2019 intel -> M1 Max was a compelling upgrade. M1 Max to M2? Nope. Maybe M3, but honestly, that's more about bragging rights than anything practical that would impact my daily life. Now if they dump the useless SD card slot and HDMI ports and give me two more TB4 ports, I'd consider it...but it would also need a substantial single-core performance boost, and even then, would have to think long and hard because I really don't need it.
I'm sitting here with the machine driving 2 4K and 1 5K monitor, encoding 4K video using h.265 hardware acceleration (that speed blows me away) in handbrake, lightroom is up to edit photos, safari for browsing, and running two linux virtual machines with 2 cores and 8GB each - and the fans just kicked on. I can't get the darn thing to slow down. Last week I was on battery power for hours, and the meter barely budged. It's an amazing piece of hardware, especially for a laptop.
My only real tech limitations right now are around things that aren't going to change: for example, being able to play windows games - and no, crossover/parallels/fusion aren't an answer, especially for intel titles. Similar, I have some old intel software that would be nice to still be able to run, but again, that's a moot point so I'm just going to upgrade to modern options.
The fact is that for me and my family, the current generation of hardware across the board is more than good enough for the foreseeable future. I'm upgrading the Watch 4's to the new rev this fall, but then we're probably on another 4-5 year cycle. Phones are on 13's, which had 5G UWB, so it'll be at least 3-4 years before another upgrade there. iPad Pro's are the same, and are already more hardware than we need (though I will upgrade one pro to a cellular model later this year, but then that's done for a long time). Airpods work well enough, so no upgrade there. Apple TV's are on 4k, so no upgrades there for a long time. I still have old airport expresses driving a couple of amps, but since the appleTV's lost TOSLink, there's no upgrade path.
Apple's going to need a new category to keep extracting the apple tax from my wallet at anything like the rate they have over the past 10 years. I'm not sure AR goggles are it, and I'm darn sure the new carplay isn't (since we aren't replacing cars for at least 10 years).
I'm sitting here with the machine driving 2 4K and 1 5K monitor, encoding 4K video using h.265 hardware acceleration (that speed blows me away) in handbrake, lightroom is up to edit photos, safari for browsing, and running two linux virtual machines with 2 cores and 8GB each - and the fans just kicked on. I can't get the darn thing to slow down. Last week I was on battery power for hours, and the meter barely budged. It's an amazing piece of hardware, especially for a laptop.
My only real tech limitations right now are around things that aren't going to change: for example, being able to play windows games - and no, crossover/parallels/fusion aren't an answer, especially for intel titles. Similar, I have some old intel software that would be nice to still be able to run, but again, that's a moot point so I'm just going to upgrade to modern options.
The fact is that for me and my family, the current generation of hardware across the board is more than good enough for the foreseeable future. I'm upgrading the Watch 4's to the new rev this fall, but then we're probably on another 4-5 year cycle. Phones are on 13's, which had 5G UWB, so it'll be at least 3-4 years before another upgrade there. iPad Pro's are the same, and are already more hardware than we need (though I will upgrade one pro to a cellular model later this year, but then that's done for a long time). Airpods work well enough, so no upgrade there. Apple TV's are on 4k, so no upgrades there for a long time. I still have old airport expresses driving a couple of amps, but since the appleTV's lost TOSLink, there's no upgrade path.
Apple's going to need a new category to keep extracting the apple tax from my wallet at anything like the rate they have over the past 10 years. I'm not sure AR goggles are it, and I'm darn sure the new carplay isn't (since we aren't replacing cars for at least 10 years).
