> Sorry you made your first gen chip so good that I don't feel the need to upgrade
M1 MacBooks are ~5 years old at this point, and if you've been working a laptop hard for 5 years it's often worth getting an upgrade for battery life as well as speed.
I don’t think it’s the fact that it’s plugged in so much. I used mine plugged in pretty much all the time. It only charges to 80% but every once in a while, I drain it down to zero. I do live in a cooler climate as well and I probably don’t use my computer as much as most people.
What magic are you and everyone else doing ? I already have only 92% on my less than year old M4 14inch Pro.
I haven't booted up the older M1 recently to check, but I remember it was throwing replace battery warnings well before I got the upgrade and that I think that triggering below 80%.
I actually went to the Apple Store last spring with battery upgrade in mind, but Apple Store in Burlingame told me it will take 3-5 business days to do the change.
I didn't have a spare laptop to work with at that time for a week so i held of[1]. This is probably a reason for lot of people opting out of upgrades.
After the M4 came there was hype for the new screen which performs better in sunlight and M1->M4 seemed worth it plus vRAM which is certainly handy.
[1]The screen was also deteriorating - no physical issues just wasn't as bright as it was new) and they said I should replace that too. The economics a new Air worth of money on a older laptop with just 1-2 years primary use life left is shaky.
2. Batteries age faster in the beginning and then their ageing rate plateaus. It's the same for electric cars. E.g. a Tesla can lose 5% efficiency in the first 30k miles, but will lose the next 5% over 60k+.
Perhaps something is wrong with way I cycle it or set my apps up. I always feel it never hold charges anywhere close to what everyone is saying they get.
The only time battery is not a problem is when video streaming for hours, presumably the decoding is offloaded to the dedicated media chips on the board.
I don’t use it a lot and I keep it plugged in some majority of the time. It only charges to 80%. I also occasionally, probably every month, drain the battery to zero.
Also, the majority of time it’s been in my van, which is pretty chilly most of the time.
From my understanding, battery health is based on use and environment.
I have been monitoring temperatures closely with mac-stats https://mac-stats.com/ over the last few months.
It typically runs around 110-130 for CPU and the battery is 85-90 on light usage like say browser or slack.
However if i run a full compile of the repo or just about anything a bit compute intensive CPU jumps easily to 170-200 range regularly and battery to 120.
I am now frequently running the fans higher manually to cool it down[1]
I think Apple is optimizing for being quiet over battery and laptop life and have kept the fans low speed even if it would benefit the hardware to speed them up earlier under load.
[1] This is not because I can the temps all the time in the top bar. The palm rests do become noticeably hotter and bit uncomfortable than the noise would be.
frankly nothing holds a candle to the battery performance of the M series machines so it’s likely a safe bet to assume that advantage will also translate into longer overall life/battery health until we see otherwise. We’ll see in a few years I suppose.
I felt the same way about the battery in my 2018 MacBook ... it was losing capacity, but I didn't mind as it still ran for hours between charged.
Then it started having issues waking up from sleep. Only the OG Apple charger could wake it up, then it would see it actually had 40-60% battery but something had gone wrong while sleeping and it thought it was empty.
Intel MacBooks had terrible SMC issues, so maybe this won't afflict the M-series. Just sharing because I could still use that MacBook a few hours between charged, it just couldn't be trusted to wake up without a charger. That's really inconvenient and got me to upgrade combined with new features.
I switched from an M1 to a new M4 (this is my work laptop and it had a problem) and the old M1 has a much better battery life than the new M4. Quite noticeable. The M1 was such an awesome machine. The M4 is faster, but the M1 was plenty fast.
I spilled a sugary coffee drink in my keyboard, and having it replaced under AppleCare+ meant they also replaced half the rest of the machine (battery, display etc). I think I'm set for another 5 years.
How much would you charge me to swap out my MacBook Pro 2018 15.4" battery using authorized methods to not cause other damage? I want my laptop back within a few days, a 90 day warranty on parts and labor, and I want a genuine Apple battery - not some unknown 3rd party.
For battery replacement you really want to take this to a local electronics repair shop (read the reviews so you find a good one). They'll do it same day or next day.
It'll probably be around $200-$300 if you want an official battery. More like half that if you're willing to accept a 3rd party one.
Apple doesn't sell the official battery as a standalone part even to Authorized Apple repair shops, so anyone telling you they're installing an official battery is already lying to you or putting in something used.
Even if a local shop somehow sourced a legit, new Apple battery, why wouldn't I go to the Apple Store if it's the same cost and would only be the battery?
