Last November, I went from a Late 2013 MacBook Pro to an M1 MacBook Pro and it's phenomenal. Sure, I could get by on the Late 2013 but everything is so much better on the new one, I would hate to go back. I can easily code for an entire day now without having to worry about charging, makes a massive difference if you work outside the house a lot. I'm even thinking of upgrading again whenever these M3s come out because the performance and energy efficiency increases sound nuts. My advice would be to upgrade whenever you can. Even just 'little' things like being able to highlight and copy text out of photos and screenshots make it a vastly better experience.
I would love to upgrade, the short battery life is just really immensely frustrating because I need my laptop a lot outside the house too. And it is often slow, especially with too many tabs open. But it's way too much money for me right now. My comment was more a reply to:
> Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs
which I felt can't be true because my laptop is ancient by modern standards but still usable. Not as snappy as I would like it to be, but also not terrible or unusable.
