[rewmie]

> Any reason for not upgrading?

Why is this sort of question always framed as if people have to provide a justification for not buying a new model, as if spending money on the new shiny without any reason is normal or desirable?

We live in a day and age where hardware bought a decade ago still packs enough punch to run most of today's software without any hiccup. Why would anyone waste their cash to replace something that works without having any compelling reason?

[MBCook]

Some people have experienced downsides you might want to know about.

For example as you passed 2016-2019, not only did you have the butterfly keyboard mess but each generation reportedly got hotter and thus louder.

My 2015 was quieter/cooler than my 2019.

So if you’re happy it may turn out that even though the newer machine has better performance it feels like a downgrade for other reasons.

(I don’t think that’s the case here)

[karolist]

2019 16" no longer used the butterfly keyboard, they have a physical Esc key and something Apple called "magic keyboard", really a scissor based mechanism that's really pleasant to type on and doesn't stop working with a tiny bit of dust under the cap.

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/butterfly-keyboard-vs-scisso...

[hot_gril]

2019 MBP mostly fixed the issues introduced in 2016. But lack of USB and HDMI was enough for me to pass on it. Also, the 2015 one is prettier.

[karolist]

Ah I miss the lit up Apple logo.

[hot_gril]

Yeah I would definitely miss that, as well as the shape.

[ksec]

The new magic keyboard or new scissor keyboard has a key travel of 1mm, for me I wouldn't describe it as really pleasant.

[ryandrake]

I'm rocking a 2017 MacBook Air and it's great--really the only down side is that Apple stopped supporting it in macOS past Monterey. Almost all of my past and present Apple hardware has long outlasted software support, which is my biggest complaint with the company.

[olliej]

It would depend on workload. On my old intel MacBook, I was looking at an hour or so to build, and it could only complete one build on the battery if that. Testing took a similarly absurd amount of time.

The M1 dropped both times by in the region of 30 minutes, could do multiple rounds on a single charge and didn't make a tonne of noise while doing so.

The amount of time savings you get from the improved CPU perf is quantifiable, and you can assign a monetary amount to that time.

Now if your use case is not performance (cpu, battery, etc) limited then of course there's no reason to upgrade, ever really, but that would apply to any laptop or pc not just Macs.

[fastball]

Because the productivity gains from upgrading can be quite large relative to the cost of upgrading, esp when you factor in the average salary in this community.

I spend 8-10 hours on my Macbook every day. The amount of time I've saved / productivity I've gained by things just running faster and by being more mobile (much longer battery life) is huge compared to the $2000 price tag.

Frugality is good but there are some things in life (depending on your personal circumstances) where it does in fact make sense to upgrade for clear benefits.

[JohnBooty]

Really depends on what you're doing.

I spend 8-10 hours a day coding on my 2018 MBP (web apps - Postgres and Rails or Python) but almost none of that is really CPU-bound in my case. The meat of my work, the actual coding and iteration, is not limited by the aging CPU.

The one thing that's painfully slow is rebuilding Docker images, but we don't do that too often. Less than once per week.

I actually am upgrading soon, but it is not going to make an amazing difference for me in terms of productivity in my current work.

[rewmie]

> Because the productivity gains from upgrading can be quite large relative to the cost of upgrading, esp when you factor in the average salary in this community.

You see, this is simply not true. At all. By far.

I have a cheap Intel laptop released 8-10 years ago. It shipped with 8GB of RAM and 4 cores. I bought it on a clearance sale for around $500. I use it still to this day to work on webapps, including launching half a dozen services with Docker Compose. The only time I experience any type of slowdown is when I launch IntelliJ.

I also have new kit, including a M2 MacBook.

There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2 laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop. Nothing. The only issue I have with my old laptop is battery life, and that's just because I don't bother replacing it.

Please do point out a single concrete example of "productivity gains" that I would get by spending $2k on a new laptop.

[georgespencer]

> There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2 laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop. Nothing.

[…]

> The only time I experience any type of slowdown is when I launch IntelliJ.

I can't tell if you're a serially dishonest interlocutor, or whether your fetish for making very emphatic generalisations with lots of intensifiers makes you seem like one, but once again this is very weak reasoning. You have yourself pointed out something you cannot do with your Intel laptop which you could with an upgrade.

> Please do point out a single concrete example of "productivity gains" that I would get by spending $2k on a new laptop.

You can run IntelliJ smoothly and have no battery life issues. (Literally from your own post… it's just so sad to see this utter lack of self awareness.)

[xxs]

The only downside would be struggling with 8GB, which should be upgradable just as well. 10y old would have a cd/dvd tray - that can be replaced by an SSD for 4TB of goodliness (SATA but still good enough).

