I have 0 urgency buying something more expensive than a $150 refurbished i5 16gb ram laptop.

Local AI isnt useful for agent stuff.

Same. My personal laptop is an M1 Air and I also have an M1 Studio desktop. My work machine is an M4, and in "regular" use I can't tell the difference between them.

I don’t get that sentiment. I have an m4 16gb and it’s such a sluggish machine. and that’s not even doing development, just browsers, word, excel, PowerPoint. (And so many eternal bugs… I feel like I’m on windows)

do you have a corp laptop with a dozen scanners like Carbon Black, Crowdstrike, etc. installed? My corp M4 Max with 48 GB is slower than my old M1 16GB machine by a large margin. I don't know what evil things those scanners do, but they're alwayus spinning like 35% CPU, and the M4 Max machine just drags..

Nope. Just a MacBook with office, safari, Firefox, and some finder replacement. And preview. If every tab and window uses 1GB+, then you don’t need many tabs/windows to bring the system to it’s knees.

I have an M2 Pro MBP 16GB, compared to the latest MBP issued by my employer a couple months ago, I see zero difference in real world performance. Can’t speak for Office on Mac, I have not used it in over a decade, but for typical full stack web dev I literally don’t need anything more.

You better check health of your machine then.

I think software makes it sick. Perhaps it would be better without it.

Sounds broken, somehow. The M1 iPad Pro I just traded in worked fine. Traded it for a Neo and the Neo does some stuff faster, but for day-to-day casual use, it's not notably different.