[dgellow]

> Is a 3 year upgrade cycle for a MacBook Pro unreasonable?

For a personal machine? Yes that’s something I see as unreasonable, MacBook Pros have a very long lifespan. M1 laptop are still pretty awesome machines. For a business an upgrade every 3 years could make sense

[chorizo]

I still use a 16GB MacBook Air for all my development and simulation work (4P+4E+8GPU cores). Even wrote my own Metal gpu code to offload part of the simulation workflow. Modded the MacBook Air with thermal pads and a homemade cooling pad made from cardboard and a usb fan to limit throttling. I’ve run simulations for over 24 hours and kept temps below 90C successfully. A newer Mac mini would be better, but those are so expensive now.

[jonhohle]

I have an M1 Pro with 32GB of RAM and am hoping to make it through the rampocalypse. This may be my longest upgrade cycle, but fortunately the machine is fast enough for most things including LLMs.

[nerdjon]

I mean we are talking about the "Pro" machine. I think there is likely an argument to be made that if you are not doing a task that would genuinely improve with more powerful hardware do you actually need the Pro machine and you could instead go with a MacBook Air that you keep for far longer since your doing basic tasks. I do think there is still some ideas of the pro vs the Air that we are still stuck with from the Intel days.

Is that threshold for using a Pro machine 3 years, I don't know probably not for most people. My M3 Pro from almost 3 years ago is still running beautifully. I could make the argument that more power would benefit what I do with this machine without a doubt, is it worth the upgrade? I don't know, but I would be lying if I have not been thinking about it.

But I also think about the mentality I had when I bought this machine, and the mentality I had when I was looking at possible upgrades just a few weeks ago. Possibly paying more to overspec the machine compared to my current use case assuming that I want to continue to use it in 3 to 4 years.

I don't know if that calculation is necessary as cut as dry.

[thewebguyd]

> do you actually need the Pro machine and you could instead go with a MacBook Air that you keep for far longer since your doing basic tasks

This is probably the case for a lot of people, but Apple is smart with their lineup and there are several what I'd call "not pro" features that are gated by the MBP (and iPad pro) which is unfortunate.

Primarily, 120hz screen, SD card reader, HDMI port. None of those are really "pro" featuers, they're just basics I'd expect on any premium laptop.

That being said, 3 years is a tad on the aggressive side for an upgrade cycle for a laptop. I just upgraded my M1 last year, and this M4 Pro will easily last a year or two longer before I feel a compelling need to upgrade, outside of getting RAM constrained. Use case is photo+video production. So for me, a 5 year cycle would be about right.

But also depends on how you spec it out. If you are just buying the base model, then 3 years makes sense. If you spend extra to max it out, you'll be able to hold onto it for 6+ years.