My spouse has a 12y old laptop that has had pretty much everything (but the soldered GPU) upgraded - CPU, memory, HDD->SSD, CD-SSD, WiFi (to support 5GHz), keyboard (replaced), fan & heatsink, battery (replaced, might rebuild one w/ LG's 18650 MJ1). Unfortunately pre-Sandy Bridge memory is capped at 8GB, so it shows its age - still an amazing thing.

[karolist]

I love responses like this, we should think hard first why NOT to upgrade, instead of doing reverse.

[fastball]

Why do you have an M2 Macbook?

[latchkey]

It is an honest question.

For some background in my thinking, it is because today's announcement really focused on Intel users. My semi-educated guess is that Apple did a whole bunch of user studies and realized there are a lot of people out there, like the OP, who haven't upgraded yet, hence the focus. As a result, I'm genuinely curious why this person hasn't upgraded.

And for my own personal experience, the upgrade/switch from intel to m*, is night and day better ergonomics as a developer. It isn't just some shiny new toy or a waste in cash. For the same reason professional mechanics in F1 don't use shitty tools to work on their cars. Or tour de france racers aren't using 30lbs Huffy bikes.

TLDR: I don't give a f'ck if you don't happen to upgrade, that's your choice. I'm just curious about why.

[JohnBooty]

    For the same reason professional mechanics in F1 
    don't use shitty tools to work on their cars.

They also probably don't buy new wrenches every time new wrenches are released, if their current wrenches are completely sufficient and not holding them back in any way.

[latchkey]

> if their current wrenches are completely sufficient

That's a fantastically entirely subjective opinion.

[rewmie]

> That's a fantastically entirely subjective opinion.

That's the point: objectively, there is absolutely no concrete reason that justifies replacing a MacBook bought in the past 3 or 4 years with the M3 ones. None at all.

In fact, it boggles the mind how anyone could justify replacing any MacBook pro with a M3 one by claiming "pros don't use shitty tools", as if MacBook Pros packing an Intel core 7/M1/M2 suddenly became shitty laptops just because Apple released a new one.

[georgespencer]

> That's the point: objectively, there is absolutely no concrete reason that justifies replacing a MacBook bought in the past 3 or 4 years with the M3 ones. None at all.

Again, what you mean to say is that _you_ cannot think of a reason that would make _you_ upgrade from a 4 year old MacBook to a new M3 one.

> objectively

Do you understand that what you say is literally, definitionally, subjective? It's one thing to make primitive and clumsy generalisations, but quite another to be confusing subjectivity and objectivity.

> it boggles the mind

Starting to believe there isn't a lot of mind to boggle here…

> how anyone could justify replacing any MacBook pro with a M3 one by claiming "pros don't use shitty tools"

I haven't noticed anyone making this argument, but I know many people who upgrade their tools -- whether computers or otherwise -- to the latest and greatest whenever they can, because working faster and more efficiently is a concrete benefit, and it really would take an inestimable moron to, say, argue that late Intel-era MacBooks can do the same things that M-series MacBooks can.

[JohnBooty]

    I haven't noticed anyone making this argument

Yeah, you haven't read this thread.

Not that you missed anything of value. A previous poster, latchkey, quite literally made that argument:

    "the upgrade/switch from intel to m*, is night and day 
    better ergonomics as a developer. It isn't just some 
    shiny new toy or a waste in cash. For the same reason 
    professional mechanics in F1 don't use shitty tools 
    to work on their cars. Or tour de france racers aren't 
    using 30lbs Huffy bikes"

As to this assertion:

    it really would take an inestimable moron to, say, 
    argue that late Intel-era MacBooks can do the same
    things that M-series MacBooks can. 

In terms of raw performance and power efficiency, obviously the Apple Silicon laptops trounce the Intel-based Mac laptops.

But if you spend some time learning about our industry you'll realize that not all development workflows are identical, and not all have the same bottlenecks, and for many tasks an Intel-powered Mac is not a bottleneck. Surely you can understand that, or aspire to understand that.

I would certainly agree with a more generalized and reality-based version of what you and the other poster seem to be attempting to say: If your current hardware is bottlenecking you in any way, you should most definitely address that if at all possible. A hardware upgrade that unbottlenecks you and improves your developer ergonomics will almost certainly pay for itself in the long run. That is sane and profitable advice and something I've always done.

[georgespencer]

Sorry you're being downvoted for pointing out specious arguments.

[JohnBooty]

You... don't think that mechanics on a racing team are qualified to know if their current wrenches are sufficient?

[georgespencer]

I suspect that OP thinks, as I did, that you've constructed an inane straw man.

[JohnBooty]

User latchkey, the one you're agreeing with, is the one who very literally claimed that a developer using an Intel laptop is quite equivalent to an F1 mechanic using "shitty tools" or racing the Tour de France in a 30lb Huffy.

[paulryanrogers]

This isn't Huffy bikes vs F1 racers. Unless your workload is heavily CPU bound. And even then it's probably more like a 20yo F1 car vs a new one.

