You should have splurged for the Small Child Pro Max++. It comes with the extra neural engine cores. Sometimes buying the top of the line unit seems too expensive at time of purchase, but it's only after some usage does the decision to save money up front come to be regretted.

Power management is terrible on the Pro Max++, to say nothing of the stability issues.

I have a 2016 model. You're in for a wonderful year - enjoy every second of it!! :)

My 2016 model has a bug whenever any mode of communication contains bathroom words.

The child fails to respond to any further verbal input and emits some sort of sound akin to a hyena.

Nice, have you found a way to suppress the "sass" function? Is there a patch or something?

I mean sometimes I feel like mine is a much older model in a small casing.

"Sass" seems to be a critical component of the operating system. That process runs unless my model is asleep or needs a doctor. Have you heard of the sass-back algorithm? Don't let it run constantly because it loses its impact, but you can always pull it out when you need the sassing to just stop....

function sass-back (sass): return sass

I'm not sure why, but sass-back seems to put sass into a panic. It temporarily stops all system output while it tries to restart and initiates "stare".