MacBook Pro 16 M1 Max

my personal workstation remains a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro I was surprised that a guy who shills Apple for a living still uses a 5 year old MacBook. It goes to show how the longevity of laptops has increased over time. I'm also on a M1 Macbook and find it hard to justify an upgrade.

[...] As much as I loathe the consumerism of buying the latest phone every year, I realized that if the trade-in value is good enough, it's a pretty good strategy in terms of overall technology spend. [...] I got a surprisingly generous trade-in on my Pixel 6 when I bought the 9, and buying the Pixel 3 with Google Fi was pretty cheap too. The last computer I bought was an M1 Max Macbook Pro w/ 36gb of RAM and a 1TB drive, for $2499, in 2023 (thank you B&H). [...]

Having been all over the apple range over the years, the M1 Max Macbook Pro i'm currently using has been I would say the best of their laptops since the original G4 Powerbook. A couple of years into ownership of this machine, and it's been an excellent experience. I develop on it every day, and i've no need to upgrade it, so i'll wait for the M4 :)

[...] I have 12kw total battery capacity (and I'm never at 100%). [...] I game on my m1 max macbook pro now which is shockingly good at 100wh. [...] I have enough battery charging frustrations with the few things I do run daily.

[...] I use Hermes with the $20/mo ChatGPT Codex integration, myself, as well as Qwen running locally on a 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro to help save my ever-quickly shrinking Codex credits. [...] They treat themselves as the CEO of a bunch of agentic employees and have AI generated infographics of their "Stack" (all hail the mighty Stack) and everybody stands in a circle and applauds the most convoluted Hermes setups you've ever seen with not a single word how any of this is supposedly making anybody any money. [...] Are people asking money for something they one-shot instructions to an orchestration agent which delegated to fifteen other agents in Kanban and then spat out something that "works"? [...] When a new frontier model comes out I'll pass the previous frontier model's work past the new model and let it tear it to shreds and see what improvements could be made for shits, giggles, and to waste a week's worth of tokens in the course of

[...] On my M1 Max MacBook Pro, Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B provides better responses in similar time (60 tokens/second, vs. [...] 3.8 27B is slower, being a dense model, but so are dense Gemmas.

[...] But I was struck by this: The last time I had seriously dabbled with exploits and low-level recovery was when I spent months trying to revive a bricked M1 Max MacBook Pro. [...]

[...] In 2024, I picked up a 2021-released 14” M1 Max MacBook Pro w/ 2 TB and 64 GB for $1800 from Microcenter. [...] It’s my daily driver for BBedit, some IDEs, music apps, Firefox with dozens of tabs, Mail, Messages, iTerm2 with half a dozen tmux sessions. [...] I’ve been dabbling in Ableton Live Suite 12 Lite, which came with my Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S88 MKII midi keyboard, and this machine never breaks a sweat. [...] Meanwhile, my wife’s daily driver is a 2013 13” MacBook Air w/ 128 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM. [...] I purchased it used from a Craigslist seller to be my daily driver 14 years ago, and it lasted until I upgraded to a 2020 M1 MacBook Air base model, which I later donated to a friend in need.

[...] Works great, and I still have my M1Max MacBook Pro (my previous development machine), for when I want to hit the road.

As mentioned before, I think Apple hardware is the best alternative right now. Mac Studio, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, you can find even some used ones with enough RAM that will run models like Qwen reasonably well. I'm using a M1 Max MacBook Pro and it runs Qwen 3.5 on Ollama (without MLX) at a decent speed.

I’ve got a first gen M1 Max and it destroys all but the largest cloud instances (that cost its entire current market value per month!) You're either underestimating how big cloud instances can get or overestimating how much it costs to rent a cloud instance that would beat an M1 Max at any multi-core processing. According to Geekbench, the M1 Max macbook pro has a single-core performance of 2374 and multicore of 12257; AWS's c8i.4xlarge (16 vCPUs) has 2034 and 12807, so relatively equivalent. [...] As discussed recently in Geekbench is underestimating the multi-core performance of very large machines for parallelizable tasks -- the benchmark's performance peaks at around 12x single-core performance. [...]

My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory. (To be fair my $LARGEENTERPRISEEMPLOYER reserves about half of it to very bad Big Brother daemons and applications I have no control over)

[...] I bought an M1 Max Macbook Pro and I maxed most of the specs. [...] (Except for the SSD, which I got the 2TB option.) I have not even THOUGHT about “upgrading” to a newer model. [...] How much are they worth?

