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For my personal use, I subscripe to the: “Eeh, good enough” philosophy. I like the mac platform and the M1 Macbook Air is “good enough”. Sure, a USB-A port woul

For my personal use, I subscripe to the: “Eeh, good enough” philosophy. I like the mac platform and the M1 Macbook Air is “good enough”. Sure, a USB-A port would have been nice, or I could get a USB-C monitor, but the monitor I have is also good enough. For work I’d want need more ports and more RAM. How long the M1 will still be good enough is going to be interesting. I don’t want to generate unneeded electronic waste. My previous Macbook Pro lasted 7 years and would have been fine for a few more years, had OS upgrades been availble, along with a replacement screen.

simondotau 5y ago
There's no reason to think that an M1 Mac won't have similar longevity to the Intel-based Macs that came before it. Apple has taken a mature chassis design, inserted a mature computer architecture, running a mature operating system. There's just a few (likely resolvable) teething problems at points of intersection where these mature parts haven't previously been combined into one product. It's not like a first or second generation iPad or iPhone which, with the benefit of hindsight, really were more like a Minimum Viable Product. Faint echos of the 128k Macintosh, even. Catastrophically underdone hardware made viable by intense optimisation work.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  It’s really the CPU that concerns me. As Apple learn more about designing desktop CPUs they may add features or find mistakes that could give the M1 an unusual sort life span.
  - simondotau 5y ago
    Given how astonishingly robust these first gen products have been over the past nine months, it's hard to imagine anything like that. And such concerns would be limited to parts unique to the desktop CPUs, such as the PCI Express lanes. The rest of the SOC is extremely mature. Remember, the M1 is a derivative of the A14 which, along with its predecessors, has been running a fork of macOS for many years.

simondotau 5y ago

There's no reason to think that an M1 Mac won't have similar longevity to the Intel-based Macs that came before it. Apple has taken a mature chassis design, inserted a mature computer architecture, running a mature operating system. There's just a few (likely resolvable) teething problems at points of intersection where these mature parts haven't previously been combined into one product. It's not like a first or second generation iPad or iPhone which, with the benefit of hindsight, really were more like a Minimum Viable Product. Faint echos of the 128k Macintosh, even. Catastrophically underdone hardware made viable by intense optimisation work.

mrweasel 5y ago
It’s really the CPU that concerns me. As Apple learn more about designing desktop CPUs they may add features or find mistakes that could give the M1 an unusual sort life span.
- simondotau 5y ago
  Given how astonishingly robust these first gen products have been over the past nine months, it's hard to imagine anything like that. And such concerns would be limited to parts unique to the desktop CPUs, such as the PCI Express lanes. The rest of the SOC is extremely mature. Remember, the M1 is a derivative of the A14 which, along with its predecessors, has been running a fork of macOS for many years.