We also live on a finite planet. And then energy savings for many desk jockeys is unlikely to be worth it for a few decades more, if one considers the literal tons of material and energy in manufacturing.

[rewmie]

> And even then it's probably more like a 20yo F1 car vs a new one.

This thread is literally about the decision to buy an M3-based MacBook Pro to replace M2/M1/Intel MacBook Pros. We're talking about hardware launched in the past 4/3/2/1 years.

That's hardly "20yo" anything.

Also, you failed to provide any concrete, objective reason to buy a M3. None at all. Is it that hard to put together any argument to justify the move?

[paulryanrogers]

> That's hardly "20yo" anything.

My car comparison was trying to propose an alternative metaphor since comparing a top-of-the-line racing car to a child's bicycle struck me as absurdly out of proportion. Cars are generally maintained and kept in service longer than computers, so I picked 20y out of thin air.

> Also, you failed to provide any concrete, objective reason to buy a M3. None at all. Is it that hard to put together any argument to justify the move?

My point is for most people there is no justification to move. Unless one has a device beyond repair, so old its software cannot be kept up-to-date, or the very rare need for the latest performance then stick with what you have.

[latchkey]

That's totally not my experience at all.

[VancouverMan]

I've been holding off on upgrading some older Intel Mac minis I have while waiting for the memory situation to improve, but so far it hasn't.

Ideally, I'd consolidate these older systems into one new Mac mini, or even a Mac Studio.

I'd like at least 64 GB of memory, at a reasonable price.

The latest Mac mini maxes out at only 32 GB of RAM, if I'm remembering it right.

I think the latest low-end Mac Studio could be upgraded to 64 GB of memory, but the last time I priced it, this upgrade cost more than I'd been expecting. It also put the overall cost above what I'd prefer to pay.

While I'd like to keep using a Mac, it's looking more and more like I'd be better off just building a PC, where I could likely get comparable enough processing performance, but far more memory (and storage) at a lower cost.

[threeseed]

> My semi-educated guess is that Apple did a whole bunch of user studies and realized there are a lot of people out there

Apple has telemetry from macOS. So they knew exactly what percentage of users are still on Intel Macs.

And it's low-hanging fruit to go after them then try and convince existing Windows users.

[latchkey]

Telemetry doesn't answer the important "why" question.

[coin]

> better ergonomics

The newer 16 inch MacBook Pros are half a pound heavier than the Intel one.

[latchkey]

I'm weird, I sit on the floor on a cushion with my back against a wall. I have a folding table over my lap that the laptop sits on. The keyboard actually works unlike my old Intel ones with the crappy butterfly. I hardly travel these days, but throwing it in a backpack isn't the end of the world.

That said, I was actually thinking ergonomics in terms of performance of development. The thing is so fast that commands complete faster than I can deal with them. My IDE can keep up with me. I can run a ton of apps and it doesn't slow down or glitch. It doesn't get nearly as hot and there is rarely fan noise. The screen is higher quality. The speakers sound better. Magsafe is back! The button for my fingerprint works very well. No more stupid touch bar. Function keys!

I could keep going...

[andrewprock]

The honest reason is that there is no practical reason to upgrade. The computer works, and despite the various FUD you might read, the attack surface for external attacks is quite small for personal computers.

That said, if anyone would like to send me $4000, I will absolutely upgrade to a new 14" Macbook in a heartbeat.

[josephcsible]

Because hardware vendors don't provide security updates forever, and they refuse to open-source enough of their code that other people can do it for them.

[georgespencer]

> Why is this sort of question always framed as […]

OP didn't frame it any way at all as far as I can tell, but either way it seems like an entirely reasonable question to ask of someone on a forum which is largely comprised of computer and programming enthusiasts who has not upgraded their daily driver for nearly a decade.

> as if spending money on the new shiny without any reason is normal or desirable?

Every single person who spends their money on "the new shiny" has a reason. You may not find the reason edifying, but that's irrelevant to your stated argument.

> Why would anyone waste their cash to replace something that works without having any compelling reason?

As you were doubtless aware when you specifically constructed a straw man argument predicated on an entirely false premise and laden with your own subjective judgements about "waste" and things that "work" and "compelling" reasons, nobody does this.

I suspect what you really mean is that you believe people upgrade their machines without what _you_ consider to be a good reason. You think people are too quick to upgrade when their machine isn't the very latest, or when it's got a dent, or when it's slowing down a little.

If you'd written what you really believe -- that people should not upgrade as rapidly as they do -- you'd probably have pulled on the thread for a further 0.02s and realised that everyone has different values and priorities, and you likely "waste money" in others' eyes across multiple line items of your annual budget. So it's terrific luck, really, that the internet's various competing interpretations of a "compelling reason" can't stop you from spending your money however you'd like.

