[gr4vityWall]

Great work. I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years, like the Thinkpad T420 used to be. For different reasons, of course.

Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.

[Tuna-Fish]

> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years

I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.

The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.

[cromka]

Absolutely not.

SSD can be resoldered and that service is actually becoming popular and inexpensive. It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered. This will become a totally normal thing in a few years from now.

[netule]

Exactly, the entire appeal of Thinkpads is their ability to be repaired and upgraded by the end user. MacBooks are designed to be disposable.

[kalleboo]

I've yet to see a desktop SSD wear out from writes. The only dead desktop SSDs I've seen have been due to buggy firmware (early drives or that recent batch of Samsungs) or well before their wear level is down (cheap noname drives off amazon).

[gr4vityWall]

I have a 120GB SSD from 2013 that saw typical gaming/workstation usage since it was bought, and it still works fine.

I think repairability is important, but I don't think it will stop those laptops from being popular.

[agildehaus]

The keyboard has a much shorter lifespan than the SSD, and it's incredibly difficult/expensive to replace.

A single bad key or trace and any Apple laptop is basically toast. $800+ to have Apple replace the top cover.

Maybe an independent shop can do it cheaper, I don't know.

[mikae1]

And how easy is it to replace an aging battery?

[barnabee]

I still haven’t felt much urge to upgrade my 64gb MacBook Pro M1 Max.

The biggest issue I have with it is macOS Tahoe. Guess I really should be checking out Asahi on it!

[drooopy]

S**, I haven't felt much urge to upgrade from my 16GB M1 Air and I even use it to play some Windows games under Crossover. Quite possibly the best laptop I've ever owned.

[fl0ki]

It's really nice springing for 64G RAM and being increasingly glad you did for every year that passes. (And this year more than most)

[tmikaeld]

Before you do, note that battery time on Asahi is abysmal at best, so if you're on battery often I'd really reconsider.

[zozbot234]

Public information seems to describe the M4 GPU as mostly a performance-oriented refresh of the one from M3. M5 has brought bigger changes, not least neural/tensor accelerators on chip.

[haunter]

I just like the build quality and they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market. I bought one with 16GB RAM and a small black strip one the side of the screen (don’t bother me) for 230€ last week

[joe_mamba]

>they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market.

Where?! I just cheeked the used market in Austria and 2020 M1s go for at least 350 for the 8GB RAM models and 450 for the 16GB model. Your 230 for the 16gb one fells more like a rare exception but not them norm everywhere.

[monocasa]

Apparently there's changes to boot that are more or less understood, but require some heavy work to handle.

Basically starting with M4 you have a choice between starting with Apple's page table monitor already running in their guarded mode extension, or all apple extensions disabled on the CPU cores.