I second this. I got a 14in M3 Max with 96GB of RAM (although 512GB storage but not a big deal with NAS and external storage) for the price of a 14in M4 Pro 24gb/1tb back in May from the unsold stock in my country's online store. It's honestly way overkill for what I do and the only time I really use the power is when I load large LLM into the memory once in a while or build a decently sized project (rarity since I mostly work on my own stuff which is much smaller in scale so far). But for the price I would've paid for a "weaker" laptop, it's a banger deal

Interesting! More details on this please? like what country and how the prices compare.. This doesn't seem to be available on Apple's online stores in Scandinavia.

It was in Verkkokauppa (finnish version of amazon, crudely speaking) in Finland. They were marked as refurbished on the storepage but the boxes came sealed with 4 cycles on the battery and no visible sign of use (I think I ran some utility to check for SSD usage and it was pretty low but I didn't do it immediately after turning on can't base anything off that).

Either apple refurbished a product return and then resold back through Verkkokauppa? The machine came with Sonoma 14.3 or 14.4 which is well after the November 2023 manufacturing date. But sealed box threw me off, cause the unboxing felt exactly the same as for a brand new macbook. Warranty I got from the store is also the same you would get for a brand new item.

nonetheless, the value is great. 24/512 14inc M4 Pro costs 2500eur in Finland brand new for reference and I got this M3 Max for 2999

It's most likely factory refurbished by Apple. You can buy these directly from Apple, and I've seen them in small quantities on third party resellers but I'm not sure how they're sourced.

or buy refurbished from the apple site. better deal too.

everything i buy is refurbished from apple. better deal than new.

I find the Apple doesn't have the range that others have, but yeah it's a good option when they have what you are after. I've also had good refurbished electronics from Backmarket. I'm sure there are similar in other countries.

If they have what you want. Often it’s specs with too little memory.

Apple's official refurbs aren't available in every country though. Seems to be available in the UK but not here in Sweden, don't really know the reasoning since it's available in Germany.

I saw the link to refurbished pop up in the Apple Store app on my iPhone recently in Finland (it either lead to the normal product page or just didn't load, I cannot remember). Apple refurb might be coming to Nordics in the near future

This is particularly true for M1 and up; for the vast majority of users, any M1 with 16GB RAM or more is going to be _fine_.

I recently got a used M1 Max 64gb with 4tb for around 2000 USD and 120 battery cycles. (when new it was around 4500)

This thing has 400 gb/s memory bandwith and never swaps. For dev work with shitload of dockers it just flies. Compile times in the newer CPUs are better but not by much.

For local LLM it's not the best (no cuda support), but for everything else this thing will last at least for the next 3 years easily.