If I were to guess, it's likely that sales projections are down right now, and they're hoping by keeping the existing line a bit longer, new buyer numbers will be larger in the spring. Most people don't upgrade every generation and a lot of people are still running M1/M2 devices.
I would also speculate that there may be some growing pains for the n2 production from TSMC, and/or a desire to get there in the AZ fab production before launch to avoid tariffs hitting their bottom line. They'd rather pay 12-20% more for just the CPU than eat large tariffs on the full cost. I don't think they'd be able to significantly raise prices further based on tariffs, like some other companies with smaller margins are forced to do, on order to be competitive.
Poorly, mine still hasn't learned, after 3 years, that it spends 99% of its time connected to a Thunderbolt charging monitor. And regularly discharges itself over the weekend because it failed to fall asleep properly.
Does macos have sleep problems these days as well? I had the impression it's usually pucca due to hardware-software vertical integration in apple land.
Mine does, yep. After almost every long weekend the battery is dead if I don't shut it down entirely. It's probably because it's a laptop that stays always closed, connected to a Thunderbolt monitor, and on/off are done via the monitor, so sometimes something gets mixed up, but even then it's pretty bad.
I like how it's normal in the Apple ecosystem to pay 11€ yearly subscription for extremely basic features that come by default, for free, on most other laptop vendor/OS combos.
Don't forget SSD degradation since it's not a user replaceable part and you can't do true external boots (it copies to the internal storage). That's my biggest worry.
SSDs aren't exactly known for high failure rates, especially if you're staying within their expected endurance. Sure, you can kill one by running fluid simulations of one, but any sane use case doesn't even come close to what you'd need to kill one with any decent level of expected endurance.
The only ones I've heard of dying are from brands I'd never trust in the first place, or from bad firmware, and my impression is that it's usually the controller dying, and with the controller being part of the chip itself on Apple Silicon, it's not gonna die without taking the rest of the machine with it, and for the most part, they just aren't.
The M1 is old enough that we'd know about it if the faliure rate was abnormally high.
> Sure, you can kill one by running fluid simulations of one, but any sane use case doesn't even come close to what you'd need to kill one with any decent level of expected endurance.
If fluid simulations are included in your definition of serious work, then you can't do serious work on any machine with less than at least 128 GB of RAM, probably more, be it Windows, Linux or Mac. Your SSD will be killed by excessive writes no matter the OS or what specific hardware you've chosen. You can probably get enough RAM on some of the highest end Macs to not have to swap to disk for fluid simulation of any decent size, although I haven't looked into that. 128+ GB of RAM is a big ask no matter your platform.
No widespread failures have been reported on M1s. SSDs often exceed their expected lifespan, especially when spec’d generously. But, monitoring tools can misreport, so be cautious drawing conclusions from early TBW readings.
So, when choosing a Mac, opt for higher RAM and SSD capacity to reduce swap pressure and spread wear.
If you are cautious, monitor TBW, but interpret the data with healthy skepticism.
I upgraded from an M1 to an M4 MBP recently and although the performance gains were mostly incremental, the matte screen (fucking finally Apple) is really nice and a good reason to upgrade if you ever plan on using it in a brightly-lit area. It’s a must-have.
I switch to 45" UWQHD myself.. slightly taller with bigger pixels for work and enjoy it immensely. I've had a few issues where my vision got dramatically worse a couple years ago so even my 32" 1440p was a struggle at times.
With this display, it's similar to two 4:3 aspect displays in my typical use... my IDE or Code pinned on one side, my browser or another app on the right.
Hmm... I guess someone thought that I was boasting about my setup.
It's really not a big deal. I know quite a few people that have much nicer rigs; especially gamers.
I was really just saying that the MPB has a processor that still rocks, several years later, but the large screen that I use (which is actually not as impressive as some of the gaming screens), has me spoiled, and using a laptop screen feels cramped.
Due to the limitations of MacOS, my M1 MacBook pro is pretty much exclusively a thin client (software dev, gaming) and I see no reason to upgrade it - unless battery degradation warrants it.
It's fantastic as a thin client - though it's a bit annoying carrying around a mini PC with me when I travel.
Regardless of the CPU, the time to upgrade every year is long gone, even without taking M chip series into consideration.
Most of my home stuff is from around 2010, my work laptop is from 2021, and neither at home, nor at work, do I need more programming power.
I have enough cores, RAM, disk space, and graphic cards, to still code whatever I feel like locally, with exception of ray tracing or latest AI models, neither of which are that relevant to my computing activities.
So I will keep using them until they die, or there is no hope left of the battery and need to acquire a new one to take outside the house.
Really, they could probably get away with selling M4 devices for another couple cycles. As far as performance is concerned, even going back to the M1, the only group feeling inadequacies large enough to make upgrading a “must” are those whose needs sit within spitting distance of cusp of consumer/prosumer computing. Battery life is still industry leading with only a handful of competitors just recently being able to claim similar real world numbers (thanks mostly to Lunar Lake, which isn’t available for many models and comes at the cost of some performance).
I’ve used both M1 Max and M4 Max machines extensively and while the latter is a good deal faster, it’s only really noticeable with longer sustained tasks and particularly large projects. The high-RAM variants of M1 models in particular should continue to be quite servicable for some time to come.
You should also consider liking Linux, or wanting to support the right to repair movement. Or disliking Apple for whatever reason, such as their generally very closed nature. My biggest criterion for buying consumer electronics is being able to replace the software easily, followed by being able to replace the hardware easily. Nothing else is particularly important.
Linux support is not industry leading, nor presence of Ethernet port. Sadly others are following in lack of ports as I can't find a new Thinkpad that has both an Ethernet port and an SD slot.
What do you need these ports for, that you can't get with a modern USB-connected dock? It can't be a matter of portability since by and large laptops with Ethernet and SD-card I/O are going to be bulky, not-really-portable "desktop replacement" products anyway.
My current Thinkpad has both and is very portable (14", 1.5 kg)
The Ethernet port is extremely useful in the field or in the lab to connect to various devices. The SD prt is useful for imaging embedded devices, or for getting pictures off my camera.
OS is still pretty terrible. From janky kid focused UX, to trying to hide errors and information from you (e.g. you try extending your screen to an iPad, and it just says it failed. No information whatsoever about why or what you could do, just fuck you), to basic features missing (did you know you can't have a different scroll direction between scroll button and touchpad? There are two toggles in two menus, but they just change each other).
The OS is one of the important part of the experience of using a computer. So it makes sense to filter first on what kind of OS matches what you want. I run a M2 MBP and I wouldn't use it if I couldn't run linux. But in terms of hardware it's a truly great machine. The first laptop where I'm satisfied by the power. M4 doesn't have linux support(yet).
I don't see how that is a relevant distinction. Most PC and laptops have no Linux support if you view it like that. The point is Linux runs great on the ones it's available for.
Apple seems to overlook how much timing matters for Mac sales in academia. Macs—especially MacBooks—absolutely dominate among professors (I’d guess ~90% in my department).
The academic fiscal year often ends in Aug/Sep, and new faculty usually get a “technology fund” for buying their first computer. A lot of us use that to get the latest Mac. Historically, Apple’s October refresh was just late enough to miss that budget window, but people would still wait a month or two for the new models.
If they push announcements even further (as the article suggests—early 2026), it’s a different story. New hires can’t wait half a year with no laptop, so they’ll just buy whatever’s top-of-the-line right now. For research folks who need GPU power, that could easily mean a 5090-based laptop instead of a Mac.
Apple has pretty sophisticated modeling for their sales cycle so I assume that it they aren't simply looking at the academic lifecycle.
Professors are a very small % of the education market, most of their sales come from high school and college students and during back to school season.
What about university students? They also start their classes in September, and while they have no "budgeting deadline", they still need to buy some computer around that time.
interestingly, i have a teen that will be heading off to college in a couple years. My plan is to send him off to the dorm with a Macbook and not his gaming rig heh. Although, inevitably, it will be up to him to decide how to make the best use of his time..
One of my first jobs was working for my university while attending. We had a small student lead team of people that did IT work for other students, and faculty. We'd fix or at least attempt to fix any software issue or hardware issue that we feasibly could with the tools we had available.
In my unsolicited advice, I recommend your son take both devices. I'll spare you my countless war stories, but I can confidently say I have seen many students up a creek without a paddle at some of the most unfortunate times.
Not the original commenter, but if I was that parent, I’d explain to my kid the amount of money I would be contributing towards their education and expenses if they bring it…and if the don’t bring it. They can make the educated choice then.
That seems to me to be the least likely outcome of that decision.
A common outcome would seem to be a year spent bombing in their classes because they can’t separate themselves from some stupid game to study while accumulating $10-20k in student debt.
I think Apple has historically used the college student market to clear out their remaining stock of last year’s MacBooks. Otherwise why release the new models just after classes have started?
Considering a base MBA M4 can be had for $899 (and it's a monster) and a base MBP is about 80% more, I can’t imagine the bulk of freshman buyers who have so many things to buy just to go to university for their first year would opt to spend an extra $650 on an MPB.
