I’ve been a Mac user for 20 years and it’s wild to think how slow my 2003 PowerBook G4 or even my 2008 MacBook Pro felt after five years compared with my 2021 M1 Pro.

My 2013 Core i7 took almost eight years to get to where the previous ones were at five, and if it weren’t for local LLMs pushing me toward an upgrade in the next year or two, I have to imagine my M1 Pro could be my daily driver well into the next decade.

M1 Air guy here... I'm not looking for a replacement still. Almost 6 years now. Runs butter-smooth. Best tech purchase I ever made.

I rode a 2009 MacPro5,1 (¡galliently! into the future, with capable GPU upgrades) until Jan23's M2Pro mini debut (which I still use as my main Mac).

Apple Silicon is certainly incredible (I also have a base-model M4mini, but it severely lacks RAM/ports so I don't really use it much/eWaste); my only Silicon-purchase-regret was buying a beautiful new 2024 MacBookAir (15") – heavily discounted $850@CostCo – but with only 8GB of RAM (it is functionally worthless, other than for watching it destroy your SSD with page-outs as you casually stream YouTubies...). In 2024, only 8GB of RAM (soldered onto the board because fuck you)!

My 16" M1 Pro personal laptop is literally just as smooth for 99% of tasks as my work M5 pro. It's crazy how well they built these. I mean the screen on this and the speakers are superb. And you can find these for like 500-800 bucks 2nd hand. I just hope they give us a few more years of MacOS updates.

Macbook Pro 14" Max M1 (64GB). Best Apple device I've owned and worth the investment at the time, especially given the prices now. It's still pretty great for being as old as it is. Have no intention to pay inflated prices, I'll ride it out.

I'm wondering what decrease in performance you were expecting from a five year old computer? It isn't like the processor suddenly gets slower simply because it's older.

I suspect if you used an average 5 year old PC and current PC, there'd be very little noticeable difference between the two outside of LLMs

My work gave me an m4 MacBook Pro. I could barely tell the difference between my personal computer and my work computer.

generally agree, although mine's battery health has been sitting at 80% for what seems like ages now.

Same, and I dual-boot Asahi as well.

Biggest issue with my M3 Max is apple mandatory fun bloatware. I think it's the same playbook as phones long term. The hardware is still powerful but the software is optimized for the latest CPU, so older models run hot, take a fraction of the second longer to load the resources, etc. That stacks up over 5-6 years of releases to make older models feel slower.