My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

If you are going to start making a list of expensive hobbies, $3K for a computer isn't going to be anywhere near the top of the list.

I think it actually would be quite near the top, in terms of ranking. Most hobbies are a lot cheaper.

Of course, not near the top in terms of money because there are a few hobbies that cost vastly more.

The type of person shelling out 3k for a computer is not running it until the wheels come off.

What do you mean "in terms of ranking" vs "in terms of money"?

I mean if you ranked all the hobbies in terms of cost, casually spending $3k on a laptop would be near the top of the list. But there are a small number of hobbies that are vastly more expensive.

The distribution is highly skewed. Like wealth. The 99th percentile are near the top in rank (by definition) but nowhere near the top in absolute terms.

What does the purchase price have to do with it? Seems like it would entirely depend on circumstances and constraints, rather than cost, how long someone would run something

Just off the top of my head in hobbies that I've been in/around that this $3k would be a nothing burger: photography, wood working, grease monkey, cycling, gun collecting, antiquing, recreational substances...

Tells me they are price insensitive and probably get a new computer every couple of years.

There’s some nuance to it.

Judging by the authors preference for Linux, I’m guessing this hobby has some professional applications as well.

$3k is the price of a very nice guitar, but I am not about to casually shell out that money every few years.

However, I earn my wage using a computer, so it’s a lot easier to justify staying relatively current on specs.

Median vs mean, essentially, is how I read it.

Try general aviation as a hobby. It will be eye opening

I actually can’t think of one hobby that costs less than $3k

For me the only one would be sketching/painting. But I agree with the point in general, most hobbies cost a lot.

That reasoning does not make any sense. I spend $3-4k on a MBP and run it till it fall apart, usually 5-7 years later.

A lot of things are cheap to taste — a second hand bike and some $200 running shoes and you’re training for a triathlon. Or a makerspace membership and you’re now sewing or doing 3d printing.

It’s once you get “serious” and need to have your own equipment that all these things get real. Or in the case of things like social dance, you want to take time off with and travel further and further away to attend pricey exchanges and camps.

cross training ?

I reckon it makes some sense for Apple users. You have to be willing (and financially able) to upgrade when Apple says. Apple forcefully obsoletes their products way too quickly to be a viable option if you care about longevity[0]. I have five excellent-condition still-perfectly-working Apple products next to me, none of which have current operating system support from Apple.

[0] EDIT: for reference, my previous ThinkPad lasted me 14 years.

I interpreted it as: if you include all hobbies and games made by humans in history, I'm pretty sure most of them involve a set of cards made of paper, some others involving wooden figurines (chess, checkers) or even drawing on dirt with a stick.

A computer is many, many orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than that.

This isn't said with the intention to demonize expensive hobbies if no one is harmed because of it.

But I do sometimes wonder if my hobbies are too dependent of a power plug. Even reading, which I do with a e-reader.

> $3K for a computer isn't going to be anywhere near the top of the list.

That says a lot about the community you live in.

No, if cross training qualified, those in cross training would be sure to tell you they did cross training and go into details about it

That they've worked hard to be able to afford nice things? What do you think it says, exactly? This is a pretty irritating comment.

The "mac community" is even worse. I recently spend $4k on linux laptop, and I get endless criticism, that it is "too expensive" for a "windows pc". I need spec for my work, and comparable mac is 4x more expensive!

Worked hard, won a lottery, whatever. It mostly says that these are people with tens of thousands to burn on fun stuff, and such people are a rather narrow slice of the population. There's nothing bad about that, it's just a rather niche community, whose opinions may not be very relevant for the large majority of people outside that niche.

You can absolutely be a hobbyist photographer for a fraction of $3k. A hobbyist lens collector is a different story.

I have the M1 Max. It’s still going hard. Not planning to replace it anytime soon.

Well, there’s hobbies and there’s a buying addiction that comes with a hobby.

In many areas there’s a tendency to overdo it with tools, gadgets and also to compensate for lack of skill with more gadgets. I do woodworking for example and my total spend for industrial vacuum, different types of power and hand tools, work bench, clamps, etc probably comes to around a few thousand EUR. Mine is a really good set-up for a hobby, but I still don’t have any stationary machines or fancy separate work area or room. I bought everything over the years and I only buy brand-name. My point is, this is actually a lot of money especially if spent as lump sum and not at all a “nothing-burger”.

Thinking it’s a hobby is an american thing. I’ve never met anyone who do it, but for Kobe Bryant, Harrisson Ford, Tom Cruise it seems normal.

Most people save $400 per month tops, that they spend on holidays.