I think you might be surprised at the extent to which iPad sales cannibalize MacBook sales in the current crop of undergrads, especially ones who don't anticipate having to write papers or code. An iPad Air will do everything many college students need at half the price and size and weight, and it can have a pen, which the MacBook can't. When you do get a surprise assignment that the iPad can't do, there are always lab computers, and many universities will loan out laptops upon request.
As someone who's worked at a (small) university for a decade and a half, IME most of the ones who get Mac laptops get the Air. This has been especially true since the Apple Silicon transition, as the chip in the Air is still damn good.
I think it might just be the other way around, if they front-loaded a lot of inventory shipments before tariffs were due to hit they might be loaded with unusually high inventory levels that needs shifting and will be hard to do so at price if a new model is out.
Add to this the recent economic uncertainty and prospective buyers might just have been holding up purchases (thus further adding to inventory if they already front-loaded before tariffs).
As for people buying powerful machines that could be worth going to a 5090 based machine instead, they're probably a fairly small part of the Mac purchaser market in the big picture.
Like I said, most people want something that's the "latest"; M4 is already one year old.
wrt the second part of your comment: Academics care about speed, RAM, battery life, the ability to run the latest AI models at a decent speed (M4 is still relatively slow).
Most of academics write papers, they care about none of those things.
Unless you work on AI, which most don't, then you don't care that the M4 is a little slow for that purpose. The academics who are working on large dataset frequently have access to cluster computers or large servers running in the university datacenter... or frequently sits under their desk, because they have trust issues.
citation needed. AFAICT, sales data says that "most people" want a bargin and would prefer $200 off than 10% faster newest etc... Most people buy 1 or 2 generations old.
I would venture a guess that 99% of academics could run whatever workloads they have on something half as powerful as an M1 Mac. Very few need or want to run cutting edge LLM models on their laptop.
It's tough for me to justify upgrading an M1 device to an M4 device for the AI performance improvement, going from an M4 to an M5 for a small segment of the user base is not moving the needle enough to sway something like this.
Anyone really geeked about AI performance to the level of not picking something because of it (be it price or performance) should not be looking at a laptop anyways.
There are Windows laptops with faster GPUs. Being Nvidia certainly helps with software support.
Are they comparable? No way. Laptops with x86 CPUs and discrete GPUs need a lot of power and dissipate a lot of heat. This makes them larger, heavier, louder, and with terrible battery life. If they are gamer laptops, they also look like toys.
Unless you compare base models (entry level MacBooks are very price competitive, but then upgrades are very expensive), they blow Apple devices on performance and price/performance. An HP Omen or Asus ROG Zephyrus with 1-2TB SSD, 32-64GB RAM, powerful CPU, and a proper NVIDIA 4/5070-5080 (which is better at gaming and AI than M chips, or if you need "unified memory" for bigger AI models, AMD APUs are pretty good) for less than a similar memory and disk (let alone performance in most tasks) MacBook.
Battery life is worse though. Depending on the use (3-4h gaming, 7-8h regular use) still plenty though.
How universities have changed, almost 40 years ago we cared to have access at a computer, any at all.
I have had classmates that did the entire 5 year engineering degree in Software Engineering, using the computer labs computers, the modern ones running a mix of Windows 95 and Red-Hat dual booting, or the more ancient MS-DOS/Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and terminals to the DG/UX server.
As someone who hangs around with academics outside the comp sci field regularly they mostly seem to have old MacBooks which are falling to bits. Not sure I’ve even seen an ARM one yet. They mostly don’t need a lot of juice and don’t want anyone changing anything on it. Also I don’t think I’ve seen anything more than a sneer on AI.
The advantage is all of that legacy software that some process relies on and hasn't been meaningfully updated in 10+ years and won't be ported over to the ARM processors that you damned kids are running on because back in my day we paid for one copy of x86 software and that got us through 10 winters, dammit.
I do. Wanted a discrete GPU and ability to run all the games I love on the go, including those that may want a little bit of GPU performance and don't have a macOS port. Can't realistically do this on non-x86.
The person you responded to has an AMD framework laptop, which means they can do 96 of ram if they want (some users report success with 128GB). The laptop you linked only goes up to 16GB of ram.
That laptop only has 256GB of storage whereas you can throw a 4TB m.2 ssd into the AMD framework if you want.
That laptop only has 2 USB type-c and they're both only 5Gbps (and one legacy USB port). The AMD 7040 framework has 2 USB4 40Gbps ports and 2 regular USB type-c 3.2 ports (and then the whole modular card system in front of those ports).
That laptop looks genuinely nice. With a few small tweaks I'd consider it. Though, in terms of personal preference I wouldn't want to do a chromebook again because of the annoyance of having to rebind the keys on every operating system I install (the pixelbook had the caps lock key bound to super and IIRC F11 was bound to something that doesn't exist on normal keyboards), and I'll never buy an oled screen for/in a computer.
What's the difference between "napping" and sleeping? Once you truly power down all the I/O they should perform about the same. A tablet with all the radios powered down (via airplane mode if necessary) can "nap" for a long time, rivaling any laptop with its proper "sleep".
Why is that? I read something about both Intel and AMD stopping a certain "level" of suspend, I didn't know there was an issue or design shortcoming that affected only AMD.
Not certain, but it appears the intel pretends it doesn’t support it but the hardware is still there, so Linux can still use it. But the newer AMD truly doesn’t.
I would love it if Apple just fully embraced Asahi, dedicated resources to it. Imagine 'you can now run either macOS or Linux on your Mac, or both, your choice' - not an an Apple subsystem for Linux, actual Linux, and all peripherals working right across the line.
Seems like as impressive as the work & project is, it's always going to be struggling to play catch-up: you're not happy with the extent of M1 implementation, my understanding is M3/M4 just barely work headlessly.
What I’d most like in future MacBooks is the continuation of increases in memory size and bandwidth.
Apple has carved out a niche for itself in the local LLM space, yet it continues to overcharge for RAM and under-deliver in terms of bandwidth.
I have no hopes that Apple will decrease its prices, particularly on top-of-the-line models like those with 128 GB of memory and above.
Yet I certainly believe that it can deliver even more RAM and, in particular, memory bandwidth. Apple clearly offers much more VRAM than consumer NVIDIA GPUs, but Macs are still behind in terms of memory bandwidth and, relatedly, overall performance.
It would be silly of Apple not to jump at the opportunity to eat even more of NVIDIA’s market share among the general public.
I got M1 Max with 64GB and 32 core GPU fro $1500 refurbished with zero cycle battery on 100%. As most companies doing refresh/write-off after 3 years 2025 is really a year where you can get a beast of machine for the money. I also have M4 Max for work and differences are only on really heavy tasks but for 3X less money I guess M1 Max is still good deal. This delay also means that M2/M3 ones will be good buy next year as well.
That's what I have too. I upgraded about 9 months ago from an M1 Max 32 GiB + 1 TiB SSD to 64 GiB + 4 TiB SSD, and donated the old one to a FOSS developer in Europe who can now support macOS. The "new" one is used, but had about 15 cycles on it and 99% battery health... like it was in someone's closet for 3 years.
It's a total waste of money paying zillions for tiny improvements.
There goes the hopes of those expecting M5 to finally sort out the fate of Intel Mac Pro.
From my point of view they have to accept if they want a desktop like experience, only PCs with Windows/Linux/BSD are left standing as composable workstations.
No they aren't, because you forgot the little detail not every kind of PCIe card is supported, like those that folks using graphical workstations for CAD/CAM rendering, or those in VFX, might think of using.
Also not all kinds of high-speed network, or real time audio cards are supported.
Stuffing a Studio into a desktop case full of air, and limited set of supported PCIe cards, is a slap into the face of the hardcore users that still hope Apple cares about workstations.
As long as they keep overcharging for RAM and storage they can delay the M5 indefinitely. It’s a joke what it costs to put 64gb or 128gb in those things. Yes it’s fast ram but the markup is extreme.
Welcome to the world where Tim Cook has to present gold offerings to the US president and spend most of his time navigating massive new taxes on imports the company relies on.
Would be nice to do that for OS releases too. I feel like the yearly macOS releases are too ambitious at this point, and Apple's software quality is suffering. 2-3 year cycles would be much more sustainable. Hardware is good enough now to not need a new release ever year.
Refresh cadence has little to do with sustainability.
Consider cars: manufactures come out with new ones each year with marginally differences. Is that somehow unsustainable and they should instead keep manufacturing an old design for years? Does that mean once the 2026 model starts manufactuing you go dump your 2025?
It makes more sense to iteratively improve your design and stop manufacturing old things if you can manufacture something better.
The real sustainability argument is about support length (which apple does well), and repairability (which apples does ). Changing to a 3 hear cycle is orthogonal to both of these.
Who's forcing you to get every upgrade every year?
The yearly releases make a lot of sense for everybody, because then you can upgrade on your own schedule, instead of delaying the upgrade because the product was released a full 2 years ago, at a time your older one is on its last breath.
In fact, yearly releases are then also more sustainable, too, since the purchasing would be spread out to each year (on an as-needed basis), instead of having a month-long cycle every 3 years, necessitating the extra infrastructure all along the way (from the stores to manufacturing to shipping).
