Experiences with the Macbook Air M1 or M2

General
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Hi there,

I have always worked with Macbook Pros and performance was always great given the time of purchase. Now, my Macbook 2016 got destroyed by my tea cup and I am looking for a new one. To keep it short: The new pro models are either too big (16inch) or too small (14inch) for my taste. That is why I am considering to go with the Macbook Air M2. But I am worried that due to lack of active cooling I will face slow performances when putting it to work using Bayesian modeling or other data analytic work. Bayesian Modeling was typically what was most challenging for my 2016 MBP so that is why I ask here.

If there are people here who have a Macbook Air with M1 or M2, could you please comment on your experience? Since 7 years passed, I would expect to have big jump in performance from the M2 chip. If the lack of cooling would cause me to be catapulted into 2016, I guess I need to arrange with a too big or too small screen …

Thanks for any feedback on the matter :)

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For a while I used an Air with an M1, albeit with a small screen (it was a work-issued machine). It ran Stan blazingly fast, but of course was not capable of doing anything useful with the GPU. I was living in upstate New York without air conditioning, and even on hot days I never noticed a performance hit.

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I’ve had my M1 for a while and I’ve never run into issues running Stan, even when using most of my cores for parallel chains.

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those are very encouraging experiences. Thank you for sharing.