(For $299, Apple replaces the speakers, touchpad, batteries, top case, and keyboard and provides a parts and labor warranty for 90 days)
MVNOs FTW. They know they're competing for price-conscious consumers so have to offer more value. The big 3 know most of their customers are going to go with one of the big boys, all of whom are expensive and not great.
MVNOs have slower data rates since they buy deprioritized traffic in bulk, don’t have the roaming agreements domestically and especially not internationally, and don’t offer unlimited high speed data.
Hm, not my experience. When traveling internationally there was an option I could have used, but I chose to use a local SIM card instead. The data speeds are just fine for me, and I haven't experienced any issues with roaming domestically.
But then I don't even care about 5g versus 4g/LTE for the most part, so perhaps I'm just not noticing limits that affect others.
That’s how MVNOs work, they buy data in bulk at wholesale prices. But they
pay for lower QoS. There isn’t anything wrong with that. But they are getting jankier bandwidth.
T-Mobile comes with 5GB of high speed data per month to use for roaming in Canada and Mexico and lower speed data roaming almost anywhere else in the world.
Based on the type of responses you are giving, I actually do believe you probably call your phone company's customer service regularly. So perhaps your criteria might be different. Have you heard of Consumer Cellular?
Yeah, those products people are passionate about and really like are total junk. We should mock them while not explaining any of our reasoning, thank you for showing the way.
I explain my reasoning on the Franework laptop for instance - they are bulky, shoddily made, loud, and poor battery life compared to even an M1 MacBook Air.
From what I read, even for x86 laptops, they are for from the best and that’s a really low bar in 2025
> Franework [sic] ... they are for from the best [sic] ... from what I read
That's a lot of typos to just repeat someone else's first hand experience you read about. I guess I should have opinions on Airbus vs. Boeing, too -- mind you, I've never flown a plane, but you know, I've read some stuff online so I'm basically an expert.
Really? While I don’t know anything about flying a plane, I do know when they say something weighs $x, how heavy $x is. I also know that if it has a fan that stays on constantly it’s going to be louder than a laptop that doesn’t have a fan or one that hardly ever comes on.
I know that if they say the laptop last 3 hours on a battery compared to 13+ hours that 13 > 3. I learned that when I was 4 years old.
I also know that if it’s an x86 laptop, that it is going to run hotter than my M2 MacBook Air.
If I read the dimensions of the laptop and read the dimensions of my laptop, I can easily say it’s “bulky”.
I leave my setup plugged in, using a low-profile USB-C to lightning cable on the iPhone SE stuck on the back of my screen and wired hotspot on macOS is a great experience.
We're discussing a MacBook someday with a built-in phone, the closest I've found is an iOS device wired to my MacBook as a wired hotspot. It's like having fast wifi everywhere.
Using my personal phone (that I also use for other things like calls) wouldn't be like having wifi everywhere on my Mac, for example if I walk away from my laptop while on the phone the Mac would lose internet.
The relationship is that the credit card companies are not accepting payments for erotica but are accepting payments for digested and regurgitated erotica.
What a nice way to talk to another person who... didn't attack you?
A typical passenger car driving 12,000 miles puts out about 5 metric tons of C02
The person driving that passenger car likely has a 1,000 sq ft or larger home or apartment, which can vary widely but could be reasonably estimated at another 5 metric tons of C02 (Miami vs. Minnesota makes a huge difference)
So we're at 10 metric tons for someone who doesn't live in a van but still drives like a suburbanite
Care to be a little kinder next time you feel whatever compelled you to write you response to the other user? Jeesh.
> I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster
The numbers you provided do not come to 4000x faster (closer to 2400x)
> Why is actual user experience not able to keep up with benchmarks and marketing?
Benchmarks and marketing are very different things, but you seem to be holding them up as similar here.
The 5x 6x 4x numbers you describe across marketing across many years don't even refer to the same thing. You're giving numbers with no context, which implies you're mixing them and the marketing worked because the only thing you're recalling is the big number.
Often, every M-series chip is a HUGE advancement over the past in GPU. Most of the "5x" performance jumps you describe are in graphics processing, and the "Intel" they're comparing it to is often an Intel iGPU like the Iris Xe or UHD series. These were low end trash iGPUs even when Apple launched those Intel devices, so being impressed by 5x performance when the M1 came out was in part because the Intel Macs had such terrible integrated graphics.