For Apple computers, the last breath comes almost a decade after they were built.
If you wait until it dies, then you will want to get what's available at that time, but, if you plan from the start, you'll have a lot of flexibility with these machines.
My MBP is the same age as my Thinkpad, and looks much nicer.
Yeah, Apple's products are pretty long lived in my experience.
My '07 macbook lasted till 2020. It was almost as tough as any thinkpad I've had. My x220t, 2008ish, is still going. Both did damage to the hoods of a few cars.
Last I heard, my iPod nano from 20+ years ago is still being used daily. Only other portable music player I've had last that long was a Walkman.
I've got friends with old ass powerBooks that still get used frequently.
5+ years for home users and systems administrators. I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Air, it's fine for everything I need. The only issue is, as other points out, the external monitor issue. Only one monitor, and certainly no daisy chaining of displays.
My M1 Pro turns 5 pretty soon and I don’t even have the tinge of an itch to upgrade. Which maybe isn’t great for Apple since Nvidia ended up getting my $1000 this year.
Apple is in such an interesting position right now. Having made the decision for whatever reason to go with a unified memory architecture, they are now almost unique in terms of being able to offer super power efficient laptops with very large GPU memory. If they were to just double the memory bandwidth and do nothing else they could break away as a preferred way to run especially inference but maybe even training for small LLM models. Given the bottlenecks on availability and pricing of nVidia cards we are already toying with the idea of building a small local LLM stack based on Macs for this reason. If Apple made it more compelling we could easily go from toying with it to seriously considering it.
It's disappointing to hear they are delaying this year's Macbooks because I was really hoping to see some improvements like this specifically targeted at running local LLMs.
The edge is, "it actually works". Eg: I just set the device to "mps" in PyTorch, everything is using the GPU.Until nVidia gets monopoly treatment for CUDA and are forced to open their software stack, Metal is the next best thing as far as I can tell.
Not to mention, I have no faith that these laptops won't thermally throttle - my fan only spins up when I'm running truly demanding workloads, the rest of the time the laptop might as well be fanless.
I'm writing this on a 16GB M1 MacBook Air, but I've gotten disillusioned with macOS and Macs.
When everything is done in a browser, the biggest differentiator on a laptop would be monitor and peripheral support, and Apple is behind the competition.
macOS has no support for daisy-chaining with DP MST, no support for a second monitor (new to M1, the 2020 Intel model does support dual external monitors), no way to turn-off antialiasing, limited ports, RAM and storage options, limited repair and expansion options.
Why exactly do we even still use macOS anyways?
Even the cheapest Chromebook laptops have better monitor support and better expandability, at 1/10th the cost.
No support for MST daisy chaining is unfortunate, but not really a dealbreaker since most users spending a lot of time at a desk are using either a standalone dock (e.g. CalDigit TS4) or a monitor that has a dock built in (like Dell’s U2724DE) which also achieves one-cable multimonitor (+charging). The limit on number of monitors isn’t an issue on the newer low end models.
On the hardware side of things, the big differentiators are build quality and battery life. To get either as good as is found on MacBooks you’re likely to be spending about as much in the x86 world. Those dirt cheap Chromebooks in particular are miserable to use.
MST makes getting a dock cheaper. It's very cheap to get a hub or dock that can do two or even three monitors over MST, with power pass through and a few extra USB ports for a mouse and keyboard or printer. Like $30-$50. Maybe you spend another $50 for a decent extra charger to go with it.
On Mac you basically HAVE to get an expensive $200+ TB dock to get a one cable multi-mon setup.
The new M4 MBAs can still only do two external screens at a time. It's better but the competition can do more.
Yeah, my $79 Chromebook, could literally already do 2 external USB-C monitors, at 1/10th the price of an M4 MacBook Air!
The best part about DP MST is that most monitors already have a DP-Out, so, you can already daisy-chain even without having to buy a cheap dock.
I'm pretty sure DP-Out would be even more popular if not for the macOS users leaving all the negative reviews about the daisy-chaining not working after paying a full half price for a DP MST monitor compared to a Thunderbolt one!
Ironically, some manufacturers simply remove the DP-Out port, and release the resulting product as a Mac-friendly version of an identical PC monitor with a DP-Out.
My fav USB-C / DP MST monitor deals, have been HP Z24m G3 at $149.99 USD in early 2024, and PHILIPS 4K UHD IPS Black 27E2F7901 at $209.99 in mid/late 2024, both 400nits with DP 1.4, USB-C and DP-Out, at far cheaper prices than any comparable Thunderbolt monitor:
I’d buy the Thunderbolt dock anyway because plain USB-C docks/hubs have been consistently flaky and generally frustrating in my experience, even under Windows/Linux. The reduced frustration is easily worth the higher cost.
Wait, that's a $379 dock? Isn't it a bit too much to pay so much just to get back about the same ports that most non-Macs still have?
If I connect my peripherals like SSD and mouse/kb through this dock, will they continue working during a power outage? Or do I now have to get a UPS for my laptop, too, because I can't use the native ports anymore, and have to use a dock to connect the most basic equipment?
Many monitors on the market today do come with a dock built-in, but most of the time, it's a DP MST kind of dock, so, the daisy-chaining won't work in macOS, since it has no support for DP MST.
Thunderbolt is VERY rare across most monitors. It's even more rare on the models that go on sale and aren't broken in some fundamental way (IIRC, some Samsung TB monitor that was on sale, would actually have terrible reviews specifically because it still didn't work daisy-chained properly).
Since you're a Dell fan, I've just casually looked over the filters at https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/computer-monitors/ar/8605, and it's got 42 for USB-C, but only 6 for Thunderbolt; that's 7 times more non-Thunderbolt monitors that Thunderbolt.
If we limit the search to QHD 2560x1440, there's 11 USB-C, but only 1 Thunderbolt. You're basically paying 2x more, or $300 more, for a "free" Thunderbolt dock.
Compare to DP-Out options. For example, HP Z24m G3 2560x1440 was on sale for many months throughout 2024 at $149.99 USD brand new, it does have DP-Out and RJ45, a very quality monitor.
As for battery life, I'm not doing video encoding or compiling on my Mac, so, battery life is just a matter of power consumption. There are many ARM-based Chromebooks that are powered by like 5W CPUs. By definition, they're INCAPABLE of consuming their 50Wh battery in less than 10 hours; this often results in a better battery life than my MacBook Air, simply because M1 is still a 15W CPU, and can easily made to waste lots of cycles doing pointless webpage busywork that noone cares about, diminishing the battery life.
Yes, they've finally fixed the regression with a second monitor come M4, but it's still missing the most basic ports and expansion features.
The Dell monitor goes on sale for lower prices from time to time. Those other cheaper 2560x1440 monitors aren’t really apples to apples comparisons, because they use older less capable panels (less contrast, lower brightness, no certified flicker free, no VRR, no factory calibration, capped at 60hz, etc etc) and many don’t include KVM functionality even if they do add a couple extra ports. Comparably feature rich monitors from other brands are similarly expensive.
As far as port counts go, to get anything close to what a TS4 adds, you’re looking at a desktop of some kind or maybe one of those monstrous 17”+ workstation or gaming laptops (but even most of those have fewer ports).
That's the thing, the brightness is actually only 350nits on Dell, but 400nits on HP and Philips I've linked; the original MSRP was the same as the Dell, it's only the sale price that ended up being really good on those. So, the only TB monitor in its class actually has worse brightness than many of the non-TB options.
The HP is calibrated and has amazing colours, and it's 90Hz, too, although I keep it at 60Hz.
The Philips monitor is 4k UHD and also IPS Black, same 2000:1 contrast as all IPS Black panels share, so, I'm not sure why you'd get the Dell with the lower resolution and lower brightness at a higher price. The only true benefit of Dell is 2.5GigE and 120Hz, but 350nits is actually a downside compared to 400nits of the cheaper monitors I've listed.
BTW, you've never addressed the UPS issue.
Do any docks at all work when the power is out? How do you take that into account when you need to connect stuff like SSD, kb and mouse? Do you suffer data loss on your SSD because your laptop lacks standard ports and dock use is required that can't be powered by the laptop anymore? Or do you get UPS for your laptop just for the dock? I just don't understand how the dock requirement is not a big deal. I got a laptop simply because it's fanless and has an integrated UPS, I didn't need it to be portable otherwise.
4k is a detractor for my usage, no integer scaling, which is annoying not just under macOS but also Linux. 2560x1440 or 5k are preferred.
I guess you’d probably need a UPS for a powered dock, I don’t know. The power is out too infrequently where I live for it to be an issue and it’s nice for the dock to be able to charge for one cable swapping between machines.
I think the last power loss here was 8mo15d ago at my place (around Christmas time in 2024?), but it could easily result in a data loss if you're using an external SSD through a dock, because your MacBook lacks a sufficient port supply, and because internal storage is severely limited by Apple, too, so, you may as well be required to use it with an external SSD at all times.
4k@27in may be too small pitch, but QHD@27in would be too pixelated. Especially on macOS that does NOT allow turning off antialiasing.