[rewmie]

> (..) it seems like an entirely reasonable question to ask of someone on a forum which is largely comprised of computer and programming enthusiasts who has not upgraded their daily driver for nearly a decade.

Are professionals expected to mindlessly throw money around at the new shiny without having absolutely no compelling reason to do so?

I think my post was rather straight-forward: people buy things only when they feel there is a clear upside to it. If you made that purchase 2 or 3 or 4 years ago, you need a very good reason to just throw it away and buy a new replacement. You need to at least make a valid case for it, otherwise you are just wasting your hard-earned money for nothing at all.

> Every single person who spends their money on "the new shiny" has a reason.

Why was OP framing that question on whether no reason was needed then, and instead people had to justify why weren't they wasting their money on the new shiny? Why is being new and shiny such a strong rationale that the onus of not buying is placed on not buying?

These are simple questions. In fact, all it would take is provide a single compelling reason why it would be a good idea to waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro when you already own a M2/M1 Macbook Pro, or even a late 2010s Macbook Pro. Hell, why on earth would you even waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro if you already have a M2 Macbook Air?

If you cannot answer this question, why would it be anything than absolutely foolish to pretend that people should justify not buying a M3?

[georgespencer]

> Are professionals expected to mindlessly throw money around at the new shiny without having absolutely no compelling reason to do so?

Once again you're loading an incredibly tawdry straw man argument here with your own inane value judgements. The only difference is that this time you've undermined your argument with a typo: it's otherwise as self-evidently vacuous as your original comment.

Just look at this epistemological nightmare you enumerated with apparent sincerity:

> why on earth would you even waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro if you already have a M2 Macbook Air? If you cannot answer this question, why would it be anything than absolutely foolish to pretend that people should justify not buying a M3?

Putting aside haplography (I guess if your argument is just begging the question a dozen times it gets hard to write coherently), it seems that you're literally incapable of considering that other people have fundamentally different values and priorities to you.

Read this sentence you wrote:

> In fact, all it would take is provide a single compelling reason why it would be a good idea to waste money on a M3 Macbook Pro when you already own a M2/M1 Macbook Pro, or even a late 2010s Macbook Pro

It is axiomatic that there can be no "compelling reason why it would be a good idea [sic]" to "waste" money on an M3 MacBook Pro. It's a waste of money, so there cannot be a good reason. What you presumably intend to write is: "I cannot think of a single compelling reason for a person to upgrade to an M3 MacBook Pro if they already own an M2, M1, or late-2010s MacBook Pro."

And that's it. You can't think of a reason. People in this thread have given you both examples of reasons to upgrade, and clear-eyed explanations of why your inability to suspend your disbelief in this area is not the incisive general argument you think it is.

Much of the work I personally do will be made significantly faster by upgrading from the M1 to the M3 Max, which I will upgrade to. I upgraded to the M1 from an Intel Core i9.

You might think that this is a compelling reason -- wanting one's work to be faster and more efficient. You might not. It doesn't matter. It's a good enough reason for me to upgrade, and that's the rub. Everyone has a reason to upgrade, you just disagree with how compelling those reasons are. And again, the great news for everyone else is that your handwringing serves only to make you seem enormously judgemental and narrow-minded. You remain free to spend your money as you wish.

[JCharante]

They mentioned their coworker and most companies have upgrade policies. Just fill in a form every x years and you get a shiny new laptop (and depending on where you work, you’ll get to keep your old one as a gift)

[rewmie]

> They mentioned their coworker and most companies have upgrade policies.

Upgrade policies aren't driven by new requirements, or performance improvements. Some companies have mandatory hardware replacement policies which mostly serve to allow their tech support staff to standardized on a small number of devices. Getting a M3 MacBook Pro replacement just because your employer doesn't want to maintain an Intel MacBook Pro is hardly indicative that a M3 is worth spending money on, let alone replace a M2 or even M1 MacBook Pro.

[HumblyTossed]

Because capitalism, that’s why. Capitalists have convinced people it is a moral imperative to continue to spend constantly.

[astrange]

The mode of production doesn't affect the fact that you have to do production. If nobody's continually demanding laptops from the laptop maker, they will stop making laptops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift

[ndriscoll]

If people don't need new laptops because their current ones already do everything they need, then reducing laptop production is good. Fewer resources and less pollution spent on things people don't need.

[astrange]

Not if it meant there are none when they do need a replacement.

Similarly, buying cheap used cars only works because someone else bought them new.

[irusensei]

> sir this is a wendy's

[threeseed]

I am sure that 16yo girl buying an iPhone is thoughtfully postulating about the juxtaposition of morality and capitalism.

And not because it's shiny, fun and lets her socialise with her friends.

[Dylan16807]

> thoughtfully postulating about the juxtaposition of morality and capitalism

I don't know how you managed to read the comment you responded to as suggesting that.