The M2 seems incredible. It is the first thing in a long time that has tempted me to try out a Mac. The price is high, but is the performance worth it? 32GB of unified memory would be nice.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
> RAM usage on macs, particularly ARM, is completely different to Windows.
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.
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.
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.
It’s more that the system itself is designed with the assumption of a super fast SSD, so it keeps way more in both ram and swap longer because it can swap fast enough to not be bottlenecked.
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.
I don't believe I've yet seen any swapping on my 128G M2 studio but I also don't watch it like a hawk.
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.
> 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.
I'm about due to upgrade my 2017 Air, and it'll be to a 13" M2 Air. I would have done it already, but every time I price it out and see that they want to charge me $300 for 256 gigs of storage, I get a little offended and close the tab. As with every Apple purchase I make, it'll just come down to necessity, after the old one finally breaks. I'll hold my nose and pay the Apple tax, knowing that they think of me as a sucker, and they're probably right.
What may not be widely known is that going from 256GB -> 512GB on M2-based machines also gives the SSD a huge speed bump, because 512GB is made up of 2x256GB chips with dual channels. Apple uses a single chip for 256GB configurations as a cost saving measure :(
For some use cases, you're even better off upgrading the base model M2 Air to 512GB vs upgrading the RAM from 8 to 16GB for a similar cost. This is because swapping suddenly becomes twice as fast.
…your description makes it sound like an upgrade, when actually the 256 configuration is just incompetent, a failure (or sabotage?) compared to the m1 models that worked properly without the expensive “upgrade”
a failure (or sabotage?) compared to the m1 models that
worked properly without the expensive “upgrade”
I don't know the specifics, but the "lowest-capacity model has reduced performance because there's only a single chip instead of multiple chips being used in parallel" has been the case with SSDs for just about as long as they've been around and it is definitely not an Apple-specific thing.
My understanding is this: when the lowest-capacity model is only using a single chip, it's because the manufacturer is no longer making smaller sizes. For example, Apple's supplier(s) may not even be making 128GB NAND chips any more or may be discontinuing them soon, so they don't even have the option of using 128GB+128GB instead of 256GB.
One caveat! You must buy the M2 Pro (14" or larger, non-air) model to get 2 external screens.
We bought the wrong model to start with (13" M2 regular) and spent a week messing around with ours trying to get it to work with our 2 external displays when we rang Apple and they explained the difference between M2 Regular and M2 Pro. If you were buying one for yourself and budget was of no value, note the 13" and 14" are virtually the same physical size, and yet the design and technical capabilities of the 14" model are far and beyond ...
I wrote off the 13" as a loss and paid the difference myself, and now use it as a laptop at home :) Old design, yes, but it was such a nice piece of kit, no way I was gonna send it back to Apple!
I believe multiple screens are possible, even on the M1 MBA, you just need a docking station. Officially some don't support multiple screens, but there are mainstream solutions to this in the form of docking stations, just not sure why Apple doesn't even so much as hint that it's possible. It's a really unclear process!
It's possible only if you use a DisplayLink dock which requires using very specific dongles and installing specific third-party drivers. Our company already has 10-ish Dell Monitors with USB-C docks integrated, also Thunderbolt Dell docks, and neither of these work. There is no workaround.
Yep you get an extra 25% GPU and an extra 256 gigs of storage for 300$.
Dammit price discrimination. I realize buying the cheaper option frequently is the better option with Apple prices but they really know how to price in storage anxiety.
I bought the 13inch m2 air a few months back and it's awesome. Super sleek design and feel, awesome keyboard, no touchbar, and also magsafe. It's really good. I actually hate MacOS and use a framework for 60% of my day (my work machine), but I have to admit the m2 is just a pleasure. I've used Macs extensively for years because that's what most companies provide for software hires, but the m2 air was the first Mac I've ever purchased with my own money, and I don't regret it.
My understanding from benchmarks is that M1 and M2 have an excellent performance / energy consumption ratio. But in terms of raw performance, many Intel and AMD options can still deliver more. Another very interesting aspect of Apple's CPUs is that they offer a lot more performance than the competition for entry models. I cannot find anything that matches a Mac Mini M2. Sadly, Asahi does not support the M2 yet.
Regarding the Mac Studio, I had heard complaints about noisy fans. Can you comment on that?
Or if you're near an Apple Store, go in and ask if you can play around - if they'r not busy they'll often let you download stuff onto the demo machines, etc. They can easily reset them.
And then buy a refurbished one on the Apple Card to save a bit of cheddar™.
