u/Zealousideal_Sink489

Just bored and looking to grab a quick conversation with someone. Feel free to slide into DMs.

Hey folks. I'm a student with 1 year Gemini AI Pro subscription (which I got for free) and Claude Pro (just paid for 1 month, to give it a try). Both subscriptions are about to end soon.

I've noticed that I've started to use way more tokens than I had anticipated, often hitting daily and weekly limits pretty soon.

I don't mind subscribing to one AI tool monthly, or at max two, with a total budget of $20-$30 (ideally, lesser the better for now). Something that has generous token limits. Or, one subscription that gives access to many models, and huge token limits. Both Gemini and Cursor have recently stopped their free student tiers unfortunately.

Do y'all have any suggestions?

Primarily need it for app development. I'm big on Antigravity IDE right now.

😭😭

Yoo. Would love to meet some new people and make online friends. Single guy. Love anime, music, video games, travelling, ancient architecture and other eclectic things in life. Feel free to slide into DMs. Love tech as well. Always up for adventures.

MacBook Air Specs and Price

I'm quite inclined to purchasing a MacBook Air because of its portability, aesthetics and display size (just the right size for me).

However, I'm concerned if I'll ever reach a stage where I'll hit bottlenecks in a couple of years, if not months. These include the system slowing down, heating issues, laptop getting stuck / frozen etc.

Context - primary apps I use include web browsing (and I often have many, many tabs open, and multiple browsers open too in my current Windows Laptop - in fact, I partition my stuff into Edge, Chrome & Firefox), Notion, Steam/Epic (which won't be relevant anymore), IDEs like Antigravity (main), VS Code and Cursor, Figma, Claude desktop, WhatsApp, and a lot of video calls, with screen sharing (instances where my current Windows laptop just gives up). No heavy AI/ML workflows - just ones for my coursework and personal projects - although I'm not sure if this usage will increase in the future; and occasional video editing (product ads, event trailers, bit of vlogging etc). I'm currently used to laptop + monitor; but I suspect I'll be switching to just laptop quite often going forward (which factors in for the screen size).

I have both seen and heard from some of my friends and co-workers in the past that their MacBook Air gets stuck when too many tabs are open (one of my friend's lap was great when he first bought it, and it started acting up after a couple of years). Although, part of me knows that it's more of a RAM issue, which is why I'm taking 24GB. Concerns are with heating (especially because it's metallic body) and its ability to handle heavy workloads.

If not this, I'm inclined to purchase a refurbished Apple MacBook Pro 16" M4 Pro 24GB 512GB - so the downgrades would be portability, storage (I'm at 90% of my current 1TB laptop, although I suspect I can optimize this later) and chip generation (and, I don't think it's a major downgrade too - M4 seems to be pretty good in 2026 as well?); but upgrades would be better screen (I like the deeper blacks and the higher refresh rate - but I'm mostly an anime watcher + productivity user - not sure how big of a daily impact it would make), pro chip, cooling. I'm not choosing the 14" with M5 24GB 1TB primarily because of the slightly smaller screen size. I wear specs with minor power (and prefer to work without them), do a lot of multi-tasking - so larger screen size helps. The 16" Pro is $500 more tho. But if I account for Apple AirPods (which I can get with Apple BTS sale, then it's close to $650 worth difference).

Super confused. Which do y'all think would be a better buy?

I'm just waiting for Apple BTS sale + Amazon Prime deals, to see for some savings.

Thanks in advance for all thoughts!

Hey there! An international student here, and I'm on my summer break. Would love to meet up with a couple of y'all and make some new friends in the city, preferably around the same age group. My interests - anime, video games, travelling, music and photography. Like playing badminton and chess. On professional front, love tech, AI, robotics and startups - always excited to hear what people are building. Chill, easy-going guy.

If you wanna plan something over the summer, feel free to DM!

And, has Gemini become worse since the release of 3.5 Flash? I don't know if it's the model problem or the app.

I'm a PM and apart from using the laptop for regular workflows like presentations, documentations, meetings (video calls), web browsing (heavy, heavy - often with multiple tabs open), designing (Figma, Stitch etc), and casual entertainment, I've also recently gotten into a lot of (vibe) coding / app development and tinkering a little deeper into AI/ML technologies. Apart from that - looking for a large display, portability, super-strong battery and longevity.

I am confused between Macbook Pro and MacBook Air - but I'm inclined towards Air because of its form factor, 15" (seems like the optimum size) and the balance it has.

Do y'all think it would suffice? Where are places I'll likely hit a bottleneck?

I don't know if it's a spurious correlation or what - but since a last couple of years (maybe, maybe since the boom of GenAI), the incumbent commonly used or famous products have been becoming worse - it's almost like the industry is losing spark?

A couple of examples.

- Notion: used to be one my favorite products of all time - now, it's a feature factory + pages with extremely slow loading times

- Spotify: recommendations literally play the same songs over and over again; discovery is poor; free tier is almost unusable (which naturally forces anyone to upgrade)

- General interfaces: becoming more conversational, than click/button based. The new anti-gravity agentic IDE, enterprise tools, design tools (Stitch, Lovable, etc); co-pilot - I mean, I get that's the core of Gen AI - natural language prompt-based interaction; but wouldn't the digital world get boring if this becomes the norm (almost like us missing medieval architecture in the pursuit of modern minimalism)

- Instagram: random features - like that Instants they recently released; and they're even experimenting with Insta premium now :')

- YouTube: random UX/UI changes (recently moved the placement of the likes count and the buttons)

- Google: their entire new UI, icons post the recent I/O - ugh.

... and, I could go on. But you get the drift.

EDIT: I guess this could be said for non-software products too. Consumer electronics (I'm still wishing for the day iPhone removes its notch and the three-eyed raven camera), video game graphics (it's improved, but relatively stagnated), audio quality in headphones (hasn't seen a leap; at least among the common brands) etc.

I don't know - I've been finding Notion extremely slow over the last couple of months, if not years. There used to be a time when Notion was my go-to app - no brainer, favorite app. Over time they added an incredible library of features, and a slew of AI features at that recently. However, I feel like they've not focused on optimizing the existing user experience within the app. My primary concern is just with the loading speeds - launching the app, search, getting a page opened - everything is more than a few seconds, and it's just making me lose interest on the app.

Anyone else facing the same, or does this seem like a "me" problem?