[...] My older M1 Max Macbook Pro and underpowered newer Macbook Air are the only things I use.

I use my M1 Max MacBook Pro for pretty serious CFD with OpenFoam. It’s astonishing how good it is… but a newer machine would be nearly 2x faster, which matters when single runs can take 1-3 hours.

[...] I got a GMKtec G5 which is about 3"x3"x2", has an Intel N97 CPU, 12GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD (upgraded to a 2TB NVMe disk). [...] It has remarkable performance; I tried GNOME on NixOS and it felt instantly responsive for all general purpose desktop use (web browsing, vscodium with my linting extensions, etc). The only area of my everyday workflow in which it clearly fell behind my M1 Max MacBook Pro was in Rust compilation which is obviously expected - I was just shocked how close it was for everything outside of that. [...] It has happily been sitting on my desk running Forgejo, Mastodon, Vaultwarden, and acting as a personal storage server with that 2TB drive for the last 6 months and I never even hear the fan. [...]

In my opinion both Windows and Linux are much worse than even modern macOS, so I'm going to keep using it for the foreseeable future, but being rather conservative with installing updates. On hardware, my M1 Max MacBook Pro is the best laptop I've ever owned, period.

The single reason I switched from next.js was because it was taking me 6-7 seconds on a small project to see changes I made appear in the browser during development (on an M1 Max Macbook pro with 64gb of ram). This is when using the app router, where every change requires a compilation step. I now just use a React SPA with Vite.

I think that is much too hand-wavy regarding the performance differences. [...] I would wager that, for many applications, only a subset of these tasks are relevant to the performance of the application, yet such benchmark suites distil out all nuance into a single value. [...] I have tried running CASTEP (built from source), a density functional theory calculator, on both an M1 Max MacBook Pro [0], and on a Ryzen 7840HS Lenovo laptop [1]. A cursory glance at those Geekbench results linked might make you expect that the performance is roughly equivalent, but the Ryzen outperforms the Mac by about 4x, a huge difference. [...] Presumably the Ryzen's balance of instruction performance is more useful for DFT calculations than the Mac's, which perhaps is weaker in areas that might matter for this application, but stronger in areas that might matter for others. [...]

[...] That said, I enjoy the hardware improvements happening, because it allowed me to go from that huge full tower desktop with multiple GPUs and water cooling to doing everything I need in my life, pretty much, from a 14" M1 Max Macbook Pro. [...] For me, I am not quite ready to replace my M1 Max MBP with an M4, but I am likely going to bump to an M5, simply for performance when editing photos in Lightroom / DxO Photo Lab, but that's more of a recent requirement. Before I got this M1 Max MBP, I had a 2015 15" MBP that worked just fine for 7 years, and would have kept going if it didn't have a bulging battery and I decided to upgrade rather than repair it. [...]

I have an M4 iPad Pro, it beats my M1 Max MacBook Pro on a lot of benchmarks, yet I cannot use it for programming, 3D modeling or VFX. [...] I want the operating system that runs on the other Mx devices to run on my iPad Pro. [...]

[...] It's now due for replacement, and I'm still pretty confident I can build a more performant Windows system for less money than buying anything macOS based - even if I buy a mac Studio I'd need to go for 64GB RAM, and that would be £2500 for just the system unit with 512GB of storage. I can build a faster windows-based i9 system for that, complete with 64GB of RAM and probably 4TB of storage (if not more). I've got an M1 max macbook Pro as I've used macbooks for a few years now and despite trying Windows-based laptops out, I've not found any where the keyboard, trackpad, build quality and screen match up to a mac, and I (for the most part) like macOS more than Windows. [...]

I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. [...]

I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro I don't know why you bought a new one. You can have two ways to look at this, one way is your ultra pessimistic view, my view is I don't need to upgrade my laptop ever 2 years anymore. [...] Now I can comfortably say I'm keeping my M1 Max for a decade. [...]

