I’m an undergraduate biomedical engineering student also pursuing AI and robotics minors, so I have a wide array of use-cases, including both the medical stuff (wet labs), programming (all types), and the standard engineering stuff (CAD and modelling). I got a 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD M1 air in Sept. 2021 after seeing a lot of CS students say that they got perfect usage out of an 8GB RAM, 256 GB SSD M1 MacBook Air, knowing that Apple makes their MacBooks last a while, and planning on using this MacBook for all four years of my degree.
Since then, Apple went on to unveil new MacBook pros and airs and new generations of M-chips to go alongside them, but I still held off, knowing my MacBook Air was more than capable. However, after the M3 generation unveiling I’ve been seriously considering upgrading for the following reasons:
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I found out after I went into first year that I would be programming, graphing, and running simulations in MATLAB. If you recall, MATLAB modelling was one of the use cases highlighted in the presentation for M3 Pro. Currently, my MacBook Air has no problems running MATLAB even when I have like 10+ windows of different apps open; however I do see it occasionally slowing down, and for now I’ve only had to graph the occasional ODE or probability density function (for those who know what those are), so I’m afraid that when I actually do have to model complex biological or electronic systems, the slowdowns may become more noticeable. MATLAB seems to become snappier as I close windows, but that also poses a problem because as a student I will need to have multiple windows open basically all the time.
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My current MacBook Air is the “gold” colour, which is more rose gold than gold, something that I wasn’t expecting when I ordered it. My setup is more of the black and red variety, so the new Space Black colour of the MacBook Pro would fit perfectly with that. However, I acknowledge that this is a pretty insubstantial reason to upgrade since I could easily just stick a red and black skin on my Air or just get a black case.
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I often forget to charge my Air overnight, so at school I’m rushing around to find a charger since I leave mine at home, and often times the USB-C chargers are all checked out of the library, but the MagSafe chargers are often still there. The M3 Pro MacBook Pro has both MagSafe and USB-C, so I won’t be at loss for a charger, even if I forget mine at home.
Some things that are holding me back from upgrading:
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I’m not facing any major slowdown right now, so this feels like an unnecessary upgrade in the back of my head, and the M1 Air is still the snappiest for daily tasks.
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I already have a Dell Inspiron 7567 from when I was in high school. The only thing that stops me from using it is that it has an HDD and 8GB of RAM, but both of those are upgradable (and I actually already have a 2TB SSD ready that I just haven’t had time to put in yet), and it (unofficially) supports Windows 11, so I should be able to squeeze out a few more years of life out of it, and it might be able to run those more advanced tasks (it has only a 4-core Intel i7 7700HQ but a dedicated GTX 1050Ti GPU, so with maxed out RAM and SSD I’m thinking it could be powerful enough to serve me a few more years and I won’t need a new laptop).
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I kind of want to get a new windows laptop (preferably the Surface Laptop Studio 2) because I want to see what Windows 11 (and 12 when it comes out) will be like. I usually like to keep both a PC and a Mac with me so that I can jump between both OS’s since I have use for both (I produce music in FL studio as a side gig and like the way FL runs in Windows compared to Mac, there are also some Windows only software like ModelSim that I need, and since the transition to ARM Macs can’t run bootcamp so I need a Windows PC to run Windows (I won’t pay for Parallels)), and while I currently do have a Windows PC mentioned above, it is on the end stages of its life and eventually I will need a new Windows PC.
Let me know what y’all think. Any advice would be appreciated!