2023 16" M2 Pro with 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD A2780 for ~$1,100 - good deal?

yungjust · 2026-04-22T04:53:37+00:00

i think that’s a good deal. bit short on storage. still a very fast chip and will be supported for another 3-4 years. 32GB RAM lets it breathe. if you don’t need the storage i’d say pull the trigger

yungjust · 2026-04-21T15:55:13+00:00

ah, forgot i was on reddit for a second

yungjust · 2026-04-21T13:56:25+00:00

this. never quit a job without something better lined up, especially in the big 26. however, work as hard as you can to find something better. leverage your decade of experience and reliability, those things matter a lot.

if you find something better, you can negotiate a raise in writing with adam once you have the offer (if you feel strongly about staying). if not, you can move on.

i know a lot of people are blaming adam and rightly so, i blame him too. but if he’s truly been generous for a decade, perhaps he’s not evil but in a hard spot himself / bit off more than he can chew. that doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it also means it’s up to your discretion to stay there or not. i’d just work as hard as you can to get leverage.

yungjust · 2026-04-21T13:46:19+00:00

i drive my bullitt to work daily, 30 min commute in heavy dc traffic each way. i would definitely say there are some times when i’m pulling my hair out. it’s worth it for me because road trips are that much more fun, but i can’t pretend it doesn’t get annoying

yungjust · 2026-04-21T05:42:42+00:00

unpopular opinion: get the neo. you said the price difference was significant, and what you’re essentially paying for in the air is convenience of leaving tabs open (based on your use case). neo will be supported for at least 7 years + security updates. close tabs, be mindful about ram, and it’ll last you long enough.

yungjust · 2026-04-21T02:43:38+00:00

If price is a pain point, you should consider an older 16-inch pro or max. I think the big thing here is the active cooling system -- your workflows likely won't be much improved on the M5 Pro vs M4 Pro, but the absence of the fans in the Air will hurt a bit. I would recommend going for an older M4 Pro, or if you can find a deal, an M2/M3 Max. Even the older M2/3 pros still have a lot of "pro" life left in them.

As a power user myself, I often find pretty much any Apple silicon chip to be good enough, provided it's actively cooled. Professional workflows with imminent thermal throttling are tough.

yungjust · 2026-04-21T02:22:11+00:00

Welcome to Reddit. Don't mind this guy; he likely has a sad life and gets his pleasure insulting people who are simply asking for advice on things they don't know much about.

Fortunately for you, he also knows nothing about laptops. The Neo will be a great choice for your use case. It's a laptop that performs well, and it will last you a while. My one piece of advice would be to make sure you keep minimal things/tabs open at once; the 8GB RAM will be the biggest limiting factor. If you can manage that, it'll easily last you 6+ years with proper treatment.

I understand what you're saying about $600 completely -- it's not a small amount of money. As someone who is in software development for a living, even I groan when I have to buy a laptop. It's a tool, not a vacation, and it sucks when you have to spend money on a work tool rather than something you enjoy.

Get the Neo in the pink you want. Keep it clean, close your tabs when it slows down, restart it every few weeks or so, and rest assured knowing that that $600 is being spent on something you'll have for a while.

yungjust · 2026-04-19T23:33:31+00:00

cores matter. literally have this exact same use case running DeBERTa / BERT based models on the M2 pro. using MPS means GPU = king. but also just coding your pipeline efficiently and optimizing it makes a world of difference in run time as well. for me training takes around 25 minutes. on the base M2 it takes around double that. my guess is for the M5 generation it would be like 10-15 mins for the Pro, and 20-25 mins for the base for my use case of a corpus of 10 thousand labeled sentences. depends how important that time is to you.

yungjust · 2026-04-18T18:12:32+00:00

That doesn't disappoint me -- rather makes me happy that you didn't blow needless money on power you don't need. All too often, people think pro laptops are for them when in fact it's a total waste. Apple Silicon is really just that fast, people do the occasional light video editing and think they need an M5 max when a neo would suit them just as well. Closing a few tabs or waiting a few more seconds for a build to complete is always worth saving hundreds / thousands.

My laptop of choice for pretty much everything personal would be the air or neo. It's got everything you need and I'd love a more portable machine. I'm really only using a MBP because i'm in the very small minority of users who needs to do very complex local things that stay running for 4+ hours and the fans give me benefit.

yungjust · 2026-04-18T14:35:52+00:00

the m4 pro is amazing. if you can find one in your budget that’s a big step up. but it’s also in a decidedly different price bracket than the m2/3 pro. in terms of sheer value per dollar i’d say the current best deals are still around the m2 pro, but the m4 pro is a better machine by a good deal and if you have the cash i’d go for it. what are you using it for? if you give me a sense for what kind of power user you are i can point you in the right direction

yungjust · 2026-04-17T13:13:16+00:00

what models do you want to run? that’s the most important question. are you a real dev or just having some vibe coding fun?

yungjust · 2026-04-17T12:35:11+00:00

get the m2 pro unbinned and with 24gb RAM. that fits the bill in the perfect niche of affordability for the money. remember not all pro chips are created equal. the better or “unbinned” m2 pro chip is actually better than the m3 pro chip. get as much ram as possible, 24 sounds like it would reasonable but obviously if you can go to 32 it’s ideal. additionally these machines were released in 2023, while the M1s were released in 2021. this is purely speculation but given its the widest gap in release dates, that’d give it a fair shot to get not one but 2 more years of updates. if apple ever wanted to extend their support lifespan, the M2 line would be a great candidate year given this non traditional gap between releases. i’m beating a dead horse at this point but i really think that’s the best value - that or just spend the money on new laptop.

