When the M1 MacBooks dropped, they looked amazing and I picked one up in 2021. It’s 2025 now, so it’s fairly typical of me to be upgrading. It felt a little unnecessary since my M1 was: extremely perfectly fine. It’s an excellent machine really and it will continue to be for it’s next owner for surely many, many years. I’m just a privileged dude and we have a work budget for these things.
I was convinced by Marques. His points are:
- The raw perf numbers are ~2✕ — video work being especially improved
- It comes in black and it’s awesome
- It has the nano-texture display option and it’s awesome
- Thunderbolt 5 is nuts fast
- It can get brighter
I’m on board for all that.
I actually notched my specs down from what I normally do.
- I went M4 Pro not M4 Max.
- I went with 2 TB drive down from 4 TB (I don’t even use 1)
- I went with 48 GB RAM down from 64 GB RAM
It’s wild that it’s like a $2,500 difference between a nicely specced laptop and a maxed out laptop. It will still easily outperform the old machine.
I figure 95% of my usage is web devvin’ and web browsin’ so a maxed machine just does very little for me.
I also figure that the “savings” between the notching down and the gift card I’ll get from sending the M1 back to Apple (via the Trade In program) that’ll make replacing my actual main machine (a Mac Studio) a lot more palatable in a year or two. ????