[mekster]

I think you got that wrong. Speed isn't a bottleneck anymore and you won't get much better experience. This is same as phones.

Soon, they'll have to be more creative for people to consider buying every few years.

I wish MBA started having ProMotion.

[microtonal]

> I think you got that wrong. Speed isn't a bottleneck anymore and you won't get much better experience. This is same as phones.

Well... I'm pretty sure that this is Hacker News. And for many developers, any performance improvement is great.

I first got an M1 Air, which was fantastic. Faster than my 3700X workstation for building Rust projects, while it was passively cooled and portable. Despite the awesome performance of the M1 Air, I upgraded to an M1 Pro when it came out. Moving from 4 performance + 4 efficiency cores to 8 performance + 2 efficiency cores was yet another awesome upgrade, giving again much quicker builds.

I work on machine learning stuff, so the AMX matrix co-processing unit in the M1 was really great for training small networks (sometimes convolution networks are still great for NLP + being able to train locally is nice for development). Then the M1 Pro/Max had double the AMX units, so it's again a great step forward.

Getting 20% YoY improvements will definitely make me very happy (and I bet many other developers).

[adrr]

Depends what you do. Compiling/Building or Video/Photo editing, the speed makes a big difference. M1s cut compile time on xcode build by half compared to I9s. Also docker builds are faster. Shaving off a few minutes here and there makes a big difference in ROI when you factor in the a year lifespan. Let's say it saves you 15 minutes a day. That is 62 hours a years.

[puranjay]

Small things add up. Freezing a track in Ableton, for instance, is substantially faster. This makes a huge difference to the workflow. When you're in a creative state of flow, stopping several seconds just for a track to freeze can take you completely out of your zone.

[maccard]

Completely agree here. Not only that, but I have faster compiles on my m1 mac than on my i7 mac, _and_ I can compile on batter on my M1 and still have it last all day.

[eitland]

I am a Linux user.

For me lagging on Windows is not only noticeable but also maddening.

Typically my old laptop with a 3 year old processor and half the memory is snappier running a mainstream distro with KDE Plasma than a brand new one running Windows.

[zimpenfish]

> Speed isn't a bottleneck anymore

stares in Mojang's poorly optimised Java

(Also, as other people have pointed out, it absolutely can be when compiling, using Photoshop, doing billions of Prolog inferences, etc.)

[bismuthcrystal]

>Soon, they'll have to be more creative for people to consider buying every few years.

No, they will just stop the "security" updates and force you to buy a new one.

[rdsubhas]

Higher speed at the same power usage translates to better battery life.

[sib]

I spend a lot of my (non-work) time doing photo editing using Adobe products while traveling.

I'll happily take a laptop that is 10x as fast as my current one...