For example if you can edit at $your_target_resolution and everything is liquid smooth without dropping frames even with a decent amount of effects then any improvement is overkill.

I'm sure for crazy high end set ups (8k video, etc.) an M1 Max would be nice but for other folks editing 1080p or 1440p videos at 30-60 fps you can get liquid smooth editing even with ~5-6 year old hardware that costs $1,000 all-in (a bit more expensive now due to GPU prices being temporarily crazy in price).

That depends entirely on the circumstances (whether the performance increase of the local machine can get you that, that is).

It's really a very specific niche that's targeted here: namely mobile(!) video editing and -production.

There are very few use cases these days that benefit from a high-performance mobile (cannot stress this enough) solution.

So unless your specific use case benefits at all from local processing power, I'd argue that it'd be hard to even get a 5% productivity increase that cannot be reached by other means (better/bigger display, more ergonomic peripherals, optimised workflow, etc.).

I'm not denying the fact that even a 5% improvement may justify the price difference. I'm just questioning whether the improvement in performance can meaningfully contribute to that in most use cases.

Exactly. If your time is expensive (as it is for most senior developers in first world markets), even 15% more productivity could easily pay the price premium in very little time.

Being X% faster while consuming Y% less energy and therefore being Z% quieter and having W% longer battery life absolutely outweighs 2.6x price. Add build quality, longevity, resell value, this isn’t even fair, the laptop market is basically garbage or Apple these days.

We have one guy with the Dell XPS in the office. This laptop keeps making noise…

As the other person mentioned even a small productivity difference can offset the cost. And we haven't even touched on QoL items like trackpads, screens, and battery life. Everyone is so focused on AS it feels like the screens are not being talked about enough.

As I mentioned, QoL items can be had externally for substantially less money (e.g. displays, mice, keyboards).

The improvement only materialises in a very niche use case (e.g. primarily mobile workplaces with virtually no additional weight/space for things like mice).

The cost of equipment is negligible compared to the personell cost so unless your machines work by themselves that's not very relevant. That's why professionals and the people having to pay and maintain them care so much about quality and ease.

I clicked a couple of comparisons and they say the opposite.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-4800H-vs-Ap...

The rest is not strictly about M1/Apple, but I found technically superior hardware can be quite sluggish depending on your software stack.

That seems to be about the Macbook Air M1

Macbook trackpads blow all others out of the water. At least they did up until two years ago when I was in the market last.

This is still the main thing that sends me back to mac every time I try to switch to a linux daily driver.

That seems like a lot of laptop for sub-$1000! Where did you buy/spec it?

> Why should I get rid of my laptop and use the apple instead?

You probably shouldn't. Your laptop is more than adequate for your tasks. It may even be better in some respects (you can play some AAA games if you want).

well I would guess screen is way nicer on MBP which might be something one cares about having to stare at it all day (not saying you should switch)

If the machine is used primarily with external monitors that point becomes much less important, though.

Another question is whether the undoubtedly much better screen is worth the >2x price tag. You can get a nice portable monitor and a very good stationary monitor for just the price difference.

> Another question is whether the undoubtedly much better screen is worth the >2x price tag

For me, yes! It's how interact with the machine for hours and hours each day. This is also why the keyboards over the last few years were such a travesty - they are the primary input method.

Thats def a personal choice for me it def. is :)

Wrong comparison . You are comparing old M1 (that laptop is around 1000 bucks). Here’s the comparison with M1 max https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-max-vs-amd-ry...

for me the biggest reason is that i can't (locally) compile to ios on anything but a mac.

It is always interesting to look back. It is clear Intel barely made any improvement since 2016. And the jump from 2014 to 2016 wasn't that spectacular in terms of IPC. PCI-E also happened to stuck at PCI-E 3.0 for a long time. DDR (5) improvement slowed to be point all resources went to LPDDR. ( Although one could argue LPDDR was more in demand ). DRAM and NAND price rise because of Supply and Demand cycle for 3 years. Crypto causes GPU price hike. HDD price only went back to normal in 2016 after the Thailand flood. And HDD roadmap such as HAMR, MAMR were all 5+ years behind. Wireless 802.11ax suffered 3-4 years delay compared to original schedule. Took a long time to agree on NBase-T.

We basically have a 5+ year gap of little improvement in PC Industry. ( Comparatively speaking ).

In parallel:

7 year gap, during which Apple also experimented with the trashcan, the emoji touchbar, the shallow keyboard, the non-magsafe non-SD connectors. It was like a pause on personal computing.

7-year gap from 2013 to 2020 where social media became political machines, and all companies became cloud-first.

Oh Yes. It is interesting to look back now.

Strange decade indeed. Unless you are in US and the financial disaster hit hard, then I think I look back in 2010 that 2000s were comparatively uneventful.