I'm currently using the 400nit HP Z24m G3 @ 2560x1440 @ 24in with my 16GB MBA M1, the colours are absolutely amazing compared to the cheaper Lenovo monitors.
Firefox works great, because it lets you turn off antialiasing, but there's no way to turn it off in Brave or Chrome, which results in super washed out and blurry text everywhere.
Honestly, macOS is not production ready at this point. Data loss because you have to use an external SSD through a dock, poor monitor support with regressions after moving to Apple Silicon, no ports for anything, inadequate RAM/storage that cannot be upgraded in any way besides the external SSD through a dock with a UPS.
Basically, the most simple things are super complicated.
Didn't it used to be the opposite with the Macs, where they were actually simpler and more flexible?
I have one desk setup where the main monitor is a 5k Studio Display (with 27” 1440 secondary), and another where that Dell is the main monitor. While the former is much nicer looking, I don’t find the 27” 1440s bad at all under macOS. My mail client and RSS reader even sits on the secondary 1440 most of the time, so it’s used for reading plenty. I don’t futz with AA settings at all.
Laptops in general haven’t been flush with ports for a very long time now, unless we’re talking about workstation laptops and sometimes gaming laptops. I have an old late-00s 15.4” Precision that has more ports than a lot of consumer desktops and entry-level motherboards these days, but by and large laptops come with maybe a third as many at most. Apple laptops haven’t been replete with ports like that since the PowerBook G3 “Pismo” was EoL’d back in 2000. People who need that many ports usually get a tower of some kind.
This is factually inaccurate. It's perhaps true on the Air and base model Pro, but not the others.
I hate on Apple's bs all the time, but it seems like the reality in your situation is that you got nearly the cheapest mac laptop 5 years ago, with a shitty screen, bumped the ram, and you're doing just fine still, except for some esoteric limitations that I just factored into my budget when buying one recently and aren't blocked by, namely external monitor support without MST.
I didn't get that computer at that time because of some of those limitations, sticking with my prior intel 13" until last year, until I finally convinced myself it was time. Doesn't mean they aren't worth complaining about though, I think 5 years on an Air is pretty good, they've always favored mobile utility over stationary excellence
Meant to say that I didn't get the lower specced M series around the time you did even though I was generally still sticking with the base models, because of the constraints you mentioned, opting to just wait until it was more feasible to spend more later on and continue suffering
I mean, that's the reason I got the late-2020 MBA M1 16GB in September 2022, instead of going for M2 24GB 512GB for twice the price, because M2 downgraded the 256GB SSD, so, you'd have to get 512GB to get the same performance as M1 256GB, and then might as well max out the RAM at 24GB, too, and now suddenly you're paying 2x for the base model with max RAM compared to the maxed-out base M1 MBA.
So, if you agree with the constraints I've mentioned, how are they inaccurate? The early-2020 Intel MacBook Air does support dual external monitors, it's an M1 regression where it's no longer supported, and it took them until M4 to finally fix the regression, it's present in every MBA until then, and in several MBP models, too.
The more I think about it the more I find it kind of odd yet somewhat endearing that we have so much of our lives determined by the orbit of the planet. Not so much things that are actually affected by it like seasons and its impacts on ecology, but on a yearly scale we had software updates, new hardware and financial reconciliation. Things that all feel so abstract and yet are tied to the cycle of our rock spinning around the sun. The druids approve!
So I have no issue when something like a laptop being pushed back, it was all very arbitrary anyway. Can they release is a Mars based yearly cadence?
Isn't this one of those "how Roman roads determined our rail gauge" things?
Seasons -> harvest -> traditions freeze working/holidaying times -> kids start school a certain time -> gotta sell them computers to be ready at those times.
I have a 16" M2 Max with 32 GB of RAM and I do pretty much everything on it, and I've yet to have a moment where I thought "ugh I wish this was faster"
I used to upgrade computers every 1-1.5 years but I think I could easily roll with this for another 2-3 maybe even 4 or 5 years more.
Heck, even if I was given free money I'd be too lazy to switch to an M4 Max just because of the hassle of transferring data that isn't on iCloud/Time Machine.
I was waiting for the M5 to have some other substantial changes like in the display or sound etc.
Same problem as their phones. They don't do anything new or interesting year over year. The CPU gets a bit faster, but that's it. They haven't provided a compelling reason to upgrade in a few years
My completely uninformed bet is that with the release of open source GPT, they're planning to embed this on all laptops. That will require a huge bump in the baseline specs, and therefore you have cascading delays.
There certainly can be. Reputation risk/being canceled, misinformation spreading, ethicial/legal issues depending on the topic, public opinion influence, authority problems, not understanding the community you are participating in, etc.
Seems like their comment engages a curious person to wonder how likely it might be. That's as much value as I generally expect to get from any comment.
If I were to guess, it's likely that sales projections are down right now, and they're hoping by keeping the existing line a bit longer, new buyer numbers will be larger in the spring. Most people don't upgrade every generation and a lot of people are still running M1/M2 devices.
I would also speculate that there may be some growing pains for the n2 production from TSMC, and/or a desire to get there in the AZ fab production before launch to avoid tariffs hitting their bottom line. They'd rather pay 12-20% more for just the CPU than eat large tariffs on the full cost. I don't think they'd be able to significantly raise prices further based on tariffs, like some other companies with smaller margins are forced to do, on order to be competitive.
Yeah I’m on an M1 and it’s still outstanding.
The only motivation to upgrade is battery degradation or getting more RAM to run larger LLM models locally.
Get Al Dente Pro and set your battery to 80% and do a full cycle once a month. It'll extend the life tremendously. https://apphousekitchen.com/aldente-overview/
>Get Al Dente Pro and set your battery to 80% and do a full cycle once a month
MacOS does that natively. My battery rarely charges above 80% because I "almost never use it on battery so there's no need."
> MacOS does that natively
Poorly, mine still hasn't learned, after 3 years, that it spends 99% of its time connected to a Thunderbolt charging monitor. And regularly discharges itself over the weekend because it failed to fall asleep properly.
Does macos have sleep problems these days as well? I had the impression it's usually pucca due to hardware-software vertical integration in apple land.
Mine does, yep. After almost every long weekend the battery is dead if I don't shut it down entirely. It's probably because it's a laptop that stays always closed, connected to a Thunderbolt monitor, and on/off are done via the monitor, so sometimes something gets mixed up, but even then it's pretty bad.
I like how it's normal in the Apple ecosystem to pay 11€ yearly subscription for extremely basic features that come by default, for free, on most other laptop vendor/OS combos.
Don't forget SSD degradation since it's not a user replaceable part and you can't do true external boots (it copies to the internal storage). That's my biggest worry.
SSDs aren't exactly known for high failure rates, especially if you're staying within their expected endurance. Sure, you can kill one by running fluid simulations of one, but any sane use case doesn't even come close to what you'd need to kill one with any decent level of expected endurance.
The only ones I've heard of dying are from brands I'd never trust in the first place, or from bad firmware, and my impression is that it's usually the controller dying, and with the controller being part of the chip itself on Apple Silicon, it's not gonna die without taking the rest of the machine with it, and for the most part, they just aren't.
The M1 is old enough that we'd know about it if the faliure rate was abnormally high.
> Sure, you can kill one by running fluid simulations of one, but any sane use case doesn't even come close to what you'd need to kill one with any decent level of expected endurance.
So you can't do any serious work on a Mac ?
If fluid simulations are included in your definition of serious work, then you can't do serious work on any machine with less than at least 128 GB of RAM, probably more, be it Windows, Linux or Mac. Your SSD will be killed by excessive writes no matter the OS or what specific hardware you've chosen. You can probably get enough RAM on some of the highest end Macs to not have to swap to disk for fluid simulation of any decent size, although I haven't looked into that. 128+ GB of RAM is a big ask no matter your platform.
No widespread failures have been reported on M1s. SSDs often exceed their expected lifespan, especially when spec’d generously. But, monitoring tools can misreport, so be cautious drawing conclusions from early TBW readings.
So, when choosing a Mac, opt for higher RAM and SSD capacity to reduce swap pressure and spread wear.
If you are cautious, monitor TBW, but interpret the data with healthy skepticism.
Last, but not least, backup regularly!
I upgraded from an M1 to an M4 MBP recently and although the performance gains were mostly incremental, the matte screen (fucking finally Apple) is really nice and a good reason to upgrade if you ever plan on using it in a brightly-lit area. It’s a must-have.
> the matte screen (fucking finally Apple)
and a slightly better screen in terms of response time, which is nice since ghosting is very present on all of them
Are they still using MicroLED? I can't stand the bloom in dark conditions on my M2, it's horrendous!
It's still MiniLED but I believe there was a subtle change on the M4 series that means it's slightly better about it.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/11/15/apple-quietly-gave-the-m4-mac...
Localized bloom is vastly preferable to the alternative, which is the uniform bloom of a backlit LCD display.
It's mini-LED backlighting, to be pedantic.
I welcome your pedantry. I stand corrected, though I can’t edit the post any longer.
I was so bummed when they removed the matte screen option many years and glad to see it back. My next one will definitely be matte.
I run an M4Pro Mini, connected to an LG 49" ultrawide. I have an M1Max MBP, collecting dust, upstairs.
