And the totally weird thing is after it “Feeling” that way for a while you start discovering that it is in reality a lot more customisable…
Finder toolbars are totally customisable, ditto the pinned items on the sidebar, gestures can be customised, basically every system keyboard shortcut can be redefined, etc…
Refreshed 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air models are expected to be introduced at the keynote event of the 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference, set to be held on June 5.
according to:
the article has interesting renders, if you’re waiting on edu discount, might as well see what’s available then.
M1 (slower than M2, non Pro/Max) has plenty of grunt for most enthusiast and professional coding… I wouldn’t do much in VMs on 16G M1 … 24G redesigned M2 … might be ok.
… will be interesting to see pricing, and how they end up stacking the product line up to sell the new Air, without canibalizing the 16" MBP
yeah, Mac OS “desktop feel” is more customizable than ever IMO. With amethyst and yabai as tiling VM stand-ins =)
I haven’t used a MacOS (mom’s computer doesn’t count) for a few years now (since around 2018), … I’m curious how it’d feel like to go back to it now that tons of devs have switched back to M1/M2 machines because battery and are producing tons of helpful utilities.
yes to fully enjoy macOS you need to drop a lot of preconcieved notions of how things should be, and instead try to be open to the way things are implemented and trying new~ish things.
there are some egregious omissions in the macOS GUI but overall its still a very solid package and great for daily use
The big one, snapping windows, etc. is fixed with a $5 (or 15? i forget) app store app called magnet.
As an aside - i’ll just say that Apple Silicon runs VMs like a champ.
Like… Windows 11 in terms of regular use feels as good or better (because there’s no driver BS to deal with, its all handled by Parallels tools and no shitware) than native . So don’t let the lack of boot-camp on the new processors put you off too much.
I’ve run some old 3d games (e.g., Neverwinter Nights 2) for x86 in Windows 11 ARM on mine just fine.
Linux runs great in Parallels too.
I can’t overstate just how well VMs feel on this hardware; i’m not sure what magic voodoo the M series chips have in them but the responsiveness for machines running under hypervisor is just amazing, and i say that as someone who’s run VMware workstation on various desktops since about 2003…
Pretty sure the M series Apple GPU must be fairly “sane” (i.e., legacy free, well designed, etc.) and the virtualization layer is fairly thin because performance and responsiveness is just amazing.
Just to clarify this, as per my above post… Linux (ARM) can run in a VM on Apple Silicon. Rosetta can then be exposed to the Linux VM to run x86 linux code inside said VM.
Windows 11 ARM is trivial to virtualise with Parallels and it includes a microsoft translation package to run x86 Windows apps inside ARM Windows. It works well.
With the VM performance (responsiveness, etc.) i get above… the lack of “x86 virtualisation” isn’t really a big deal, because you can simply run the ARM variants of either Windows or linux and if need be run x86 code for Windows/linux inside them at near native speed anyway.
Not to suggest that your options aren’t also legit… but unless you’re seriously looking to run a lot of Windows games specifically… x86 code for whatever platform can generally be run on the Apple Silicon macs… normally at petty much native speed - certainly faster than any native x86 machine in this power envelope 
That said parallels does do a decent job of a significant number of windows games too.
What?! How? That sounds cool.
Here’s an Ars article and the Apple Developer information on it. I know it’s working with UTM, but I don’t know if Parallels has implemented it, it doesn’t look like it has.
The ability to repair and replace stuff is highly important, if you are aren’t inclined to just burn money on a new laptop the moment your needs change or if something breaks.
I have a W520 from somewhere around 2009 that still works, though recently retired. Here’s a list of shit I did:
Even trying to these things nowdays with Lenovo is suboptimal at best. Apple’s level of anti-consumer games are a straight up no go for me dawg.
I haven’t done it (haven’t had to) but as above there are docs on it.
Speaking of UTM, its a great free hypervisor app that can also run x86 and Sparc operating systems, google utm gallery.