HN is that niche community though. HN is a forum targeting a niche community that skews technical no matter where someone is physically from, and that community skews relatively rich. Concern trolling that there are starving kids in Africa when there are literal billionaires posting here; I mean sure, I'm not saying we shouldn't say something for fear of their feelings. Nor am I saying that everyone here must be rich in order to comment her. Just that some members of the niche community can recognize are inordinately rich. Advertising eg the Volonaut here will likely generate a couple of sales, and if you thought a $3k laptop was a lot, definitely don't look that one up.

Knitting / crocheting / quilting / embroidering? Drawing / painting / calligraphy? Singing in a choir? Creative writing / journaling / blogging? Solving crossword puzzles? Bird watching? Day hikes? Reading? Visiting museums? Learning about history / philosophy / art / whatever? Learning a language? Taking dance classes? Playing chess or petanque or any other game that doesn’t require expensive gear? Or most sports?

Maxed out a mbp, I couldn’t get more than a bit than 8k. And comparable is probably generous.

14 years as your main driver ? Because that what we’re talking about.

Is this 16,000 dollar laptop in the room with us now?

It’s perfectly possible to enjoy hobbies deeply without getting “serious” in the way you describe.

I’ve taken my 10 euro dance classes for years without feeling the necessity of pricey exchanges and camps.

My neighbour goes to the park many evenings to play petanque, doesn’t cost him anything.

A couple I’m friends with goes on day hikes where they do bird watching—maybe they bought a nice pair of binoculars once? Another couple likes to lay jigsaw puzzles together, not exactly breaking the bank!

My sister is learning Finnish because she never learned a non indo-european language. She bought a book.

I would wager most people’s hobbies are low key like this because either they don’t have disposable income to spend on them, or they don’t want too!

I can not think of many hobbies which are less expensive if you are serious about them. Some hobbies around me, where $3000 wouldn't get you far: Motorcycles, cars, cycling, collecting anything, woodworking, machining, music making, traveling, horses,...

Absolutely yeah, and regardless of whether it ends up eventually being expensive, I think part of what I’m saying is that it is important to know how to at least start something cheaply.

I get very frustrated with the kind of people who see one tiktok about a thing and suddenly feel like they need to spend $3k to pursue whatever their new passion is.

to be pedantic, a maxed out MBP is 90200 BRL in Brazil now before AC+ and software, around 16777 USD

just skip going out to lunch once and eat a turkey sandwich instead /s

This whole discussion is weird. For the majority of the world's population, dropping $3K on a computer is a non-starter, if even possible. Over six hundred million people cannot even afford proper food and shelter. But there are also sixty-two million millionaires in the world. So there are a large number of people who can buy a MBP without even blinking. We've just discovered income disparity. What the heck does that obvious truth have to add to a review of a MBP?

Seriously. Stapelberg is a talented guy that's done well for himself, why can't he have nice things if he wants them?

It makes sense for some people, and doesn't for others. Not particularly surprising or insightful.

> photography, wood working, grease monkey, cycling, gun collecting, antiquing, recreational substances

Yacht owner says ‘hold my beer’.

14 is a indeed very long. Let’s instead assume 12, it’s 2013 and you got a top specced T440 with 4th gen i7. That’s actually not bad and the build quality is like a tank as all Thinkpads. Nothing I would use as daily driver myself but having used many other thinkpads of that generation I can see why others are still getting by with it today.

Since we are talking about OS support. 4th gen Intel isn’t supported by Windows 11, so you’d have to upgrade to Linux.

That was not a judgment, good or bad. Simply an observation.

I have an M2 Ultra. I don't see myself getting rid of it for another 5 years at least.

Bullshit. I shelled $3k for my MBP M1 back in 2021 and I intend to use it until I can’t anymore.

It depends on the person and the use case. Different personalities etc

>I have five excellent-condition still-perfectly-working Apple products next to me, none of which have current operating system support from Apple.

If they're working perfectly, why does it matter if they have current operating support? It doesn't seem like you're dependent on Apple.

That's not particularly rational given how quickly computers progress in both performance and cost, a current-gen $1k Macbook Air will run circles around your M1. You'd probably be much better off spending the same amount of money on cheaper machines with a more frequent upgrade cadence. And you can always sell your old ones on eBay or something.

Software drops support for certain OS versions even if the device still can run it.

The first iPad Pro can’t run adobe products for example.

The Mac is a bit more resilient to this, but it’s still worrying as yearly improvements become subtler.

I can think of dozens. Running, dance, knitting, painting, woodworking (you can go very far for much less than $3k), archery, chess, board games, drawing, painting, brewing, darts, cycling, etc. etc.

