6 ms·

I'm a career-long PC guy and had an excellent watercooled "Battlestation". I dipped my toe in with the M1 Mini, then an M1 Max MBP... and my battlestation now h

I'm a career-long PC guy and had an excellent watercooled "Battlestation". I dipped my toe in with the M1 Mini, then an M1 Max MBP... and my battlestation now has like 1/4" of dust on it. It helps that most of my work anymore is AWS Console or VSCode, which does just fine on either. 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 :)

jakear 3y ago
I'm happy as a clam on my 16gb M1 air. One hidden nice feature is how cheap and easy DIY repairs are. To date I've replaced my battery, monitor, and speakers (my lifestyle involves very rough handling of the machine), and everything about it was downright trivial, with cheap parts readily accessible and iFixit's walkthroughs very comprehensive.
- IndySun 3y ago
  > I've replaced my battery, monitor, and speakers... 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?
  - swores 3y ago
    Read the sentence after the one you quoted in their comment and you'll see they clearly weren't blaming the laptop.
  - piva00 3y ago
    > 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.
  - jakear 3y ago
    The speakers didn't need to be replaced, that was a misdiagnosis on my part. But the process was easy (note for the readers: take a dry toothbrush to your speaker grilles if they ever start to sound off). 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.
    - IndySun 3y ago
      Interesting about the battery cycle. We have four original M1 and have the same issue. Apparently fixed on the subsequent hardware. As a matter of interest, did you also buy AppleCare, and use it? I don't know where you bought, but in the UK we get, effectively, 6 years 'fit for purpose' with such purchases. So, despite our slamming and crushing and touring, no replacements were needed until beyond 6 years of abuse.
      - jakear 3y ago
        I didn't get AppleCare. Looks like it'd be $70/yr, so I'd be $210 down (plus $100 for screen repairs). The battery was $130 [1], and the screen was $170 [2]. Comes out to a bit cheaper to DIY, and I don't have to give up access to my device to random technicians for an undisclosed period of time. 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-2020-battery https://www.ifixit.com/products/macbook-air-13-a2337-late-20... [2]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/385103589564 https://www.ebay.com/itm/385103589564
        IndySun 3y ago
        I could have been clearer. Such UK retail purchases are guaranteed for 6 years. So the point I'm making was that it was beyond 6 years before any of my 20 x 2015 mbp's failed in any aspect. The 4 x M1s had poor battery cycle count, very early on, and subsequently became unreliable when not powered. I use them in the office. I should add there would be a significant investment hurdle in new peripherals to move to the 'new' usb-c standard, hence holding on to the 2015 model. It's been nothing short of the most versatile laptop I've ever worked with. But it's time is almost up.
Gigachad 3y ago
Also have a gaming desktop, and I just find myself using my macbook more. The macbook "feels" faster even though on benchmarks it's not. The mac just never misses a frame. No bugs, no random hangs, no noticeable delays doing anything.
- dagmx 3y ago
  The thing I find is, the arm Mac’s have way better feeling input. I don’t mean the hardware end but the latency from key stroke to appearing on screen. 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.
  - devinprater 3y ago
    Wow, that's good to know, because that's something I feel a lot when going from my Intel MBP to my AMD Windows laptop, especially important for accessibility (VoiceOver).
aetherspawn 3y ago
The 16gb configuration is an absolute powerhouse and seems to be fine ... RAM usage on macs, particularly ARM, is completely different to Windows.
- stephenhuey 3y ago
  My daily driver for the past couple of years has been the last Intel Macbook Pro with 32GB of RAM, but I just started using an M2 Mini in the last few weeks and with 16 GB of RAM it easily outperforms my older machine. A couple days ago, I realized I had a lot of stuff running without any signs of trouble at all, and I checked and was using only 14 GB of RAM with all of these apps open: 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.
  - smugma 3y ago
    A more extreme example—- I had an 8GB M1 Air that outperformed my 64GB Intel MBP that was less than a year old when I got the Air.
- stephenr 3y ago
  I've seen this a lot since the first m1 macs came out. While I'm not a hardware engineer my understanding is this: 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.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    > 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.
_ea1k 3y ago
Yeah, but I want to play with LLMs. I think at least 32GB is a must even for something like falcon-7b. For coding, I think ram gets a little overrated sometimes. Many projects would work fine on 16GB machines.

jakear 3y ago

I'm happy as a clam on my 16gb M1 air. One hidden nice feature is how cheap and easy DIY repairs are. To date I've replaced my battery, monitor, and speakers (my lifestyle involves very rough handling of the machine), and everything about it was downright trivial, with cheap parts readily accessible and iFixit's walkthroughs very comprehensive.

