Over the years I've gone through a Core2 MacBook, a 2011 MBP, a 2015 MBP, and now a 14" 2023 M2 Pro as each wore out physically over the years. Generally the charging systems and keyboards degraded severely by the 5 year mark. The 2015 had all those problems as well as janky graphics issues, but I used it until its SSD died recently.
Aside from performance it's hard to overstate just how quiet the current MacBook Pro is. The 2015 got noisy pretty easily especially if I had to switch to the discrete GPU, and anything heavier than 1080p30 in Firefox would cause the fans to go bonkers. By most accounts the last of the Intel models were worse. This one? After a few hours of transcoding video the fans still only spin up to a quiet whisper.
What I don't hear anyone talk about is the rigidity. You could hear the 2015 creak and flex if you picked it up with one hand. The 2023 just feels like a solid chunk of metal.
For all of its warts, this is probably my favorite hardware of the bunch. The software (macos 14) is utter garbage though. That's the culmination of lots of poor design choices over the years and nearly non-existent quality control.
I work with a lot of 4K elements and video in Apple Motion, After Effects, and other applications. The better the chip the faster things go, especially previews and encoding. Every second ends up counting.
I can see why others like me may upgrade. But I’m not going to bother just yet.
I write text in a text editor all day but would still upgrade my machine on a regular basis. I have a Threadripper and use all 32 cores everyday. I'm still debating on whether or not to upgrade to the new generation released yesterday. 4 year old CPUs are not speedy.
You'd be surprised at just how slow running zellij in iTerm was on an Intel MBP. Somehow in 2023 we've managed to create resource hungry text interfaces.