Frankly, the MBP is still an excellent machine, but I don't travel, anymore, and this big honker that is as wide as my desk, has me spoiled.
I switch to 45" UWQHD myself.. slightly taller with bigger pixels for work and enjoy it immensely. I've had a few issues where my vision got dramatically worse a couple years ago so even my 32" 1440p was a struggle at times.
With this display, it's similar to two 4:3 aspect displays in my typical use... my IDE or Code pinned on one side, my browser or another app on the right.
Overall, it's been pretty great.
Hmm... I guess someone thought that I was boasting about my setup.
It's really not a big deal. I know quite a few people that have much nicer rigs; especially gamers.
I was really just saying that the MPB has a processor that still rocks, several years later, but the large screen that I use (which is actually not as impressive as some of the gaming screens), has me spoiled, and using a laptop screen feels cramped.
I upgraded only for large memory (upgraded from 16G M1 to 48G M4). Battery life was still outstainding when i upgraded.
Due to the limitations of MacOS, my M1 MacBook pro is pretty much exclusively a thin client (software dev, gaming) and I see no reason to upgrade it - unless battery degradation warrants it.
It's fantastic as a thin client - though it's a bit annoying carrying around a mini PC with me when I travel.
Have you tried Linux on it? I’ve been meaning to try putting NixOS on my M1 MBP.
Regardless of the CPU, the time to upgrade every year is long gone, even without taking M chip series into consideration.
Most of my home stuff is from around 2010, my work laptop is from 2021, and neither at home, nor at work, do I need more programming power.
I have enough cores, RAM, disk space, and graphic cards, to still code whatever I feel like locally, with exception of ray tracing or latest AI models, neither of which are that relevant to my computing activities.
So I will keep using them until they die, or there is no hope left of the battery and need to acquire a new one to take outside the house.
N2 production in Arizona won't start for years. Also I'm expecting M5 to be on N3.
s/N2/N3, in any case... the planned node.
I’d upgrade from m1. I want more mem, more storage, and some ai power
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Really, they could probably get away with selling M4 devices for another couple cycles. As far as performance is concerned, even going back to the M1, the only group feeling inadequacies large enough to make upgrading a “must” are those whose needs sit within spitting distance of cusp of consumer/prosumer computing. Battery life is still industry leading with only a handful of competitors just recently being able to claim similar real world numbers (thanks mostly to Lunar Lake, which isn’t available for many models and comes at the cost of some performance).
I’ve used both M1 Max and M4 Max machines extensively and while the latter is a good deal faster, it’s only really noticeable with longer sustained tasks and particularly large projects. The high-RAM variants of M1 models in particular should continue to be quite servicable for some time to come.
What about current macbooks is not industry leading?
What excuse besides liking windows or wanting an even cheaper machine do you have not to get one?
You should also consider liking Linux, or wanting to support the right to repair movement. Or disliking Apple for whatever reason, such as their generally very closed nature. My biggest criterion for buying consumer electronics is being able to replace the software easily, followed by being able to replace the hardware easily. Nothing else is particularly important.
Linux support is not industry leading, nor presence of Ethernet port. Sadly others are following in lack of ports as I can't find a new Thinkpad that has both an Ethernet port and an SD slot.
What do you need these ports for, that you can't get with a modern USB-connected dock? It can't be a matter of portability since by and large laptops with Ethernet and SD-card I/O are going to be bulky, not-really-portable "desktop replacement" products anyway.
My current Thinkpad has both and is very portable (14", 1.5 kg)
The Ethernet port is extremely useful in the field or in the lab to connect to various devices. The SD prt is useful for imaging embedded devices, or for getting pictures off my camera.
Conference rooms have Ethernet ports but don't have docks.
Aren’t those both easy to add via USB-C? Ethernet for sure is just a dongle connected to your Ethernet cable.
> What about current macbooks is not industry leading?
Market share, right to repair, upgradability, no open source
OS is still pretty terrible. From janky kid focused UX, to trying to hide errors and information from you (e.g. you try extending your screen to an iPad, and it just says it failed. No information whatsoever about why or what you could do, just fuck you), to basic features missing (did you know you can't have a different scroll direction between scroll button and touchpad? There are two toggles in two menus, but they just change each other).
The OS is one of the important part of the experience of using a computer. So it makes sense to filter first on what kind of OS matches what you want. I run a M2 MBP and I wouldn't use it if I couldn't run linux. But in terms of hardware it's a truly great machine. The first laptop where I'm satisfied by the power. M4 doesn't have linux support(yet).
> M4 doesn't have linux support(yet).
To be fair, no M-series Macs have Linux support. For some, the community has added support themselves, without any contributions from Apple.
I don't see how that is a relevant distinction. Most PC and laptops have no Linux support if you view it like that. The point is Linux runs great on the ones it's available for.
Apple seems to overlook how much timing matters for Mac sales in academia. Macs—especially MacBooks—absolutely dominate among professors (I’d guess ~90% in my department).
The academic fiscal year often ends in Aug/Sep, and new faculty usually get a “technology fund” for buying their first computer. A lot of us use that to get the latest Mac. Historically, Apple’s October refresh was just late enough to miss that budget window, but people would still wait a month or two for the new models.
If they push announcements even further (as the article suggests—early 2026), it’s a different story. New hires can’t wait half a year with no laptop, so they’ll just buy whatever’s top-of-the-line right now. For research folks who need GPU power, that could easily mean a 5090-based laptop instead of a Mac.
Apple has pretty sophisticated modeling for their sales cycle so I assume that it they aren't simply looking at the academic lifecycle.
Professors are a very small % of the education market, most of their sales come from high school and college students and during back to school season.
To a first approximation, 100% of Apple’s customers are not university professors.
What about university students? They also start their classes in September, and while they have no "budgeting deadline", they still need to buy some computer around that time.
> What about university students?
interestingly, i have a teen that will be heading off to college in a couple years. My plan is to send him off to the dorm with a Macbook and not his gaming rig heh. Although, inevitably, it will be up to him to decide how to make the best use of his time..
One of my first jobs was working for my university while attending. We had a small student lead team of people that did IT work for other students, and faculty. We'd fix or at least attempt to fix any software issue or hardware issue that we feasibly could with the tools we had available.
In my unsolicited advice, I recommend your son take both devices. I'll spare you my countless war stories, but I can confidently say I have seen many students up a creek without a paddle at some of the most unfortunate times.
Isn't it up to him to bring his gaming rig?
Not the original commenter, but if I was that parent, I’d explain to my kid the amount of money I would be contributing towards their education and expenses if they bring it…and if the don’t bring it. They can make the educated choice then.
And they'll take it and make friends and get jobs from those associations with more value than the degree itself.
Not trying to sway you, just thinking about common outcomes!
That seems to me to be the least likely outcome of that decision.
A common outcome would seem to be a year spent bombing in their classes because they can’t separate themselves from some stupid game to study while accumulating $10-20k in student debt.
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I think Apple has historically used the college student market to clear out their remaining stock of last year’s MacBooks. Otherwise why release the new models just after classes have started?
I agree with that - 'back to school sale' sounds a lot better than 'end of line clearance'.
Considering a base MBA M4 can be had for $899 (and it's a monster) and a base MBP is about 80% more, I can’t imagine the bulk of freshman buyers who have so many things to buy just to go to university for their first year would opt to spend an extra $650 on an MPB.
I think you might be surprised at the extent to which iPad sales cannibalize MacBook sales in the current crop of undergrads, especially ones who don't anticipate having to write papers or code. An iPad Air will do everything many college students need at half the price and size and weight, and it can have a pen, which the MacBook can't. When you do get a surprise assignment that the iPad can't do, there are always lab computers, and many universities will loan out laptops upon request.
What kind of university degree doesn’t require writing?
Anecdotally, I got my MBP as a graduation present when I graduated high school and was heading off to college many years ago.
So I got it in ~May, when my college program started in September.
Nothing changes about them, as (previously) new Apple MacBooks weren't available until October, more than a month after their classes start.
But the argument here was that one month delay was not ideal, but acceptable, but a longer delay will have more severe effect on demand.
As someone who's worked at a (small) university for a decade and a half, IME most of the ones who get Mac laptops get the Air. This has been especially true since the Apple Silicon transition, as the chip in the Air is still damn good.
I think it might just be the other way around, if they front-loaded a lot of inventory shipments before tariffs were due to hit they might be loaded with unusually high inventory levels that needs shifting and will be hard to do so at price if a new model is out.
Add to this the recent economic uncertainty and prospective buyers might just have been holding up purchases (thus further adding to inventory if they already front-loaded before tariffs).
As for people buying powerful machines that could be worth going to a 5090 based machine instead, they're probably a fairly small part of the Mac purchaser market in the big picture.
I can assure you that by now Apple has a near perfect model for timing releases to optimize sales.
They could just buy the M4 models.
Only in countries like US, across the globe many do with whatever they can get their hands on.
They would just buy the M4? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The average user, even the "power user", does not care/know the difference between an M4 and whatever the M5 will be.