IndySun 3y ago
> I've replaced my battery, monitor, and speakers... 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?
- swores 3y ago
  Read the sentence after the one you quoted in their comment and you'll see they clearly weren't blaming the laptop.
- piva00 3y ago
  > 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.
- jakear 3y ago
  The speakers didn't need to be replaced, that was a misdiagnosis on my part. But the process was easy (note for the readers: take a dry toothbrush to your speaker grilles if they ever start to sound off). 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.
  - IndySun 3y ago
    Interesting about the battery cycle. We have four original M1 and have the same issue. Apparently fixed on the subsequent hardware. As a matter of interest, did you also buy AppleCare, and use it? I don't know where you bought, but in the UK we get, effectively, 6 years 'fit for purpose' with such purchases. So, despite our slamming and crushing and touring, no replacements were needed until beyond 6 years of abuse.
    - jakear 3y ago
      I didn't get AppleCare. Looks like it'd be $70/yr, so I'd be $210 down (plus $100 for screen repairs). The battery was $130 [1], and the screen was $170 [2]. Comes out to a bit cheaper to DIY, and I don't have to give up access to my device to random technicians for an undisclosed period of time. 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-2020-battery https://www.ifixit.com/products/macbook-air-13-a2337-late-20... [2]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/385103589564 https://www.ebay.com/itm/385103589564
      - IndySun 3y ago
        I could have been clearer. Such UK retail purchases are guaranteed for 6 years. So the point I'm making was that it was beyond 6 years before any of my 20 x 2015 mbp's failed in any aspect. The 4 x M1s had poor battery cycle count, very early on, and subsequently became unreliable when not powered. I use them in the office. I should add there would be a significant investment hurdle in new peripherals to move to the 'new' usb-c standard, hence holding on to the 2015 model. It's been nothing short of the most versatile laptop I've ever worked with. But it's time is almost up.

Gigachad 3y ago

Also have a gaming desktop, and I just find myself using my macbook more. The macbook "feels" faster even though on benchmarks it's not. The mac just never misses a frame. No bugs, no random hangs, no noticeable delays doing anything.

dagmx 3y ago
The thing I find is, the arm Mac’s have way better feeling input. I don’t mean the hardware end but the latency from key stroke to appearing on screen. 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.
- devinprater 3y ago
  Wow, that's good to know, because that's something I feel a lot when going from my Intel MBP to my AMD Windows laptop, especially important for accessibility (VoiceOver).

aetherspawn 3y ago

The 16gb configuration is an absolute powerhouse and seems to be fine ... RAM usage on macs, particularly ARM, is completely different to Windows.

stephenhuey 3y ago
My daily driver for the past couple of years has been the last Intel Macbook Pro with 32GB of RAM, but I just started using an M2 Mini in the last few weeks and with 16 GB of RAM it easily outperforms my older machine. A couple days ago, I realized I had a lot of stuff running without any signs of trouble at all, and I checked and was using only 14 GB of RAM with all of these apps open: 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.
- smugma 3y ago
  A more extreme example—- I had an 8GB M1 Air that outperformed my 64GB Intel MBP that was less than a year old when I got the Air.
stephenr 3y ago
I've seen this a lot since the first m1 macs came out. While I'm not a hardware engineer my understanding is this: 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.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  > 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.

_ea1k 3y ago

Yeah, but I want to play with LLMs. I think at least 32GB is a must even for something like falcon-7b. For coding, I think ram gets a little overrated sometimes. Many projects would work fine on 16GB machines.