Obviously you can spend pretty much any amount of money on those if you want (if you are "serious" about it) but you don't have to and most people don't. Also he said this $3k expenditure wasn't for serious work.

I don't think you can say that -- I paid about that for my 2021 M1 Max with 64GB and I'm still using it four years later as my main machine. There's an argument to be made to buy an expensive computer every 5 years or so rather than a cheaper one that you need to replace every 2 years because it's become unbearably slow.

It’s a doable common hobby for middle class Americans. I grew up in a rural area with a dirt airstrip and everyone owned planes- even people that could barely afford a reliable used car. You can sometimes find something like an old Cessna for about $20k, and if you’re willing to do “experimental” planes that you fix yourself, sometimes just a few $k. Like anything, if you’re an insider in the community you can get good deals, sometimes even free from friends that age out, etc.

Many universities in rural areas have student clubs that offer lessons and rent club owned planes for cheap.

i like using computers until they break on me, i've never really felt (for the usage i give my macbook) that it is lacking in power. Even after, what, 5 years?

i think i'll be upgrading in the next 2 or maybe 3 years if apple puts OLED screens on their new machines as it is rumored.

It's not the absolute expense, it's the delta over what else would have worked just as well.

Some of those, like horses, are 1% hobbies. But many of the others can be done very affordably. Buying used equipment, learning from YouTube and online resources, starting small and scaling gradually make most of those hobbies accessible at a fraction of the cost.

Fiberglass sailboats last forever and the hobby is dying as people age out of it. I’m in the sailing community and get offered nice free boats in usable condition every year, but already have 2 so refuse any more. This year alone I’ve turned down both a 40ft and a 23ft free boats from 80-90 year old friends that aged out. Parts are expensive, but if you can do repairs yourself, you can absolutely own a pretty nice sailboat for about what it costs for a new apple laptop. I paid $1800 at auction for my most recent sailboat and it is only 7 years old, and needed nothing. Did an overnight trip on it recently.

I want to find a way to revive the hobby by showing younger people short on money that they can get into sailing for less than they already spend on much less rewarding stuff like app subscriptions and smartphones.

> Most hobbies are a lot cheaper.

Sure, but I did specify expensive hobbies.

Respectfully, this is also bullshit for my use case. For me, the M1 purchase was a step up compared to Intel; the rest is diminishing returns for now.

It’s also not true if you care about certain workloads like LLM performance. My biggest concern for example is memory size and bandwidth, and older chips compare quite favorably to new chips where “GPU VRAM size” now differentiates the premium market and becomes a further upsell, making it less cost-effective. :( I can justify $3k for “run a small LLM on my laptop for my job as ML researcher,” but I still can’t justify $10k for “run a larger model on my Mac Studio”

See https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/4167#discu...

Out of curiosity, how much of that thinkpad were you able to upgrade? Could that be the difference between 5 and 14 years here?

M2 here also, still flies for cross platform mobile development. The 250GB storage space is a bit tight without external storage but my dev environment is lean and purges caches every day so I manage easily.

Besides programming, my hobbies are writing stories, writing and recording songs, drawing, and painting. None of them needs to cost anywhere near $3000. Any of them can cost as much as you want.

Take the music hobby as an example. I have several expensive guitars now, but in the first 20 years of that hobby I probably spent under $1000 on guitars and related gear the entire time.

Running. You only need good shoes, really. Words from coworker running marathons.

There are other factors to consider such as screen size, storage and RAM, connectivity and ports, active versus passive cooling (thermal throttling), and speaker quality. Additionally, the M1 Pro GPU benchmarks still outperform the latest M4 Air.

For example if I spec out a 13" M4 MBA to match my current 14" M1 Pro MBP, which with tax came to ~$3k in 2021 (32GB RAM, 1TB storage), that $1k MBA ends up being ~$1900. Now that more frequent upgrade cadence doesn't make as much sense financially. After one purchase and one upgrade, you've exceeded the cost of the M1 Pro MBP purchase.

Overall I don't disagree with your sentiment, especially for more casual use cases, but progress will never stop. There will always be a newer laptop with better specs coming out. I personally would rather beef up a machine and then drive it until it dies or can no longer perform the tasks I need it to.

My laptop is still a 2012 MBP. Granted I don’t use a laptop as my main computer, I use a hackintosh desktop. I might finally buy a new laptop in 2026, 14 years is not bad. If my new laptop can last that long I see no problem maxing out the specs at time of purchase.

Just wait until they see the price of of a 300/2.8 lens or quantum-tuned rocks to isolate power cables from the floor.

