It’s fine. I was just curious if somehow the new, inexpensive Mac Airs actually beat my M1 MBP in performance now.
I wonder if, given the M series, that all of them, from 1 through 3, with their subdivisions of Pro and Max and Ultra, are best considered as variants on a scale. All useful, all powerful, more punch and features as you move along, but broadly all ranging from good to excellent, depending on your needs.
Kind of like the iPhones. Models 11 through 15 are all really good.
I wonder if upgrade paths will slow down or is it just me? Time was I had a seven year window I considered for my Macs. Buy the best I could afford and then bank on a seven year use window with any excess being good fortune. My 2019 iMac still rocking along and while it’s no match for my 16" M1 Max MBPro, nonetheless both machines handle editing 4k multi stream video or my 100Mp RAW files…
I think my usage is mapped to earlier requirements, why would I even think of upgrading either?
Oh we most certainly are. This upgrade is impressive. Just consider what you’re now getting in a svelte 13" MacBook.
The single-core performance is massively better thanks to an improved core and a significant clock increase. And in terms of multicore performance you can now get a 8-core 13" MBA that beats an M1 Max. Its Neural Engine is massively faster (main jump was M2 over M1) and the GPU has a lot of nice added goodies over even the M2s (better caching, h/w ray tracing and mesh shading). And all while using less power. These are without a doubt a sweet upgrade. Many of us will be fine sticking to our M1s, but if you need a new Mac today or you are finally getting around to replacing an old Intel Mac, these are awesome and there’s no reason to hold back. 
Howard Oakley has cautioned repeatedly against using just simple benchmark figures. And rightly so. Instead he has written a beautiful series that investigates the various M1-M3 evolution steps (he uses the Pro to demonstrate because that’s what he got) and points out why it’s about more than just a benchmark figure. Here’s his conclusion which at the end contains links to all the detail parts of his series. Great read.
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Whoa. Two displays change everything. I’m a MBP 16" M1 user and got my wife a 15" MBA 6 months ago. I have always liked the weight of the MBAs.
I don’t have a need for the ultra-mega-CPU/GPU power these days, and I don’t mind just a little lower resolution when I not connected to my Apple and LG Displays at my desk.
I’ll resize my MBP to the MBA’s highest res to see how things look, but I might have a look at the Apple Store this week.
If so, I’ll need to find a new home for the MBP 16 because I just can’t continue to keep every damn upgrade in my closet. 
Interesting article.
To be honest, I likely wouldn’t know the difference in speed against my M1 MBP since it is as fast as I need. If my MBP were able to go on a diet, I wouldn’t be thinking about the MBA.
Oh, that surprised me. I’m thinking about replacing my wife’s Intel MBA with this new model, and I was assuming I’d go with the 1 TB configuration. Mainly for future-proofing against the ever expanding size of software installs in general, and macOS in particular. Maybe I don’t need that much?
The most valuable bit for me was Howard’s advice about how to tell if you should upgrade from an M1 to an M3. I should really call this out in an ExtraBIT for all TidBITS readers to see.
Rule of thumb for upgrading
If you already have an Apple silicon Mac and are wondering whether to upgrade to an M3 model, you can use this rule of thumb as a way of working out which chip you’ll need.
Load your current Mac up with the apps you normally use together when working, and watch their use in Activity Monitor’s CPU History window. If most or all of its P cores are fully occupied much of the time, and that workload often spills over to the E cores, then you should aim for an M3 with more P cores (Max); if there’s always adequate spare capacity on the Mac’s P cores, then you probably wouldn’t get much added value from an M3 with more P cores.
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My theory on upgrades…since I only do it every 6-7 years for my laptop.
Skip the low end and get at least the medium one in the model spread. Skip the 16 and go with the 14/15 based on weight since it does get schlepped around when we travel. Always upgrade RAM and drive…my current 14 M1 has 32GB and 2TB but would upgrade this to 4TB next time so that my external Lightroom catalog and images drive can get backed up to the internal while I’m gone. Stick with the Pro…more ports, better screen, and more pixels on the screen.
Wife on the other hand…just sticks with the lightest air…she’s currently got an M1 13 and doesn’t want any smaller than that as she has some vision issues…she only uses hers for Numbers/Pages, Firefox, and Mail mostly.
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I think these days Apple has us really well covered on the mobile Mac side. Probably better than ever before. You can get a very speedy MBA if portability is your primary concern. OTOH thanks to the tremendous performance of M3 and Apple now also offering a vanilla M3 14" MBP, people who don’t need more power but emphasize screen and audio quality can get a good deal too.
I don’t need tremendous CPU performance and I need even less from my GPU. But since I spend a lot of time away from the desk, screen quality and speakers are important to me. I could probably be just fine with a vanilla M3 14" MBP as long as I deck it out with enough memory and SSD (and I am very happy with my M1 Pro 14"). My wife OTOH doesn’t really care too much about a high-quality screen, she prefers single-app mode and lower resolution for legibility. She doesn’t need more performance than I do, but she absolutely hates big and heavy. To her the thinner/lighter the better so the MBA is ideal. I have a postdoc here who runs several VMs side by side and is always maxxing out her cores. But like me, she also wants something that she can still bring onto (and use!) on coach. To her the M3 Max with 48 GB RAM all in a 14" is perfect.
In the past, performance requirements tended to push us toward one end of the lineup. And often times those who wanted super light or small couldn’t get really nice performance. Nowadays it feels like almost everybody can get the portable Mac that suits their use almost perfectly. There is a bunch of stuff I don’t necessarily agree with Apple on, but I have rarely been so bullish about Mac before. The present portable lineup is spectacular and offers us more diversity than I think we’ve ever enjoyed before.