I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro. [...]

as a long term apple user, their blatant disregard for fixing bugs is really starting to piss me off to the point where next time i upgrade my phone and computer, i'm probably going back to android/linux. their software is literally a microsoft-tier experience (maybe even worse at this point) across the board now, and i'm not going to keep paying a premium for non-premium bullshit full of stupid bugs any junior dev could figure out. these are just the bugs i can think of off the top of my head which have existed for literal years: - on iphone, the haptic and sound feedback from tapping letters on the keyboard has a noticeable lag to it half the time. - on iphone, the volume of all system sounds shoots up to 100% without warning, even if you're wearing headphones. this bug also reverses the volume level, so you have to turn the volume up to make it go down. - on iphone, browser tabs just get stuck displaying one page (or sometimes nothing at all) no matter how many times to try to navigate or refresh, and you have to either kill safari and restart it or close the tab and open a new one. - on mac laptops, the battery drains while sleeping at a rate of about 20% per day. i've been a mac user since 2015 but only since i got an m1 max macbook pro, nearly every time i open the lid, it's dead. [...] - on any platform with siri, it will just reset to the default voice/accent regularly, making all the other options useless. - on any platform with siri, you ask it to remind you about something in x minutes or at x t

I own a M1 Max MacBook Pro 14.2 it is the best computer I have ever owned. Their build quality I haven't questioned its really their weird design choices. Although, I'm not sure why it didn't come out with Wifi 6E and faster SD card slot but those are nitpicks and I don't use SD cards (I did put in a flush SD card to give me a 512gb of extra storage).

I bought a Framework 13 when it first came out, with exactly this hope. I gave up after about one month of madness and ordered an M1 Max Macbook Pro. [...]

FWIW I dev on an M1 Max MacBook Pro and it’s the best computer I’ve ever owned. Maybe the best thing about these M3 chips is that they’re making those older machines more affordable.

[...] I play Dota from time to time on my M1 Max Macbook Pro and it runs more than fine. [...]

[...] Because I have a M1 max macbook pro, and it never gets hot ever. [...]

my m1 max macbook pro 14 has small little divots out of the edge on the right side (not on the left) presuambly because of where my wrist sits when using the track pad. It would be nice it there was some radius on it to not cause that.

I have an M1 Max Macbook Pro, and having used many employer's newer variants of M-series macbook's since then, I'm still very satisfied with my M1 Max but the air series is really good, and very light my M1 is now noticeably heavy and I don't think upgrading to another Macbook Pro is the move the resell value of the M1 did not hold, specifically the bumped up storage models. There doesn't seem to be a market for 8TB of space specifically, but the base 1 - 2TB holds its value because the baseline of the MBP holds its value M5 Max looks tempting if there is a very compelling tradein, but the M1 Max is pretty old so I don't have real hope of that, but I'll look. [...]

[...] For an easy start just install LM Studio and have a play.) I picked up a second-hand 64GB M1 Max MacBook Pro a while back for not too much money for such experimentation. [...] It can also run all manner of diffusion models, but there the performance suffers (vs. [...]

[...] If I do the five finger gesture on my M1 Max Macbook Pro, and start typing, the first few keystrokes will give me the "you're trying to type where you can't" sound and they won't register into the search box. [...]

Chiming in here, M1 Max MacBook Pro 64GB using gpt-oss:20b over ollama with Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot is unusably slow compared to using Claude Sonnet 4, which requires (I think?) GitHub Copilot Pro. But I'm happy to pay the subscription vs buying a Mac Studio for now.

[...] I have gpt-oss:20b installed with ollama, but haven't found a need to use it yet, and it seems like it just takes too long on an M1 Max MacBook Pro 64GB. [...] I wonder if anyone is getting better results, or comparable for cheaper or free. [...]

So, on a mac, what good alternative to ollama supports mlx for acceleration? My main use case is that I have an old m1 max macbook pro with 64 gb ram that I use as a model server.

This is on my M1 Max Macbook Pro though it's probably the same on all platforms since the dist dir contains all platform distributions local du -h -d 1 . 214G ./crates 33G ./dist 830M ./rustup 2.7G ./crates.io-index 250G I'm fairly indiscriminate with my setup. I just used defaults everywhere.

I can't tell the difference between my new M1 Max MacBook Pro and the new M3 Max Macbook Pro If you bought a M3 Max just to fuck around on Facebook and Hacker News then of course you won't notice a difference. If you are running workloads that actually require that level of performance then you will notice a significant difference. M3 Max is twice as fast at rendering 3D scenes in Cinebench.

[...] I have a 64gb M1 Max Macbook Pro and I think I'm limited to 4 bit quantized models? [...]