There are some decent sales on B+H and Microcenter on older higher-spec units. B+H had a 16” MBP M1 Max 10/32 (upper bin) with 4TB/64GB for $3.3k (then $3k, lol jebaited) this time last year. Microcenter has M1 Max 14” 64GB/1TB (yeahhh 1tb but it’s ok) for $1800 right now, refurbished tho. And stuff does go on sale in the refurb store too over time, and “factory refurbished” woot are also AppleCare eligible,
factory refurb (which the microcenter don’t appear to be?) may also be the same at other vendors so just a thing to keep an eye on. Usually it’s in the About, and you can jump to a system report by holding down option when clicking the apple menu and it’ll be an option. TIL and I’m passing it on. Apple: you can (not) discover
AppleCare is more worth it on a loaded out newer laptop imo. If you have a $3k laptop you are committed to getting it fixed for a while. It maths out that if you break a screen you’re break even. Whatever. I’ll probably lose the bet but things like tile and stone will fuck up a screen if it gets any velocity at all, hard surface impacts suck. I bought a nice laptop because I want to carry it around outside etc and still be able to do whatever I want off the plug. And M1 Max is perfectly fine at that, really the popularity of the M1 has massively eroded most of the M2 and M3’s thunder. “More perf more power” was only a narrative that mattered (throttle to whatever you want, and efficiency goes up anyway) because the price gradient from M1 has always been insurmountable.
(original German, machine auto translation English at the top with the flag) https://www.notebookcheck.com/Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X-Elite-in...
M4 Max is the first time I’m interested, primarily because of SVE and true neural accelerator APIs not through metal. And a lot of cumulative gains too, of course. AV1 encode and decode, way better perf and much better graphics, etc. I’ll definitely wait at least another gen most likely (get M4 Max on firesale?) but there really is starting to be a more substantial difference than people realize.
Honestly the air 15” is also a very compelling form factor if they give you a second pixel pipe in the m4 (does it? I thought I read it did). Especially if they get it to 32gb on the top sku… fine. Even 24gb is fine for what it is and those M2 Air 15” 24GB/1TB SKUs are down to $1700 or something in the refurb store. 14/16" MBP 32GB/1TB M1 Max are also perpetually cheap, I've seen them down below $1400 iirc. Standard/popular work laptop.
It’s been nice having the M1 Max and doing inference on the gpu, dolphin-mixtral etc are super useful and actually helpful in on tons of first-pass summarization of a niche etc. I would like more, I hope AMD lets the gpu allocate unlimited memory on Strix halo. Half the time it's plugged in as a pseudo workstation, doing some AI shit and tinkering and generally just being a beefcake with crazy memory b/w, triple thunderbolt, etc, half the time it's out on the (stone) patio or a table out in the lawn sipping power, with a nice bright screen (the fingerprints tho...) while the dogs play (and one of them is on a tieout, so he knocks things over, etc). And whether or not it's a gimmick ($350 for the 3-years and I break even if I have a screen break? i'm ok with this) it's given me peace of mind to just carry it around and use it.
I've totally been able to spend way more time out with the dogs with a nice laptop again. It's been a huge QOL change to get a portable workstation slash do it all thin-n-light with great build quality, a well-supported unix ecosystem and pytorch ecosystem, a performant GPU with a good library and broad application support, super great efficiency, high-end AI/ML model capability, a nice screen, a reasonable keyboard, tons of thunderbolt... the MBA was nice but something bigger is nice outside, and it sold me on the expensive loaded out laptop actually because it was such a good user experience just as a unix user. I've used linux plenty, I've used windows (mostly for gaming now), I've used freebsd, part of the ick people feel is just because they aren't used to bsdutils. Yes, they're archaic and different etc. They're also a cohesive ecosystem of their own, this largely isn't an apple thing. And apple is actually ironically really good about letting you have command-line utils to set file associations, bless apps (ie grant security console privilege toggles), etc, and applescript/shortcuts is always the weird fallback interface.
(Apple has had a long history of writing all their stuff as Intents, that's a hypercard thing, if not before right? And applescript/shortcuts just lets you push the buttons of the intents just like siri. You can actually make a ton of shortcuts which un-annoyify ios, in particular. "Airdrop on" right there on my home screen. Living in the 21st century.)