Who's forcing you to get every upgrade every year?
The yearly releases make a lot of sense for everybody, because then you can upgrade on your own schedule, instead of delaying the upgrade because the product was released a full 2 years ago, at a time your older one is on its last breath.
In fact, yearly releases are then also more sustainable, too, since the purchasing would be spread out to each year (on an as-needed basis), instead of having a month-long cycle every 3 years, necessitating the extra infrastructure all along the way (from the stores to manufacturing to shipping).
The academic fiscal year often ends in Aug/Sep, and new faculty usually get a “technology fund” for buying their first computer. A lot of us use that to get the latest Mac. Historically, Apple’s October refresh was just late enough to miss that budget window, but people would still wait a month or two for the new models.
If they push announcements even further (as the article suggests—early 2026), it’s a different story. New hires can’t wait half a year with no laptop, so they’ll just buy whatever’s top-of-the-line right now. For research folks who need GPU power, that could easily mean a 5090-based laptop instead of a Mac.
The average user, even the "power user", does not care/know the difference between an M4 and whatever the M5 will be.
wrt the second part of your comment: Academics care about speed, RAM, battery life, the ability to run the latest AI models at a decent speed (M4 is still relatively slow).
The m4 macbook is running AI slow compared too..... what competitive alternative?
I'm impressed at how fast gpt-oss-20b ran on my m2 24gb system.
How does it compare to Windows laptops?
Unless you work on AI, which most don't, then you don't care that the M4 is a little slow for that purpose. The academics who are working on large dataset frequently have access to cluster computers or large servers running in the university datacenter... or frequently sits under their desk, because they have trust issues.
interestingly, i have a teen that will be heading off to college in a couple years. My plan is to send him off to the dorm with a Macbook and not his gaming rig heh. Although, inevitably, it will be up to him to decide how to make the best use of his time..
The advantage is all of that legacy software that some process relies on and hasn't been meaningfully updated in 10+ years and won't be ported over to the ARM processors that you damned kids are running on because back in my day we paid for one copy of x86 software and that got us through 10 winters, dammit.
I'm enjoying my framework AMD laptop although the battery life with suspend is miserable.
Our Intel Framework does, although you might need to use Linux to utilize it.
Add to this the recent economic uncertainty and prospective buyers might just have been holding up purchases (thus further adding to inventory if they already front-loaded before tariffs).
As for people buying powerful machines that could be worth going to a 5090 based machine instead, they're probably a fairly small part of the Mac purchaser market in the big picture.
I would also speculate that there may be some growing pains for the n2 production from TSMC, and/or a desire to get there in the AZ fab production before launch to avoid tariffs hitting their bottom line. They'd rather pay 12-20% more for just the CPU than eat large tariffs on the full cost. I don't think they'd be able to significantly raise prices further based on tariffs, like some other companies with smaller margins are forced to do, on order to be competitive.
The only motivation to upgrade is battery degradation or getting more RAM to run larger LLM models locally.
Frankly, the MBP is still an excellent machine, but I don't travel, anymore, and this big honker that is as wide as my desk, has me spoiled.
With this display, it's similar to two 4:3 aspect displays in my typical use... my IDE or Code pinned on one side, my browser or another app on the right.
Overall, it's been pretty great.
So I have no issue when something like a laptop being pushed back, it was all very arbitrary anyway. Can they release is a Mars based yearly cadence?
Seasons -> harvest -> traditions freeze working/holidaying times -> kids start school a certain time -> gotta sell them computers to be ready at those times.
Something like that, in a million different ways.
When everything is done in a browser, the biggest differentiator on a laptop would be monitor and peripheral support, and Apple is behind the competition.
macOS has no support for daisy-chaining with DP MST, no support for a second monitor (new to M1, the 2020 Intel model does support dual external monitors), no way to turn-off antialiasing, limited ports, RAM and storage options, limited repair and expansion options.
Why exactly do we even still use macOS anyways?
Even the cheapest Chromebook laptops have better monitor support and better expandability, at 1/10th the cost.
On the hardware side of things, the big differentiators are build quality and battery life. To get either as good as is found on MacBooks you’re likely to be spending about as much in the x86 world. Those dirt cheap Chromebooks in particular are miserable to use.
On Mac you basically HAVE to get an expensive $200+ TB dock to get a one cable multi-mon setup.
The new M4 MBAs can still only do two external screens at a time. It's better but the competition can do more.
I’ve used both M1 Max and M4 Max machines extensively and while the latter is a good deal faster, it’s only really noticeable with longer sustained tasks and particularly large projects. The high-RAM variants of M1 models in particular should continue to be quite servicable for some time to come.
evtothedev•2h ago
reaperducer•2h ago
If you're completely uninformed, why post at all? What value do you add to the conversation?
Lammy•2h ago
nickthegreek•1h ago