I have many 2015 MacBook Pro's. All tour. All are almost permanently on. I replaced the battery on two machines last year. Speakers fine. Screen fine. Are you implying the relatively young M1 Air is so badly made, the speakers, monitors, AND battery have already needed to be replaced?
> my lifestyle involves very rough handling of the machine
No, it's not badly made, GP seems to be a huge exception. Please, read the full comment...
My M1 Air has been around since launch, have traveled with it just throwing inside bags, dropped a few times, sat on, etc., it still works 100% fine without any part swap, and looks almost pristine with just a tiny scratch on one of the edges from a drop.
As for the battery, yeah ideally it'd last longer. But it's seen a lot of physical abuse, tons of full charge cycles, and generally wonked out charging setups so I can't get too upset.
For the monitor I'm honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did. It had been slammed around and crushed far more than what it should be able to take.
And how are you saying you've had M1 devices for 6 years? I don't think thats possible.
[1]: https://www.ifixit.com/products/macbook-air-13-a2337-late-20...
I don’t think it’s just down to macOS because the Intel Mac’s didn’t feel as good. I think it’s likely down to the E cores and moving more of the IO handling processors onto the SoC (according to the Asahi folks anyway)
When my Intel Mac or AMD PC are under load, input struggles to fight with the things taking up resources. And that might be as simple as running Teams which is a resource hog at the most random times.
The Arm Macs never hit that issue for me even when I’m using aggressive loads.
XCode, a Flutter project in Android Studio, a Rails project in Rubymine, a running server/database and 2 different mobile Simulators, Sublime, Safari, Chrome, and 3 different Firefox profiles.
I'm looking forward to picking up a new Macbook sometime in the next half a year, but for now I'm quite delighted when using my Mini which literally boots in less than 5 seconds.
Edit: just wanted to emphasize that sometimes my Macbook Pro struggles without even all of the above apps open.
For regular stuff that's not gpu intensive, it's not really much different to any other system in terms of how it uses ram. What's different is it has a ridiculously fast SSD and can swap without much performance hit.
Relying on your ssd for swap over getting enough memory in the first place seems like false economy to me.
Important to keep in mind you won’t be able to replace that SSD without taking the machine to an Apple Store, and I’m not even sure they can replace the SSD without replacing the motherboard.
So almost no matter how much ram you get, in multi-application day to day workflows it’ll still use swap sometimes just because it can.
If your workflow involves something like giant objects in python or huge data structures that need to be in ram for performance, then you need the ram. But for use cases like 2,000 browser tabs plus photoshop plus Lightroom plus ten electron apps, mac osx “feels” like it has way more ram than an equivalent windows machine.
Being able to use swap is obviously beneficial, and if you're going to use it, it's better if it's fast.
But relying on it in place of regular RAM means you're just artificially shortening the life of your SSD - that's what I meant about "a false economy".
The machine "feeling" responsive isn't the point.
If all other factors are the same, the ssd wear on a machine that's used the ssd heavily for swap is going to be significantly higher.
Using a Mac (or Linux) is deeply enlightening on how terrible the Windows user experience is. From random slowdowns to odd degradation patterns under load, it’s a very frustrating environment.
The only reason I can imagine people putting up with it is being unwilling to change - it takes work to move from Windows to Linux, but Macs are so well rounded, and now with their ARM CPUs, they can offer a much tighter integration between hardware and software.
And, for developers, it’s Unix from top to bottom (well… no X, but that’s another story). WSL is impressive, but it’s still a Linux bolted on a VMS-like OS.
One thing: considering how long Macs remain usable and the fact they are impossible to expand, it’s wise to get more memory than you need right now. Thinking on developing for cluster environments, I’d try to get a Mac with 32 or 64GB of RAM.
For coding, I think ram gets a little overrated sometimes. Many projects would work fine on 16GB machines.
There are a few games that it won't play, and..... that's about it. I'm still surprised at how quickly that happened. Worth a try, the M2 mini is cheap and easy, and the 8gb/256gb config was "enough" for me. I honestly didn't even notice the bump moving to the max 64gb/2tb. Doing it over, I'd probably do an Air with 16 or 24gb and be happy as a clam.
$0.02 :)