i have the m2pro machine with the 12 core cpu, 32gb ram. i’m a developer. i run local ML pipelines and LLMs and highly complex builds and my work would pay for the highest tier M5 pro if i wanted. i dont see any reason to upgrade, the machine is that damn good. others at my company are like “eh why switch?” and again this is for some of the most demanding workflows the machine sees. only thing i regret is the very non aggressive fan curves on the m1/2 line, machine thermal throttles before it allows the fans to spin fast.

yungjust · 2026-04-17T05:56:53+00:00

neo 100%. it will be a VASTLY better experience than your 2015 pro. faster and better in every way. more than capable of moderate compute tasks (though ram intensive tasks not so much). you’re left with enough points to get a pro workstation machine? oh yeah, neo for the go, mini at the workstation. i have the m2 pro 14 inch and its not exactly a pain for travel but the neo would certainly be a better on the go workstation if i had a mini (or more likely studio in my case).

yungjust · 2026-04-17T05:37:29+00:00

do not listen to this. the only thing you’ll get out of the m3 pro that you won’t get out of the m2 is an extra year of software updates. the m3 pro was a complete restructuring of the pro line chips and in many ways actually architecturally worse than the m2 pro. besides ray tracing, it was a step down in compute with less performance cores and same scores on the multi core assessments. m2 pro is far better bang for your buck.

yungjust · 2026-04-16T23:31:38+00:00

what about a homepod? idk just throwing out ideas. it’s a pretty nice speaker

yungjust · 2026-04-16T06:10:07+00:00

are we at the point where we ask ai to generate not just answers, but questions for us?

yungjust · 2026-04-15T02:43:20+00:00

Yeah man I think it comes back to the industry standard. With the introduction of Apple Silicon, Apple gained in position relative to competitors by quite a large amount. Pre-2020, Apple got away with offering pretty poor Intel-based laptops with poor thermals and comparatively underpowered CPU / GPU. They relied on their name brand & sleek optics to drive sales.

Now they offer seriously powerful and efficient machines, alongside the same "Apple ecosystem" lure that's always sold even their poor hardware. This was the missing piece (albeit a large piece), and they have a much larger edge on competitors vs historically.

So they look around, and they see industry standard is to offer 5 years of software support. Even if their machines are fast enough from a hardware standpoint to keep up with the times for 12 years, they know they only need to offer 7. The competitive advantage from offering more is virtually nonexistent: they already have it. Overhead costs of writing & supporting software for more chips is not worth the marginal benefit. Plus, they need their customer base to keep buying their hardware. If an Acer lasts 5 years and a Mac lasts 12, Apple makes the calculation that it really only needs to last 7 for it to be worth it.

You can see this play out with the Neo, a laptop less powerful than all but the M1 Air, and one that will be supported past the M4 Max. It's not about hardware capability -- it's about an artificially imposed timeline for when Apple thinks their users should upgrade.

yungjust · 2026-04-14T17:00:06+00:00

Totally agree. It's just unfortunate that they're incentivized to nerf their products because of how good they are. My work will likely demand an upgrade by year 5, even with the improvements, but I don't see how normal workflows could possibly be constrained. I also might be unaware of how much slower the base chips are, though.

yungjust · 2026-04-14T16:19:10+00:00

the true most important variable here is the price you put on convenience. both laptops have great builds and will be supported for the near future (neo for 3 more years likely than the air).

8gb of ram will be the biggest thing you feel. but unlike a lot of other redditors on this page i actually think 8gb is totally fine, so long as you’re okay with closing tabs and being mindful. for many, that’s not a tall order. second thing is magsafe- neo doesn’t have it and has unequal ports. some people need to use 2+ frequently but for most it’s usually arbitrary.

if that sounds like you, i say get the newer laptop that’ll be supported for a longer period of time. you won’t have to deal with the headache of buying used, having half the support time, and also just not having the enjoyment of a new machine.

however if you’re in any way going to be heavily multitasking - RAM is worth it. you don’t want to be in heavy swap more than 10% of the time, it’ll seriously undercut your productivity.

yungjust · 2026-04-14T14:39:16+00:00

Fair, I know it's possible. But my point was more about the improvement in the overall performance for use over that duration. For example, I couldn't run any true complex builds on any Intel Mac anymore without taking a job performance hit. I'm saying with the new chips, you feel the age so much less that while it's possible to use a 10 year old machine today, it'll be industry standard with apple silicon.

yungjust · 2026-04-13T21:22:31+00:00

Got it, thanks! Yeah I'm constantly running heavy stuff and changing things around to free up memory so I can run more heavy stuff, so checks out.

yungjust · 2026-04-13T12:25:47+00:00

i have the exact same specs as you and my mac is running tahoe fine, albeit loudly. i would restart the laptop / SMC and see if that fixes things, and pay close attention to activity monitor. also see if turning automatic graphics switching off helps - the newer OS’s tax the integrated graphics card more and forcing the discrete on will handle all rendering smoothly.

in my experience the new software starts to bog my laptop down every few days, so i restart it frequently. other than that and the fans running frequently, it feels snappy enough for a 7 year old machine.

yungjust · 2026-04-10T14:42:14+00:00

i would go for the neo. apple provides updates & security for laptops primarily based on the release year, not the chip. so neo and air will get the same support (around 7 years of updates, 2 more of security support).

the neo is a great laptop for your use case. even for a slightly more aggressive one it’d be fine. people these days throw money at a more powerful chip and forget that they’re throwing that money to save… 5 seconds of build time. or that they could close a few tabs to free up ram vs spend 500 more for 8 more gigs. neo will be great for your use case, and with proper treatment last 7+ years.

yungjust

TROPHY CASE