I bought an M1 Max with 64GB of ram on the gamble it would last awhile because future M series would be evolutionary not revolutionary again. It seems like it's paid off since there's never a time it feels slow. I may end up upgrading to the M5 just to go down in screen size because I travel more than I did when I bought the 16" one.
Have an M1 Pro 32GB which recently started feeling slower. VSCode multiple tabs is a problem. Generally the UI feels less snappy.
I've switched now to a desktop Linux, using an 8C/16T AMD Ryzen 7 9700X with 64GB. it's like night and day. but it is software related. Apple just slows everything down with their animations and UI patterns. Probably to nudge people to acquire faster newer hardware.
The change to Linux is a change in lifestyle, but it comes with a lot of freedom and options.
Same. My M1 Max only shows it age when building a few massive C++ projects, the M4 cuts down compile times to a quarter so I feel like I'm missing out there, but not enough to put down another$4k yet.
Compared to every Intel MBP I went through, where they would show their age after about 2-3 years, and every action/compile required more and more fans and throttling, the M1 is still a magical processor.
I had a 16' m1 pro until July when work had an M3 with 2GB more ram going free and I thought it would be smart to take it, in the past when I had had a three+ year old machine and upgraded everything was super better.. but this time I don't notice any difference at all in almost any application.
The only place I feel it is when I am running a local llm - I do get appreciably more tokens per second.