The M1 was a giant jump in overall system responsiveness, and the M-series seems to be averaging about a 20% year over year meaningful speed increase. If you use AI/ML/GPU, the M-series yearly upgrade is even better. Otherwise, for most things it's a nice and noticeable bump but not a Intel-to-M1 jump even from M1-to-M4.
The planet doesn't care about your political grievances. You cannot negotiate with reality.
Those with the most resources—whether nations, corporations, or individuals—have the most to lose when ecosystems collapse. They also have the most capacity to act.
Shipping costs matter. So does having a livable planet. Beyond the obvious priorities: The people framing this as "taxation without representation" are the same ones who've externalized environmental costs onto everyone else for decades.
Is the U.N. fund perfect? No bureaucracy is.
Doing nothing while waiting for perfect solutions is how we got here.
I'm guessing carriers/networks can't handle a fleet of MacBooks-with-cellular yet. The data workload would be sustained and intense with macOS not having the type of system-level cellular framework/data control as iPad and iOS (I have used the low data mode on macOS, it helps but only handles a small part of the problem).
I have bought cracked-screen iPhones since Personal Hotspot allowed wired connections back in the 2000s, velcro'd them to the back of my MacBook screen and have been living the "I have internet on my Mac everywhere" life since then. With 5G, I can't really tell when I'm on Wi-Fi vs. when my MacBook opts for the hotspot connection.
I'd love a cellular MacBook and would also insta-buy, but I've given up hope until the next network upgrade.
That doesn’t make much sense to me, there are literally billions of phones that people are using all the time.
Apple has over 2.3 billion active devices of which a small percentage are Macs (an estimated 24 million were sold in 2024 and around twice that in iPads).
The most difficult to scale part of a cell network is number of devices connected, not bandwidth used anyway and cellular Macs aren’t going to add significantly more load to a network. And that assumes that Apple even cares what a carrier thinks.
I’m in Australia, not the USA, and for all people like to complain about internet here, we have excellent mobile coverage and it’s relatively affordable, but it’s all priced by usage.
I have 4 devices on my plan with shared 210GB of 4G usage between them for around AUD$200 (USD$130) a month on Australia’s best network (Telstra). I work remotely from cafes a lot (probably around 20-30 hours a week) as a developer and get nowhere close to that usage. I update all my apps, download all my podcasts, listen to lossless music and stream video whenever I want during breaks (although I’m not a huge out-of-home video consumer). I do literally nothing to limit my bandwidth usage and am lucky to use 30-40GB a month across all my devices.
The problem I think is that desktop software is often not written on the idea that they might need to sip from a straw.
Anyone who has tethered their machines to a phone with a middling connection knows how bad the computer experience cna get.
Like you mentioned 50 gigs a month per device... when I had to tether my machine for a week I was finding myself using 10 gigs _a day_, and this was ~6 years ago.
Not an argument that this stuff is impossible, of course, but I do think these machines are different beasts.
> The most difficult to scale part of a cell network is number of devices connected, not bandwidth used
Not a network engineer, but isn't it possible that it's only wasy to scale the number of devices because mobile devices play nice with the network? For example, battery life depends on batching network requests, meaning the incentives are aligned between Google, Apple, and the carriers?
If every device defaults to treating the network like a LAN, like MacOS is accustomed to being able to do, that may change the part of the network that's easy to scale
> (I have used the low data mode on macOS, it helps but only handles a small part of the problem)
Yes, I mentioned that in the post you responded to.
> Not sure which apps, if any, respect it, but it's there
It reduces data consumption for me about 1/5. Not nothing, but the Mac can easily consume hundreds of GB of data a week doing "normal" activities. YouTube on a MacBook is many times more data than the equivalent on a phone screen.
Cracked phones aren't tempting for anyone to steal when I leave it out, and the 5G iPhone SE came out many years ago and is available new for about $130 without a cracked screen, but finding a use for cracked devices saves them from being ewaste.
Apple knows their sales numbers, so I imagine is that they know the base model will sell the most quantity. Having it out now means more sales at the highest MSRP before talk of the next model release.
Buyers who walk into an Apple store for a base MacBook Pro will wait if they hear a new model is coming out. So if you have a buyer basing purchases on the generation number, it makes sense to launch that model as soon as possible.
Pro/Max buyers generally are checking into specs and getting what they need. Hence the M2 Ultra still being for sale, for some niches that have specific requirements.
M1 MacBooks are ~5 years old at this point, and if you've been working a laptop hard for 5 years it's often worth getting an upgrade for battery life as well as speed.