I have the same experience here with my MacBook Air M1 from 2020 with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. After three years, I upgraded to a MacBook Pro with M3 Pro, 36GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. I use this as my main machine with 2 displays attached via a TB4 dock.
I'm working in IT and I get all new machines for our company over my desk to check them, and I observed the exact same points as the OP.
The new machines are either fast and loud and hot and with poor battery life, or they are slow and "warm" and have moderate battery life.
But I had no business laptop yet, ARM, AMD, or Intel, which can even compete with the M1 Air, not to speak of the M3 Pro! Not to speak about all the issues with crappy Lenovo docks, etc.
It doesn’t matter if I install Linux or Windows. The funny point is that some of my colleagues have ordered a MacBook Air or Pro and use their Windows or Linux and a virtual machine via Parallels.
Think about it: Windows 11 or Linux in a VM is even faster, snappier, more silent, and has even longer battery life than these systems native on a business machine from Lenovo, HP, or Dell.
Well, your mileage may vary, but IMHO there is no alternative to a Mac nowadays, even if you want to use Linux or Windows.
I'm still using my MacBook Air M1 with 8gb of Ram as my personal workhorse. It runs docker desktop and VSC better than my T14 whatever windows machine with 32gb ram. But that is windows and it has a bunch of enterprise stuff running. I assume it would work better with Linux, or even windows without whatever our IT does to control it.
With Nvidia Now I can even play games on it, though I wouldn't recommend it for any serious gamers.
Ha. Same here. My personal MBA M1/8GB just chugs along with whatever I need it to do. I have a T480 32GB linux machine at home that I love, but my M1 just does what I need it to do.
And at the shop we are doing technology refreshes for the whole dev team upgrading them to M4s. I was asked if I wanted to upgrade my M1 Pro to an M4, and I said no. Mainly because I don't want to have to move my tooling over to a new machine, but I am not bottlenecked by anything on my current M1.
Man, it's absolutely trivial to migrate your configurations to a new machine.
I'm using Geforce Now on my M1 Air and it's wonderful. Yeah, i'll play competitive multiplayer on dedicated hardware (primarily Xbox Series X because i refuse to own a Windows machine and i'm too lazy for Linux right now -- also, i'm hoping against hope for a real Steam console), but Geforce Now has been wonderful for other things, survival, crafting, MMO, single player RPGs, Cyberpunk, Battlefield, pretty much anything you can deal with a few milliseconds of input latency. To be honest, what they're doing here is wizardry to my dumb brain. The additional latency, to me, just feels like the amount of latency you will get from a controller on an Xbox. However, if you play something that requires very quick input (competitive FPS, for example) AND you're connected to servers through the game with anywhere from 5ms to 100ms+ latency (playing on EU servers, for example), that added latency just becomes too much. I'll say this though: I've played Warzone solo on Geforce Now, connected to a local server with no more than 5ms latency via that connection, and it felt pretty decent. Definitely playable, and i think i got 2nd or 1st in a few of those games, but as soon as it gets over like 15-20ms, you're cooked.
> there is no alternative to a Mac nowadays
I need to point this out all the time these days it seems, but this opinion is only valid if all you use is a laptop and all you care about is single core perfomance.
The computing world is far bigger than just laptops.
Big music/3d design/video editing production suites etc still benefit much more from having workstation PCs with higher PCI bandwidth, more lanes for multiple SSDs and GPUs, and high level multicore processing performance which cannot be matched by Apple silicon.
Doesn’t Apple have significant market share for pro music and video editing?
For studio movies, render farms are usually Linux but I think many workstation tasks are done on Apple machines. Or is that no longer true?
> Doesn't Apple have significant market share for pro music and video editing?
I thought so too, but I see a lot more people using non-Apple systems for music production than I expected. I don't know whether I was too influenced by Apple's marketing (computers for creators) or something has changed.
Music production is overwhelmingly Apple. It comes from the fact that Protools was Mac only until the late 2000s and Logic Pro, Apple's DAW and alternative to Protools was also very popular and also Mac only. That left Cubase for windows and a few others like Ableton and less popular DAWs like Reaper, fruity loops etc. Today there are a few more options for Windows like Studio One who is very good though
Add to that the fact that most of the audio interfaces were firewire and plug and play on mac and a real struggle on windows. With windows you also had to deal with ASIO, and once you picked your audio interface it has to be used for both inputs and outputs (still to this day) forcing you to compound interfaces with workarounds like Asio4All if you wanted to use different interfaces, while Mac os just lets you pick different interfaces for input and output
Linux had very interesting projects, unfortunately music production relies on a lot of expensive audio plugins that a lot of time come in installers and are a pain in the butt to use through proton/wine, when it's possible at all. That means that doing music production on Linux means possibly not using plugins you paid and not finding alternatives to them. It's a shame because I'd love to be able to only use Linux
> most of the audio interfaces were firewire
With Apple removing Firewire support this Fall, and so many devices still plugging along in so many studios, I wonder what's going to happen this fall.
> That left Cubase for windows
When I was at music college doing production courses, they exclusively taught Cubase on windows.
Yes, for a while that was the only "serious" option for Windows
Yes, and Logic Pro was generally looked at as 'My first DAW' in most studios I have been in.
Also Protools was available on Windows from 1997 and was used in many PC based studios.
I remember Logic Pro becoming quite popular after version 8, even though veterans who knew protools backwards had no reason to switch, a lot of the newer studios used logic.
You're right about protools on Windows. I got confused about protools not requiring the use of their own interfaces
Prosumer, but not pro. Pixar for example are not modelling and animating on Apple Silicon.
On the video side Vegas Pro is used in a lot of production houses, and it does not run on Apple Silicon at all.
> Well, your mileage may vary, but IMHO there is no alternative to a Mac nowadays, even if you want to use Linux or Windows.
I guess I'd slightly change that to "MacBook" or similar, as Apple are top-in-class when it comes to laptops, but for desktop they seem to not even be in the fight anymore, unless reducing power consumption is your top concern. But if you're aiming for "performance per money spent", there isn't really any alternative to non-Apple hardware.
I do agree they do the best hardware in terms of feeling though, which is important for laptops. But computing is so much larger than laptops, especially if you're always working in the same place everyday (like me).
Mac Studio is pretty good on everything except raw GPU speed. Which depending on your use cases may be completely irrelevant.