Like I said, most people want something that's the "latest"; M4 is already one year old.
wrt the second part of your comment: Academics care about speed, RAM, battery life, the ability to run the latest AI models at a decent speed (M4 is still relatively slow).
Most of academics write papers, they care about none of those things.
Unless you work on AI, which most don't, then you don't care that the M4 is a little slow for that purpose. The academics who are working on large dataset frequently have access to cluster computers or large servers running in the university datacenter... or frequently sits under their desk, because they have trust issues.
m4 laptop checks the boxes on ram options (albiet a high price) and battery life.
The m4 macbook is running AI slow compared too..... what competitive alternative?
I'm impressed at how fast gpt-oss-20b ran on my m2 24gb system.
> most people want something that's the "latest"
citation needed. AFAICT, sales data says that "most people" want a bargin and would prefer $200 off than 10% faster newest etc... Most people buy 1 or 2 generations old.
Double reverse Citation needed
I would venture a guess that 99% of academics could run whatever workloads they have on something half as powerful as an M1 Mac. Very few need or want to run cutting edge LLM models on their laptop.
It's tough for me to justify upgrading an M1 device to an M4 device for the AI performance improvement, going from an M4 to an M5 for a small segment of the user base is not moving the needle enough to sway something like this.
Anyone really geeked about AI performance to the level of not picking something because of it (be it price or performance) should not be looking at a laptop anyways.
> (M4 is still relatively slow).
How does it compare to Windows laptops?
There are Windows laptops with faster GPUs. Being Nvidia certainly helps with software support.
Are they comparable? No way. Laptops with x86 CPUs and discrete GPUs need a lot of power and dissipate a lot of heat. This makes them larger, heavier, louder, and with terrible battery life. If they are gamer laptops, they also look like toys.
Unless you compare base models (entry level MacBooks are very price competitive, but then upgrades are very expensive), they blow Apple devices on performance and price/performance. An HP Omen or Asus ROG Zephyrus with 1-2TB SSD, 32-64GB RAM, powerful CPU, and a proper NVIDIA 4/5070-5080 (which is better at gaming and AI than M chips, or if you need "unified memory" for bigger AI models, AMD APUs are pretty good) for less than a similar memory and disk (let alone performance in most tasks) MacBook.
Battery life is worse though. Depending on the use (3-4h gaming, 7-8h regular use) still plenty though.
How universities have changed, almost 40 years ago we cared to have access at a computer, any at all.
I have had classmates that did the entire 5 year engineering degree in Software Engineering, using the computer labs computers, the modern ones running a mix of Windows 95 and Red-Hat dual booting, or the more ancient MS-DOS/Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and terminals to the DG/UX server.
Anyone was happy to have a computer of some sort.
> M4 is still relatively slow
Don't expect too much from a single generation upgrade. M4 to M5 won't be anything like the move from Intel to their own silicon.
> most people want something that's the "latest"
Most people want something affordable and adequate.
> Academics care about speed, RAM, battery life, the ability to run the latest AI models at a decent speed (M4 is still relatively slow).
Most academics do not give a flying fuck about running local LLMs. Academia is more than LLM researchers.
Most academics probably care most about battery life and portability and whether it runs Teams, like every other person.
But as you said, 90% use Apple anyway, so why would Apple bother at all?
As someone who hangs around with academics outside the comp sci field regularly they mostly seem to have old MacBooks which are falling to bits. Not sure I’ve even seen an ARM one yet. They mostly don’t need a lot of juice and don’t want anyone changing anything on it. Also I don’t think I’ve seen anything more than a sneer on AI.
Is anybody buying x86 based laptops nowadays? It seems that there are few advantages over ARM based Windows/Linux or the M-series laptops.
Most people buying laptops, probably.
The advantage is all of that legacy software that some process relies on and hasn't been meaningfully updated in 10+ years and won't be ported over to the ARM processors that you damned kids are running on because back in my day we paid for one copy of x86 software and that got us through 10 winters, dammit.
Uphill both ways
And you were thankful to have two uphills. A lot of people didn’t even have that!
I do. Wanted a discrete GPU and ability to run all the games I love on the go, including those that may want a little bit of GPU performance and don't have a macOS port. Can't realistically do this on non-x86.
Windows on ARM doesn't work well and has very low sales.
Almost everyone on Windows and BSD/Linux land, the large majority of folks outside US and countries with similar wage levels.
This take is about as bad as the old Slashdot take well over a decade ago - “do people still watch TV? I haven’t owned a TV in a decade.”
I think that's still most of what Dell, HP, and Lenovo sell.
Most of corporate America is still primarily using x86 systems.
The vast majority of people and companies.
Anyone not buying a macbook, which is still like 70% of the market
And it's only that high in the US. Global MacOS share is 15-17% range, in the US it's around 25% (and this is very concentrated in a few niches).
Yeah but I was also thinking of chromebooks, many of which are ARM
Link me to a reliable brand of ARM laptop that runs Linux and is high performance!
I'm enjoying my framework AMD laptop although the battery life with suspend is miserable.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/lenovo/lenovo-edu-chr...
The person you responded to has an AMD framework laptop, which means they can do 96 of ram if they want (some users report success with 128GB). The laptop you linked only goes up to 16GB of ram.
That laptop only has 256GB of storage whereas you can throw a 4TB m.2 ssd into the AMD framework if you want.
That laptop only has 2 USB type-c and they're both only 5Gbps (and one legacy USB port). The AMD 7040 framework has 2 USB4 40Gbps ports and 2 regular USB type-c 3.2 ports (and then the whole modular card system in front of those ports).
That laptop looks genuinely nice. With a few small tweaks I'd consider it. Though, in terms of personal preference I wouldn't want to do a chromebook again because of the annoyance of having to rebind the keys on every operating system I install (the pixelbook had the caps lock key bound to super and IIRC F11 was bound to something that doesn't exist on normal keyboards), and I'll never buy an oled screen for/in a computer.
Unfortunately the AMD models don't support real sleep, only "nap," like a tablet. Guess how I found out?
Our Intel Framework does, although you might need to use Linux to utilize it.
What's the difference between "napping" and sleeping? Once you truly power down all the I/O they should perform about the same. A tablet with all the radios powered down (via airplane mode if necessary) can "nap" for a long time, rivaling any laptop with its proper "sleep".
https://en.ittrip.xyz/windows/modern-standby-vs-s3
There’s a Linux command for listing supported sleep states, but I don’t have it handy.
cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
Why is that? I read something about both Intel and AMD stopping a certain "level" of suspend, I didn't know there was an issue or design shortcoming that affected only AMD.
Not certain, but it appears the intel pretends it doesn’t support it but the hardware is still there, so Linux can still use it. But the newer AMD truly doesn’t.
Both our models are couple of years old now.
M1 with Ashai Linux
As long as you don't want to plug in any screens
The HDMI works perfectly, you do need DisplayLink for the third screen which is fruatraiting but a lot better overall then the next best Arm64 laptop.
I would love it if Apple just fully embraced Asahi, dedicated resources to it. Imagine 'you can now run either macOS or Linux on your Mac, or both, your choice' - not an an Apple subsystem for Linux, actual Linux, and all peripherals working right across the line.
Seems like as impressive as the work & project is, it's always going to be struggling to play catch-up: you're not happy with the extent of M1 implementation, my understanding is M3/M4 just barely work headlessly.
What I’d most like in future MacBooks is the continuation of increases in memory size and bandwidth.
Apple has carved out a niche for itself in the local LLM space, yet it continues to overcharge for RAM and under-deliver in terms of bandwidth.
I have no hopes that Apple will decrease its prices, particularly on top-of-the-line models like those with 128 GB of memory and above.
Yet I certainly believe that it can deliver even more RAM and, in particular, memory bandwidth. Apple clearly offers much more VRAM than consumer NVIDIA GPUs, but Macs are still behind in terms of memory bandwidth and, relatedly, overall performance.
It would be silly of Apple not to jump at the opportunity to eat even more of NVIDIA’s market share among the general public.
I got M1 Max with 64GB and 32 core GPU fro $1500 refurbished with zero cycle battery on 100%. As most companies doing refresh/write-off after 3 years 2025 is really a year where you can get a beast of machine for the money. I also have M4 Max for work and differences are only on really heavy tasks but for 3X less money I guess M1 Max is still good deal. This delay also means that M2/M3 ones will be good buy next year as well.
That's what I have too. I upgraded about 9 months ago from an M1 Max 32 GiB + 1 TiB SSD to 64 GiB + 4 TiB SSD, and donated the old one to a FOSS developer in Europe who can now support macOS. The "new" one is used, but had about 15 cycles on it and 99% battery health... like it was in someone's closet for 3 years.
It's a total waste of money paying zillions for tiny improvements.
There goes the hopes of those expecting M5 to finally sort out the fate of Intel Mac Pro.
From my point of view they have to accept if they want a desktop like experience, only PCs with Windows/Linux/BSD are left standing as composable workstations.
M-series Mac Pros are a thing. They're a lot like Mac Studios, only in a big cheesegrater case and with support for internal PCIe cards.
No they aren't, because you forgot the little detail not every kind of PCIe card is supported, like those that folks using graphical workstations for CAD/CAM rendering, or those in VFX, might think of using.
