5 year anniversary of MacBook Pro M1 Pro
As I sit at my desk, watching YouTube videos, thinking (and worrying!) about my career growth and progression, letting the mind wander off, swinging back to the past and into the distant future, I go on eBay for some window shopping to help distract my mind off the eventual dreadfulness creeping up from overthinking.
An iPhone 16 Pro Max selling at CA$2,000 with a tiny subtext indicating the shipping fee (+tax) at CA$300 originating from the US pops up. Similar phone listings here and there, just like the economy has intended them to be. I tried narrowing down to Canada and the number of listings halves, and thirds at times. Filtering to worldwide bombards me again with ridiculous US listings. That’s when I realize, “are there no options to exclude a country on the UI?” Maybe there is a way, but simply awfully unacceptable for a platform that has been operating since forever.
Thinking about my iPhone 14 Pro Max that I had bought just before the tarifs were in place, back when the shipping fees were only CA$40-50 for a CA$800 listing, I let out an audible sigh. A sigh that is probably echoed by a multitude of other consumers looking for their next new-old upgrades, trapped between a rock and a hard place: overpriced domestic listings vs. value but 50% tax listings across the border. My mind then wanders off to my MacBook that I’m typing on as I catch my self-reflection through the screen with a a black wallpaper.
“It has been more than 5 years already huh?”, I exclaim unenthusiastically, partly I’m exhausted from the past few months of action-packed days. So I look up MacBooks on eBay, more specifically M3 and newer, 16-inch, 1 TB storage. There are some enticing listings around CA$2,500 (pre-tax, free shipping). Out of curiosity, I calculate the YoY price I’m paying for my current MacBook. I bought it, upgraded CPU, at exactly CA$3,333 5 years ago, in 2021, when it was first released. That means I’ve paid CA$666.6 per year. What an expensive purchase. I should have bought one through Bestbuy instead of paying full price at the Apple Store. I blame my then-naive self. It was when I first got a full-time internship + a part-time job at the same time, 2 income streams, I still use those justifications to cope. I’ve since used it to make some good money from subsequent development engagements, so the investment probably has not all gone to waste. More copium, I huff and puff.
5 years and counting, I can’t believe it. No pieces of tech have been with me that long. More impressively, it still feels like new. Of course, in recent months, there have been some scratches and dents because I have stopped babying it so much and started using more like a workhorse. But, in all, they’re just cosmetics and barely visibles. Probably the most crusty one is the keyboard surface. It has developed a shine to it as the expected from the wear and tear, naturally the area most frequently physically interacted with. But the typefaces are still without any scratches. From a medium distance, it will definitely look like new.
From the performance perspective, I sometimes experience slowness when opening up applications, but I think it’s either the OS or the application’s fault. Because even when I’m putting it through a heavy development workload with all sorts of services and containers running locally, the laptop still breezes past it. Albeit, it does get hot, but still only for a little while, without any hitches. I’m amazed, flabbergasted how well it has kept up with the ages.
I honestly think those are the primary reasons that prevent me from trading it in and splurging on a newer model. I don’t need a newer model. I don’t want to fix an illusionary problem that I don’t have. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Also I think I’ve mellowed out over the years. I would prefer stability and familiarity over new, cool, exciting changes. Though I still welcome changes, I don’t actively seek out displacement, or in this case, replacement or upgrade.
My biggest gripe and regret is most definitely not getting a larger SSD. 512 GB gives me anxiety, especially when macOS doesn’t really tell you what’s the fuck is taking up 60-80 GB in Applications, System Data, and macOS. Those categories keep ballooning without a proper explanation. I found out that removing development caches and build artifacts reduces the storage usage, but not quite to the point I would expect. It seems like Apple really wants to egg me into buying a new one with a bigger storage. But I digress. I’d gladly wipe the bajeezus out of the hard drive and reinstall macOS from scratch to see the storage go down a million times before I would even think about further increasing the shareholders’ values. A payment once every blue moon is enough for a blue moon cycle, better luck next time Apple. And when next time comes, I will buy a used specced out MacBook if needed, just like I have always done with computers in generally, most bang for my buck.
Given my increased workload now, even more so with these AIs and LLMs and agents, compared to earlier years, the MacBook is chugging along just fine, no hiccups. The M1 was, and still is, truly ahead of its time. I expect it to last another 5 years. That vision reminds me of seeing a principal Google engineer on a YouTube video using a 17-inch MacBook that, at time of the video, was probably more than 10 years old (please validate).