I'm using a Macbook Pro retina from late 2013 as my daily driver, for work as a software developer and other things. It recently passed 10 years, being used every day including weekends.
It's been great. I bought it when two non-Apple laptops failed on me within weeks of each other. A Fujitsu-Siemens which was also great until then, and a Compaq.
I'd been avoiding Apple for years in line with the GNU project's stance, but after a big life event I decided to try it out. I transferred over my Linux installation from the previous laptops to a VM on the Mac, so I can four-finger-swipe between the two OSes as if they are running side by side.
The Mac's 16GB RAM is bit tight these days but that's mostly due to memory used by Firefox with my many tabs. The 512GB SSD has been annoying for a long time as I filled it up fairly quickly, and rarely find the time to clean things up. When I bought it, I thought I'd be able to upgrade the SSD capacity a few years later at third-party prices, much lower than Apple's prices. But it turned out to be a non-standard interface with expensive upgrades, and I didn't end up upgrading, just living with it. A few keys are getting a bit unreliable, but not enough to make is unusable.
The battery is still going surprisingly well after over 10 years of daily, intensive use, a lot of it on battery. It's down to 55% of design capacity. I think that's excellent compared with what I saw with the non-Apple laptops before, where I bought a number of third party batteries to carry around with me and swap, and they deteriorated faster. However the battery flakes out occasionally when the system is under load now.
I'm getting the battery replaced by Apple in a few weeks, at their standard battery repair fee (which is reasonable), and as a handy side effect of how they do this the keyboard issues should be fixed.
I'm in the market for a new laptop. But not because the current beauty doesn't work! It's just getting strained with not enough RAM and SSD for my needs now, and Homebrew no longer supported. (Especially precompiled binaries; some HB recipes fail to build, and some require several tens of GB free space to build and take over an hour per package, like I remember from my Gentoo days...). Whoever mentioned OpenCore Legacy Patcher, thanks for the reminder, that may help a lot!
I held out for the release of the Apple M3 over the last few years. Previously waiting for the M2 after I decided to take the leap from x86 to ARM, but that dragged out, and then I decided it was expensive and to wait for the M3 to see what 3nm would get us.
Now I'm excited to be planning to buy an M3 Max. I won't skimp on RAM or SSD this time, having learned it really slowed me a lot over the last few years, swapping (without realising for a few years this was why browsing was very janky), and often having to find things to delete to free up some space. Besides, the things I work on now use terabytes of storage, and for my tasks I think I'll find 128GB RAM useful too.
I plan to keep using my trusty 10 year old 2013 MBP as my main local x88, for x86 development and testing, running x86 Linux and Windows VMs, and as a baseline for GPU graphics dev where I want to have something near the slow end to target to ensure the software runs well for people who don't have the latest devices.
It's been great. I bought it when two non-Apple laptops failed on me within weeks of each other. A Fujitsu-Siemens which was also great until then, and a Compaq.
I'd been avoiding Apple for years in line with the GNU project's stance, but after a big life event I decided to try it out. I transferred over my Linux installation from the previous laptops to a VM on the Mac, so I can four-finger-swipe between the two OSes as if they are running side by side.
The Mac's 16GB RAM is bit tight these days but that's mostly due to memory used by Firefox with my many tabs. The 512GB SSD has been annoying for a long time as I filled it up fairly quickly, and rarely find the time to clean things up. When I bought it, I thought I'd be able to upgrade the SSD capacity a few years later at third-party prices, much lower than Apple's prices. But it turned out to be a non-standard interface with expensive upgrades, and I didn't end up upgrading, just living with it. A few keys are getting a bit unreliable, but not enough to make is unusable.
The battery is still going surprisingly well after over 10 years of daily, intensive use, a lot of it on battery. It's down to 55% of design capacity. I think that's excellent compared with what I saw with the non-Apple laptops before, where I bought a number of third party batteries to carry around with me and swap, and they deteriorated faster. However the battery flakes out occasionally when the system is under load now.
I'm getting the battery replaced by Apple in a few weeks, at their standard battery repair fee (which is reasonable), and as a handy side effect of how they do this the keyboard issues should be fixed.
I'm in the market for a new laptop. But not because the current beauty doesn't work! It's just getting strained with not enough RAM and SSD for my needs now, and Homebrew no longer supported. (Especially precompiled binaries; some HB recipes fail to build, and some require several tens of GB free space to build and take over an hour per package, like I remember from my Gentoo days...). Whoever mentioned OpenCore Legacy Patcher, thanks for the reminder, that may help a lot!
I held out for the release of the Apple M3 over the last few years. Previously waiting for the M2 after I decided to take the leap from x86 to ARM, but that dragged out, and then I decided it was expensive and to wait for the M3 to see what 3nm would get us.
Now I'm excited to be planning to buy an M3 Max. I won't skimp on RAM or SSD this time, having learned it really slowed me a lot over the last few years, swapping (without realising for a few years this was why browsing was very janky), and often having to find things to delete to free up some space. Besides, the things I work on now use terabytes of storage, and for my tasks I think I'll find 128GB RAM useful too.
I plan to keep using my trusty 10 year old 2013 MBP as my main local x88, for x86 development and testing, running x86 Linux and Windows VMs, and as a baseline for GPU graphics dev where I want to have something near the slow end to target to ensure the software runs well for people who don't have the latest devices.