I regret to inform you that the tech journalists are doing it again…
Following the release of new Macs running on Apple’s new M3 family of chips, I’ve seen people doing the Mac version of the same dumb “is it worth upgrading” analysis that we get every year when the latest iPhone comes out. To give these people credit, I think they understand how silly it is to even propose a scenario where someone upgrades from an M2-based Mac to an M3 model, and instead most of them seem to be doing this with M1 Macs. In fairness to these content creators, Apple themselves made a lot of comparisons between the new chips and the previous ones in their event on Monday, mostly drawing comparisons to M1-variant chips since that comparison will naturally show the biggest gains for the M3 chips.
To be clear, I think comparing the performance of the M3 to the M2 and M1 is perfectly valid, and even important. I’m champing at the bit for reviewers to get their hands on these new Macs and perform an array of real-world benchmarking so we can get a sense of exactly how much better these new chips are compared with the previous two generations of Apple silicon Macs.
What’s silly is positing scenarios in which regular Mac customers might consider upgrading from an M1 product to an M3 product. Yes, there are some very high-end customers who can justify making that upgrade because their work is so performance-oriented and time-sensitive that it’s actually worthwhile to upgrade. But my sense is that regular Mac buyers are only making an upgrade once or twice a decade.
If you own an M1 or M2 Mac, you absolutely don’t need to upgrade to an M3 Mac, and you probably won’t need to upgrade to an M4 or M5 Mac in a year or two. Unless your computing needs have changed, you should stick with what you have.
That’s why the Mac customers Apple most strongly worked to appeal to in their event on Monday are owners of Intel-based Macs. If you have even the latest generation of any Intel-based Mac, you’re going to see massive improvements to performance, heat, and battery life when you upgrade to a comparable Apple silicon Mac, and for all but the most extreme performance metrics, that would apply to any Apple silicon Mac.
So to my fellow tech writers, I ask: Can we live in the realm of reality please?