Also not all kinds of high-speed network, or real time audio cards are supported.
Stuffing a Studio into a desktop case full of air, and limited set of supported PCIe cards, is a slap into the face of the hardcore users that still hope Apple cares about workstations.
If they took Jax-metal a little more seriously they’d have at least one more customer…
As long as they keep overcharging for RAM and storage they can delay the M5 indefinitely. It’s a joke what it costs to put 64gb or 128gb in those things. Yes it’s fast ram but the markup is extreme.
"There's a rumor about certain Apple product and it says that the previous rumor about same product was wrong."
Mark Gurman is the ouroboros of Apple news.
Welcome to the world where Tim Cook has to present gold offerings to the US president and spend most of his time navigating massive new taxes on imports the company relies on.
need more gold foil blocks
Good. Hopefully we're going back to more sensible and sustainable 2-3 year cycles.
Would be nice to do that for OS releases too. I feel like the yearly macOS releases are too ambitious at this point, and Apple's software quality is suffering. 2-3 year cycles would be much more sustainable. Hardware is good enough now to not need a new release ever year.
All I want is software tic-toc.
Leopard followed by Snow Leopard.
Every other year is just a major bugfix/rewrite release.
Refresh cadence has little to do with sustainability.
Consider cars: manufactures come out with new ones each year with marginally differences. Is that somehow unsustainable and they should instead keep manufacturing an old design for years? Does that mean once the 2026 model starts manufactuing you go dump your 2025?
It makes more sense to iteratively improve your design and stop manufacturing old things if you can manufacture something better.
The real sustainability argument is about support length (which apple does well), and repairability (which apples does ). Changing to a 3 hear cycle is orthogonal to both of these.
How's a "2-3 year cycle" sensible or sustainable?
Who's forcing you to get every upgrade every year?
The yearly releases make a lot of sense for everybody, because then you can upgrade on your own schedule, instead of delaying the upgrade because the product was released a full 2 years ago, at a time your older one is on its last breath.
In fact, yearly releases are then also more sustainable, too, since the purchasing would be spread out to each year (on an as-needed basis), instead of having a month-long cycle every 3 years, necessitating the extra infrastructure all along the way (from the stores to manufacturing to shipping).
> your older one is on its last breath.
For Apple computers, the last breath comes almost a decade after they were built.
If you wait until it dies, then you will want to get what's available at that time, but, if you plan from the start, you'll have a lot of flexibility with these machines.
My MBP is the same age as my Thinkpad, and looks much nicer.
Yeah, Apple's products are pretty long lived in my experience.
My '07 macbook lasted till 2020. It was almost as tough as any thinkpad I've had. My x220t, 2008ish, is still going. Both did damage to the hoods of a few cars.
Last I heard, my iPod nano from 20+ years ago is still being used daily. Only other portable music player I've had last that long was a Walkman.
I've got friends with old ass powerBooks that still get used frequently.
How did they do damage to the hoods of a few cars?
I've had a few times where a driver pulled into the crosswalk and bumped into me while carrying a laptop.
5+ years for home users and systems administrators. I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Air, it's fine for everything I need. The only issue is, as other points out, the external monitor issue. Only one monitor, and certainly no daisy chaining of displays.
Yep that. I just upgraded my M1 Pro MBP to an M4 Pro MBP and I can’t tell the difference really. I’ll leave it 6 years this time.
My M1 Pro turns 5 pretty soon and I don’t even have the tinge of an itch to upgrade. Which maybe isn’t great for Apple since Nvidia ended up getting my $1000 this year.
I’ve done the same last year. But it was so I could play games :)
Who does still replace their computers 2-3 year cycles, other than those with money to burn and little conscience for the environment?
Apple is in such an interesting position right now. Having made the decision for whatever reason to go with a unified memory architecture, they are now almost unique in terms of being able to offer super power efficient laptops with very large GPU memory. If they were to just double the memory bandwidth and do nothing else they could break away as a preferred way to run especially inference but maybe even training for small LLM models. Given the bottlenecks on availability and pricing of nVidia cards we are already toying with the idea of building a small local LLM stack based on Macs for this reason. If Apple made it more compelling we could easily go from toying with it to seriously considering it.
It's disappointing to hear they are delaying this year's Macbooks because I was really hoping to see some improvements like this specifically targeted at running local LLMs.
> they are now almost unique
AMD and Intel already caught up in the unified memory design. Apple might still have some edge (do they ? idk), but it's not a rarety anymore.
The edge is, "it actually works". Eg: I just set the device to "mps" in PyTorch, everything is using the GPU.Until nVidia gets monopoly treatment for CUDA and are forced to open their software stack, Metal is the next best thing as far as I can tell.
Not to mention, I have no faith that these laptops won't thermally throttle - my fan only spins up when I'm running truly demanding workloads, the rest of the time the laptop might as well be fanless.
which is why I was surprised to hear some reports that Apple was planning to abandon UMA in future chips. Can't imagine why they would do that
Integrated GPUs predate M chips, but naturally it is yet another thing Apple has "invented".
I'm writing this on a 16GB M1 MacBook Air, but I've gotten disillusioned with macOS and Macs.
When everything is done in a browser, the biggest differentiator on a laptop would be monitor and peripheral support, and Apple is behind the competition.
macOS has no support for daisy-chaining with DP MST, no support for a second monitor (new to M1, the 2020 Intel model does support dual external monitors), no way to turn-off antialiasing, limited ports, RAM and storage options, limited repair and expansion options.
Why exactly do we even still use macOS anyways?
Even the cheapest Chromebook laptops have better monitor support and better expandability, at 1/10th the cost.
No support for MST daisy chaining is unfortunate, but not really a dealbreaker since most users spending a lot of time at a desk are using either a standalone dock (e.g. CalDigit TS4) or a monitor that has a dock built in (like Dell’s U2724DE) which also achieves one-cable multimonitor (+charging). The limit on number of monitors isn’t an issue on the newer low end models.
On the hardware side of things, the big differentiators are build quality and battery life. To get either as good as is found on MacBooks you’re likely to be spending about as much in the x86 world. Those dirt cheap Chromebooks in particular are miserable to use.
MST makes getting a dock cheaper. It's very cheap to get a hub or dock that can do two or even three monitors over MST, with power pass through and a few extra USB ports for a mouse and keyboard or printer. Like $30-$50. Maybe you spend another $50 for a decent extra charger to go with it.
On Mac you basically HAVE to get an expensive $200+ TB dock to get a one cable multi-mon setup.
The new M4 MBAs can still only do two external screens at a time. It's better but the competition can do more.
Yeah, my $79 Chromebook, could literally already do 2 external USB-C monitors, at 1/10th the price of an M4 MacBook Air!
The best part about DP MST is that most monitors already have a DP-Out, so, you can already daisy-chain even without having to buy a cheap dock.
I'm pretty sure DP-Out would be even more popular if not for the macOS users leaving all the negative reviews about the daisy-chaining not working after paying a full half price for a DP MST monitor compared to a Thunderbolt one!
Ironically, some manufacturers simply remove the DP-Out port, and release the resulting product as a Mac-friendly version of an identical PC monitor with a DP-Out.
My fav USB-C / DP MST monitor deals, have been HP Z24m G3 at $149.99 USD in early 2024, and PHILIPS 4K UHD IPS Black 27E2F7901 at $209.99 in mid/late 2024, both 400nits with DP 1.4, USB-C and DP-Out, at far cheaper prices than any comparable Thunderbolt monitor:
https://slickdeals.net/f/17456364-23-8-hp-z24m-g3-2560x1440-...
https://slickdeals.net/f/17650827-philips-creator-series-27e...
I’d buy the Thunderbolt dock anyway because plain USB-C docks/hubs have been consistently flaky and generally frustrating in my experience, even under Windows/Linux. The reduced frustration is easily worth the higher cost.
> CalDigit TS4
Wait, that's a $379 dock? Isn't it a bit too much to pay so much just to get back about the same ports that most non-Macs still have?
If I connect my peripherals like SSD and mouse/kb through this dock, will they continue working during a power outage? Or do I now have to get a UPS for my laptop, too, because I can't use the native ports anymore, and have to use a dock to connect the most basic equipment?
> Dell U2724DE
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-27-thunderbo...
$599 USD for QHD 2560x1440? That's just not very competitive.
I got a QHD 2560x1440 with RJ45 and a DP-Out for $149 brand new, for HP Z24m G3:
https://slickdeals.net/f/17456364-23-8-hp-z24m-g3-2560x1440-...
So, it's basically a 4x premium for TB.
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Many monitors on the market today do come with a dock built-in, but most of the time, it's a DP MST kind of dock, so, the daisy-chaining won't work in macOS, since it has no support for DP MST.
Thunderbolt is VERY rare across most monitors. It's even more rare on the models that go on sale and aren't broken in some fundamental way (IIRC, some Samsung TB monitor that was on sale, would actually have terrible reviews specifically because it still didn't work daisy-chained properly).
Since you're a Dell fan, I've just casually looked over the filters at https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/computer-monitors/ar/8605, and it's got 42 for USB-C, but only 6 for Thunderbolt; that's 7 times more non-Thunderbolt monitors that Thunderbolt.
