18-03-2024
I had this thing for almost 3 years, it was gifted to me on my birthday and is technically my first ever computer - before that I was using my dad's old laptop. After (youtuber buzzword) daily-driving it for so long I came up with a list of pros/cons. Not that I recommend it to anyone, mostly just a list for me to remind me never to buy Apple products in the future.
Putting credit where it's due - Apple's chips are really good. I do think they cheated a little bit by using ARM architecture instead of regular x86_64. It's overpowered for things I do, which are basic browsing, usual Premiere Pro editing and occasional GIMP'ing.
Resell value will be close-ish to original price. That's just a thing with all Apple products, they resell better than everything else.
The battery lasts. I'm not going to say it's bad, but it's not good either. On an average day, I come back home with around 50-60% of battery. However, if I use Premiere Pro, that number takes a dip into 20%'s. Too close for my comfort, but at least it's not dead.
Linux support is good enough. Asahi Linux has come a long way, and though I don't use it anymore, in my short 1 month experiment I found that for daily use it's really close to completion. I wish Apple would open-source some stuff inside but that'll never happen.
Speakers are awesome. Apple is all in on audio stuff, they talk a lot about it during presentations and it shows.
MacOS sucks. It's just not for me. I don't like it. I do appreciate the fact that it's UNIX-based, but that's about it. Window management - awful, it doesn't even have hot corners. I have to use 3rd party tools like yabai to make window management feasible, which is fun in a way? But I wish it was stock.
Because you're buying an Apple product, all you get is 2 Type C's with Thunderbolt and a headphone jack. Want to plug anything else? Buy a "dongle" - what a silly name. It is not enough even for daily use - for average workflow, I want power, Type A mouse and HDMI monitor. And the lack of diversity in the ports isn't helping either! At least there's a headphone jack.
In the past 10 or more years Apple has come under fire of R2R activists and for a good reason - their products are impossible to fix. With new MacBooks simple upgrades like RAM or storage are impossible, as everything is soldered to the board or is on the chip. It sucks because those 2 components are very prone to breaking and wearing out over time, so once your storage dies it's over. In fact I already had a scare around the time I was putting Asahi on; my disk wouldn't get partitioned because it was corrupted, though that was fixed after running First Aid for about a dozen times.
Though I hate this laptop with passion, I'm going to use it for as long as it's resell value is above 500. I'll occasionally dump my entire ~ folder to a separate drive just so that I won't kill myself when the inevitable comes. My next laptop would probably be a smaller Framework, they're all in on repairability and I'm more comfortable with Linux than MacOS. Only time will tell.