[nolok]

To be entirely fair, this is not just a macbook think and mostly a computer thing.

My 4 years old work windows laptop is a dell xp13 with an i7-8something cpu and is more than enough for anyone who was ok with that laptop when it came out.

Which is not to say the m2 isn't awesome, but since bazillion core cpu and nvme drives became commonplace there isn't much beside very heavy usage (gaming, ia, ... anything that require a top level gpu) that can stop an "old" computer, even a laptop.

[soylentcola]

That's what I've found as well. Only bothered to update my 10yo computer during 2020 work from home because I wanted to play around with some new stuff, had a bit of disposable income since I wasn't going anywhere, and it had been long enough that the performance jump would be nice in games/playing with graphics rendering stuff.

But I easily could've kept using it for another several years for all but the most demanding software and it was an i7-3770k/16gb/GTX980/various SSDs/HDDs.

Still, I understand that the form factor meant that portability wasn't an issue. The difference between a 10yo laptop and a modern one would've been much, much more noticeable.

[musicale]

10-12 years ago was a sea change for laptops. On the Apple side, the "Retina" MacBook pro was a drastic improvement over its predecessors because of the display as well as the fast flash storage, while preserving a thin(ish) form factor.

Unfortunately Apple followed up with some missteps like the awful "butterfly" keyboard, and the unpopular touch bar which initially removed a physical ESC key.

[edschofield]

> the unpopular touch bar which initially removed a physical ESC key.

I still have the scars: I no longer use a Caps Lock key, even on my newer computers — it’s permanently mapped to ESC…