Same here: I paid about twice as much for my 2013 Mac Pro that I’ll probably keep using until I replace it with an M5 Mac Studio at some point next year, which I’ll then plan to use for at least 5 years.

As for camera lenses, I expect my collection of manual focus F-mount Zeiss primes to have a longer useful life than their owner.

It's sad that more countries outside of North America haven't actively developed their general aviation industries. It's never going to be cheap (or safe) but there's no good reason to impose the high taxes and regulatory constraints that keep it should be out of reach from regular upper-middle class people in many countries.

same here; I bought a M2 Max with 96GB of RAM almost 3 years ago, for €4K, but a client paid half of it for a 1 year retainer. This machine is still the best thing i've worked with, and I have zero intentions of switching this machine anytime soon (i'll probably need to replace it's battery in the future). Rather keep the same machine for 5 or 6 years than to buy a crappier one every 2 years

The cycling industry does a hard work making sure people think they need expensive bicycles but you can perfectly enjoycycling as a hobby without spending a fortune on it.

And in contradiction to computers, a bicycle from 40 years ago still does the same job as it did at the time, there is no software making it incompatible and it doesn't feel slower than the more modern stuff. All you need is a set of brake pads, cables, tires, chain and cassette every once in a while. All these consumables are fairly cheap if you aren't chasing the newest/highest end tech and stick to 2x9 / 2x10 speed transmissions.

> even people that could barely afford a reliable used car. You can sometimes find something like an old Cessna for about $20k,

Not sure what you call a "reliable used car". My low mileage for its age 2006 Mercedes B200 costed me 5.5k€ for instance. A car doesn't have to cost a lot to be reliable.

Around me $20k is an expensive price for a car and most people buy second hand +20y old cars they buy for less than 5k€.

Cultural attitudes about that vary a lot by locale I think. That is not how most American consumers think, at least where I live… people largely consider older cars, especially German ones to be too unreliable to count on and they are (wrongly) believed to be so expensive to maintain that it will cost more than a new car- so they're categorically ruled out. Even people that can barely afford food or housing will often take out a loan for a new or nearly new car under the idea that they won’t get to work consistently otherwise.

I am also into older cars and can get a reliable car for a few hundred dollars, but I would never be able to convince anyone else I know that it is an option. So yea, you can get a reliable car for a lot less than a cheap airplane only if you don’t have some irrational bias against older cars.

A lot of people fly. It's pretty common to be a fractional owner in a relatively inexpensive airplane and use it one day a week or some such.

You could say the same about computing as a hobby. Maybe that’s your point, hard for me to tell. I always compare it as a hobby to golf or hockey- both of which are common where I come from and pretty pricey hobbies.

Even if you are buying at the low end, hardware simply doesn't age that quickly nowadays. Comparing against of the M series chips, I'd be surprised if anyone found an M1 Air unbearably slow in a blind test. In contrast, there was a huge leap in going from say the Pentium 4 to a Core 2 Duo.

I actually find M1 Air class performance still more acceptable for all my usual dev tasks. I might only need a beefier machine for the extra RAM if I'm spinning up a lot of VMs. Otherwise though, the raw CPU performance is still quite fine.

Yea, this is the bigger problem: 3rd party software developers drop support for "too old" operating systems WAY too early. Especially on mobile. Some developers only support one major previous version, which is insane.

So, Apple leaves old hardware high and dry by not supporting them with operating systems, and 3P software leaves users high and dry by dropping support for operating systems. It's like they are working together to create e-waste.

Out of about a dozen Apple devices in our household, none of them can be updated to the latest operating system. It's a huge problem with the Apple ecosystem, I'd say one of the biggest problems. Their hardware vastly outlasts their software, comically so.

Meh, I've been a mac user for 15 years professionally, usually alongside some desktop pc for gaming, and I upgrade when I damn well please, which is typically when they have a notable leap in performance, my laptop gets stolen, or my needs change, which should hardly be surprising in terms of progression through a career.

Their recent hardware is proving much more capable as tools than the budget i5 I had before, so I upgraded. In terms of machinery expenses, it's more than I'd like to spend on RAM and ssd than I'd prefer (their pricing ladder is comical) but the product is amazing. I'm going to wait as long as possible before I upgrade to Tahoe though, seems almost DoA

Describe “forcefully obsoletes”?

I ran a 2008 MBP until 2019. Then…gave it to my wife who used it until 2022. Finally retired it after the battery swelled. I suspect I could have replaced the battery and she could have got another couple of years out of it if I really needed.

Not once did that device ever feel obsolete.

> The first iPad Pro can’t run adobe products for example.

That’s more on Adobe than Apple though right?