If we limit the search to QHD 2560x1440, there's 11 USB-C, but only 1 Thunderbolt. You're basically paying 2x more, or $300 more, for a "free" Thunderbolt dock.
Compare to DP-Out options. For example, HP Z24m G3 2560x1440 was on sale for many months throughout 2024 at $149.99 USD brand new, it does have DP-Out and RJ45, a very quality monitor.
As for battery life, I'm not doing video encoding or compiling on my Mac, so, battery life is just a matter of power consumption. There are many ARM-based Chromebooks that are powered by like 5W CPUs. By definition, they're INCAPABLE of consuming their 50Wh battery in less than 10 hours; this often results in a better battery life than my MacBook Air, simply because M1 is still a 15W CPU, and can easily made to waste lots of cycles doing pointless webpage busywork that noone cares about, diminishing the battery life.
Yes, they've finally fixed the regression with a second monitor come M4, but it's still missing the most basic ports and expansion features.
The Dell monitor goes on sale for lower prices from time to time. Those other cheaper 2560x1440 monitors aren’t really apples to apples comparisons, because they use older less capable panels (less contrast, lower brightness, no certified flicker free, no VRR, no factory calibration, capped at 60hz, etc etc) and many don’t include KVM functionality even if they do add a couple extra ports. Comparably feature rich monitors from other brands are similarly expensive.
As far as port counts go, to get anything close to what a TS4 adds, you’re looking at a desktop of some kind or maybe one of those monstrous 17”+ workstation or gaming laptops (but even most of those have fewer ports).
That's the thing, the brightness is actually only 350nits on Dell, but 400nits on HP and Philips I've linked; the original MSRP was the same as the Dell, it's only the sale price that ended up being really good on those. So, the only TB monitor in its class actually has worse brightness than many of the non-TB options.
The HP is calibrated and has amazing colours, and it's 90Hz, too, although I keep it at 60Hz.
The Philips monitor is 4k UHD and also IPS Black, same 2000:1 contrast as all IPS Black panels share, so, I'm not sure why you'd get the Dell with the lower resolution and lower brightness at a higher price. The only true benefit of Dell is 2.5GigE and 120Hz, but 350nits is actually a downside compared to 400nits of the cheaper monitors I've listed.
BTW, you've never addressed the UPS issue.
Do any docks at all work when the power is out? How do you take that into account when you need to connect stuff like SSD, kb and mouse? Do you suffer data loss on your SSD because your laptop lacks standard ports and dock use is required that can't be powered by the laptop anymore? Or do you get UPS for your laptop just for the dock? I just don't understand how the dock requirement is not a big deal. I got a laptop simply because it's fanless and has an integrated UPS, I didn't need it to be portable otherwise.
4k is a detractor for my usage, no integer scaling, which is annoying not just under macOS but also Linux. 2560x1440 or 5k are preferred.
I guess you’d probably need a UPS for a powered dock, I don’t know. The power is out too infrequently where I live for it to be an issue and it’s nice for the dock to be able to charge for one cable swapping between machines.
I think the last power loss here was 8mo15d ago at my place (around Christmas time in 2024?), but it could easily result in a data loss if you're using an external SSD through a dock, because your MacBook lacks a sufficient port supply, and because internal storage is severely limited by Apple, too, so, you may as well be required to use it with an external SSD at all times.
4k@27in may be too small pitch, but QHD@27in would be too pixelated. Especially on macOS that does NOT allow turning off antialiasing.
I'm currently using the 400nit HP Z24m G3 @ 2560x1440 @ 24in with my 16GB MBA M1, the colours are absolutely amazing compared to the cheaper Lenovo monitors.
Firefox works great, because it lets you turn off antialiasing, but there's no way to turn it off in Brave or Chrome, which results in super washed out and blurry text everywhere.
Honestly, macOS is not production ready at this point. Data loss because you have to use an external SSD through a dock, poor monitor support with regressions after moving to Apple Silicon, no ports for anything, inadequate RAM/storage that cannot be upgraded in any way besides the external SSD through a dock with a UPS.
Basically, the most simple things are super complicated.
Didn't it used to be the opposite with the Macs, where they were actually simpler and more flexible?
I have one desk setup where the main monitor is a 5k Studio Display (with 27” 1440 secondary), and another where that Dell is the main monitor. While the former is much nicer looking, I don’t find the 27” 1440s bad at all under macOS. My mail client and RSS reader even sits on the secondary 1440 most of the time, so it’s used for reading plenty. I don’t futz with AA settings at all.
Laptops in general haven’t been flush with ports for a very long time now, unless we’re talking about workstation laptops and sometimes gaming laptops. I have an old late-00s 15.4” Precision that has more ports than a lot of consumer desktops and entry-level motherboards these days, but by and large laptops come with maybe a third as many at most. Apple laptops haven’t been replete with ports like that since the PowerBook G3 “Pismo” was EoL’d back in 2000. People who need that many ports usually get a tower of some kind.
I have two monitors plugged on my M1, one on the HDMI port and the other one on HDMI through a USB hub.
Those are old non-Apple monitors and they look worse (colors and texts) than when plugged on Windows though.
(And I do hate macOS)
> Macos has no support for a second monitor
This is factually inaccurate. It's perhaps true on the Air and base model Pro, but not the others.
I hate on Apple's bs all the time, but it seems like the reality in your situation is that you got nearly the cheapest mac laptop 5 years ago, with a shitty screen, bumped the ram, and you're doing just fine still, except for some esoteric limitations that I just factored into my budget when buying one recently and aren't blocked by, namely external monitor support without MST.
I didn't get that computer at that time because of some of those limitations, sticking with my prior intel 13" until last year, until I finally convinced myself it was time. Doesn't mean they aren't worth complaining about though, I think 5 years on an Air is pretty good, they've always favored mobile utility over stationary excellence
> I didn't get that computer at that time
Meant to say that I didn't get the lower specced M series around the time you did even though I was generally still sticking with the base models, because of the constraints you mentioned, opting to just wait until it was more feasible to spend more later on and continue suffering
I mean, that's the reason I got the late-2020 MBA M1 16GB in September 2022, instead of going for M2 24GB 512GB for twice the price, because M2 downgraded the 256GB SSD, so, you'd have to get 512GB to get the same performance as M1 256GB, and then might as well max out the RAM at 24GB, too, and now suddenly you're paying 2x for the base model with max RAM compared to the maxed-out base M1 MBA.
So, if you agree with the constraints I've mentioned, how are they inaccurate? The early-2020 Intel MacBook Air does support dual external monitors, it's an M1 regression where it's no longer supported, and it took them until M4 to finally fix the regression, it's present in every MBA until then, and in several MBP models, too.
The more I think about it the more I find it kind of odd yet somewhat endearing that we have so much of our lives determined by the orbit of the planet. Not so much things that are actually affected by it like seasons and its impacts on ecology, but on a yearly scale we had software updates, new hardware and financial reconciliation. Things that all feel so abstract and yet are tied to the cycle of our rock spinning around the sun. The druids approve!
So I have no issue when something like a laptop being pushed back, it was all very arbitrary anyway. Can they release is a Mars based yearly cadence?
Isn't this one of those "how Roman roads determined our rail gauge" things?
Seasons -> harvest -> traditions freeze working/holidaying times -> kids start school a certain time -> gotta sell them computers to be ready at those times.
Something like that, in a million different ways.
and things that don’t fall on a yearly cadence of X times a year are really hard to think about.
If the new M* processor was every ten months, nobody would have the foggiest idea when it was coming out
I have a 16" M2 Max with 32 GB of RAM and I do pretty much everything on it, and I've yet to have a moment where I thought "ugh I wish this was faster"
I used to upgrade computers every 1-1.5 years but I think I could easily roll with this for another 2-3 maybe even 4 or 5 years more.
Heck, even if I was given free money I'd be too lazy to switch to an M4 Max just because of the hassle of transferring data that isn't on iCloud/Time Machine.
I was waiting for the M5 to have some other substantial changes like in the display or sound etc.
I have a M1 Max. Running image/video generation I often which it was faster, much faster.
Same problem as their phones. They don't do anything new or interesting year over year. The CPU gets a bit faster, but that's it. They haven't provided a compelling reason to upgrade in a few years
I'm on an iPhone 12 and I don't want to upgrade to anything that supports Apple Intelligence. Hoping this thing lasts forever.
It is from July 10.
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My completely uninformed bet is that with the release of open source GPT, they're planning to embed this on all laptops. That will require a huge bump in the baseline specs, and therefore you have cascading delays.
My completely uninformed bet
If you're completely uninformed, why post at all? What value do you add to the conversation?
There's nothing wrong with speculation that's clearly labeled as speculation.
There certainly can be. Reputation risk/being canceled, misinformation spreading, ethicial/legal issues depending on the topic, public opinion influence, authority problems, not understanding the community you are participating in, etc.
Everybody speculates on here and the rest of the internet all the time.
Has the community decided _how_ we can talk about things now?
Seems like their comment engages a curious person to wonder how likely it might be. That's as much value as I generally expect to get from any comment.
We’re all shit-posting here