>I am still on my MacBook Pro 2015 because of the Keyboard and Trackpad. So in about 2 years time this will be 10 years of usage. I dont intend to replace it any time soon. For browsing it is fast enough. And if you look at the Louis Rossman Channels it seems newer MBP just aren't built the same. It may be worth looking at it again I 2025. How little ( or big ) the past 10 years of Laptop has changed.
May be time to look for a new MacBook especially when all of them now has 16GB memory by default.
Jumping from x86 to arm may be worth it just because of how little power it needs. Perhaps you'd like a laptop where the fan never [*] turns on enough to be audible and with 20 hours battery life?
They fixed the keyboard and the trackpad has been good even in the emoji keyboard models.
Do get one with 32 Gb ram if you can. You never know what you'll want to use it for next year.
[*] Of course, if you compile/run renders etc you may get to hear the fan and it won't last 20 hours.
>They fixed the keyboard and the trackpad has been good even in the emoji keyboard models.
I actually have one with my previous company and they are still not as good. New Scissors has a key travel distance of 1mm instead of 1.5mm, and trackpad is too large that causes false positive compare to zero on my MacBook 2015. Was rather hoping Apple to walk back these two thing by the time I get a new MacBook for myself. But looks like not.
You can play some pretty taxing x86 3d games on my M3 pro laptops, in spite of the two layers of emulation. Those Lunar Lake laptops would need a GPU for that wouldn't they?
Have they in the Wintel world figured out why Apple trackpads can actually act like a mouse replacement yet?
Whole-system wise (they roughly doubled the battery life over the previous generation [0]), and the Intel SoCs have reasonably powerful integrated GPUs.
I’m not a laptop user myself and don’t consider even Apple trackpads (I actually own one of their desktop trackpads) anywhere close to a viable mouse replacement, so no further comment on that.
Well you clearly can't play first person shooters even on Apple's trackpads, but every time I switch to an x86 one the control is more ... approximate.
On my apple laptops i've succesfully played stuff like Minecraft or Path of Exile without a physical mouse. And never missed a mouse while doing software development.
> reasonably powerful integrated GPUs.
Path of Exile is anything but reasonable to the GPU. And on an older M2 mac mini I was lucky to get 20-25 fps. However, the M3 pro on my laptop can mostly run it at 60, to my complete astonishment. Especially considering it's a windows application that is ran by x86 wine that is translated to arm by rosetta 2...
I'm still using my 2015 13" Macbook Pro. I bought it in April 2015, and I think I'll actually get ten years' use out of it. The form factor is still decent, and it generally runs cool and quiet, but the performance is nothing to write home about (shall we say). It's still useable, for now, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that nobody is optimising their software for this tier of system any more.
You do have to be pretty determined to squeeze 10 years out of this sort of laptop. macOS gave up on my laptop a while ago (it runs macOS Monterey), and the app store moans at me occasionally about not being able to upgrade this or that because I don't have a recent enough macOS. It seems Apple gave up on selling replacement batteries for it at some point last year, too.
I replaced my kid's 2017 mac she used through university last year. I expected it to be trashed - and turns out it is in reasonable shape. While it looks like this might be the last OS refresh for it, it felt usable. 16G of RAM probably went a long way. Cleaning it up for a second life.
