When I bought this macbook air m1 8g, its performs good, and benchmark is even higher than the previous Intel i9 macbook pro 16. I have been using it as a portable device without a external monitor hooked up. I opened lots of chrome tabs, it performs well with its own screen, it becomes sluggish only after connect to a external 3440x1440 120hz oled monitor.

I have some unrealistic expectation from this little device :).

in terms of LLMs, I have Linux server installed many RTX 3090 that can run any size LLMs, and the speed is super. it can do both inference and training. so I am pretty happy with the Linux server, it is so good.

A powerful Mac will be good as a daily driver, but would need additional thousands bucks for it, and I am happy with my current i7-6800k (6c 12t, max 128G ram) + 64G DDR4 + RTX 3090. I spend only $50 to upgrade the RAM, all other are just spare parts sitting there in my shelf. and this machine performs surprisingly fast, even for video editing.