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My main desktop Mac has 2TB of storage. But for my laptop, I don’t need that much - just enough to hold my apps and a few actively-used documents. Everything else is stored elsewhere and is accessed via my home LAN.
But my expected usage is probably not going to be yours.
I think I’m finally tempted to upgrade my 2012 MBA ;-). The return of MagSafe seals the deal.
Except for Photos app, I mostly use web based apps (including a CAD package, OnShape) and performance is fine. The only growing problem is that some websites explicitly won’t let you log in, or don’t display images with the Safari (15.6) that comes with Catalina.
I’ve been keeping full size images on the Mac as a way to backup iCloud, so I may need to spring for extra disk space.
Rats! I’d love to get one of the new MBAs when I upgrade my 16 MBP, but I love having the HDMI port available.
Yeah, I’d find it hard to be without that and an SD slot.
And yes I have a ‘pocket dock’ that is in my bag which has all the ports but still, never like using it.
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Or archive them to external storage. You can copy the files to an external storage device and then delete them from your internal storage. It won’t be as fast as internal storage, but if it’s just going to be an archival backup of files that are primarily stored in iCloud, that might not be a problem.
Hi Simon, thanks for the interesting reply to my query. . . Since I only need a single external display, my system requirements are basic. I’m leaning toward a 14" M2Pro 16GB/512GB because I can get one as an Apple refurb for $1599. Over the years I’ve had really good experiences with various Apple refurbs. Being retired (photographer) my requirements are simple and speed isn’t important these days.
I’m assuming that your are referring to the CalDigit Element hub. It’s amazing that plugging one cable from a Mac into a TB4 hub can do so much. I’ve read that the Element can become very toasty; have you experienced that & does it require pushing the Mac/hub, something I will never do? (I’m also considering an OWC 11-port TB 4 hub).
My NEC display is limited to HDMI 1.x (I got it in 2012 for a song after it had been discontinued, so its tech is rather ancient). It’s a little hinky with my 2018 Intel Mini (Big Sur) but it seems to play nice using a Belkin HDMI to USB-C adapter with my wife’s M1 MBA (Monterey) so I hope that it will also work with Apple Silicon and a hub. The display is 1080p/sRGB and even after all these years it still has very good color accuracy and even backlighting (CCFL due to a bad experience with a first-gen MacBook Air and its LED display LOL).
Choosing a higher-end display certainly paid-off in the long run. When it comes time to replace it I’ll likely go with an Eizo since NEC has stopped producing such displays since its merger with Sharp.
My peripherals are pretty much old school but they work with the Mac Mini via USB-A and USB-C adapters. I’ll be adding external SSDs and the like as time moves on but the Samsung HDDs in old OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad enclosures (Firewire 800, eSATA & USB 3.0) just keep on spinning.
Well, that’s sort of what I am doing. So I still need to tell iCloud to keep full size images on the MBA. And then I backup the MBA to an external drive.
Pardon me if I’m misunderstanding. It sounds like your procedure is:
- Tell iCloud to keep the full images locally
- Clone the local storage to an external backup.
I’m thinking more along the lines of:
- Download full-size images to a temporary location on your internal drive
- Drag/drop the files to a folder on external storage
- Delete the files from your internal drive (or if they’re on an iCloud drive, tell macOS to delete your local copy, leaving the file in iCloud).
So you’ll end up with files in iCloud and on external storage, but not on your internal storage.
Of course, if your images are in Photos and not individual files, then you’ll need to do something different. I think you can create a second Photos library on external storage, open it, and then import photos from your iCloud library.
I’ve started to see some interesting discounts on M2 and M1 machines since the M3 MBA announcement. For example, here in the USA, I just saw that BestBuy has the 2022 13" M2 MacBook Pro w/24GB RAM, a 1TB SSD, and 2 years of AppleCare+ for $1399 if you are a “MyBestBuy Total” member.
“Total” costs $179.99/year, so even if you need to buy a membership, that’s still more than $60 off the current BestBuy sale price with AppleCare. Amazon has similar deals on various Apple laptops.
It’s nice to see a reasonable price on an Apple system with more than entry-level RAM and storage.
It’s worth visiting a deal-tracking site before making a significant purchase. For example, if I were buying a new Mac laptop today, a 2022 M2 MBP with a Touch Bar normally would not be one of my candidates. However, having learned of the BestBuy sale price via the TechBargains.com daily newsletter, I probably would add it to my “worth considering” list, despite the limited ports and the despised Touch Bar.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with either BestBuy or TechBargains other than being a customer/reader.
In my experience refurbs have been just fine. If the config you want is available, I see no reason not to go for it refurb. OTOH if you have a certain config in mind, I’d be very cautious about compromising on that just to save 10%. Apple is great when it comes to refurbs. Hardware appears (and IME behaves) as if new, with only the brown box being the tell tale sign. There’s no shenanigans and you can return items just as if you had bought new should anything not be to your liking.
The CalDigit gets warm indeed, but nothing crazy. I’ve had TB hubs for every TB generation and unfortunately, they all got warm. The Elgato TB2 one I used to use was definitely worse. I don’t like it, mostly because it screams inefficiency (note none of them have internal power supplies so its not like the AC/DC power switching is the source of the heat), but it’s never been a real issue. I’ve never had any reliability issue that would make me skeptical of the heating. And it’s certainly never been to the point where it would have been too warm to touch so that I’d be concerned about safety.
IME the CalDigit has been absolutely great. The one cable to rule them all aspect is still a bit magical to me, aside from being tremendously practical. The CalDigit TB4 hub is compact, offers exactly what I need, and makes the whole MBP setup truly dockable, almost like my old PowerBook Duo with its Dock. Just a whole lot better. 
Edit: just check out this massive progression we’ve come out of. 
