Ever since Apple started shipping their ARM Apple Silicon Macs, I've been really toying with getting one. Basically, my primary MacBook Pro, which I love dearly, is near a decade old(mid-2012 non-Retina). It was one of the last user-upgradeable laptops, and I've done a LOT to upgrade it. Still, though, it's increasingly long in the tooth. I need to replace the battery, and a lot of the stuff I'm doing now(especially my heavy Zoom useage) just beats the heck out of it.
The M1s offer a whole lot of promise, and all the reviews I've read rave about them. I had thought I'd maybe wait for the second generation(which is supposed to bring back Magsafe, USB-A, and a few other things) but I don't know when that will be and I probably need a computer sooner rather than later.
I have a 2015 13" Retina, which is an incredible computer but it's lacking a bit for some of my uses. In particular, at the time you could not get more than a dual core CPU in a 13" Mac, and that left my old 2012 with its several generation old quad core better for many tasks.
I had, however, skipped the interim generation of MBPs-the USB-C only ones with the touchbar. They had too many downsides for me, including redesigning the keyboard 4 times before giving up and going back to a scissor type mechanism on the 16"(which I love, but was out of my budget).
Enter a trip to BestBuy this afternoon, where I went in to browse thinking that buying could be a possibility, and 20 minutes later I was making sure I had enough dongles to get me by for what I need.
I ended up with a base model MBP. I'd have up-specced the RAM if they'd had 16gb in stock, but they don't carry any off-the-shelf configs with 16gb. I could have gone to 512gb onboard storage, but opted out. For one, I'm carrying too much digital baggage anyway, and this will force me to be smart. For another, I have stupid amounts of cloud storage in Dropbox and iCloud. Finally, external drives are fast and cheap now.
On paper, the Pro and Air specs are incredibly close to the point where it can be hard to make an argument for the Pro. The Pro screen is a bit brighter, but to me that's not a huge deal(I cranked it up to full blast and said "no way can I use it there"). The real differences are the battery life and that the pro is actively cooled. Reviews point to the Air throttling under heavy load, and to ridiculous battery life on the pro.
I'm still setting mine up-or really I'm mostly playing with it before I let migration assistant run over night. For one, the fan hasn't even turned, and the computer is completely cool to the touch. I'm using Firefox, which is my preferred browser but isn't the most CPU friendly, and the fan has yet to turn on on mine(my Intel computers would be cooking me, especially with all the other set-up stuff I have running in the background).
The battery really is that good. I've seen reports of 16-20 hour battery lives, or really, truly all-day batteries. Mine was at 66% when I unboxed it. Between installing software and other set-up stuff, I'm still at 55% 2 hours later.
The computer is FAST. I haven't hit it yet with Lightroom(will install that tomorrow) but just general zippiness and responsiveness are better than any computer I've used. So far every program I've run has been ARM native(A lot of the big programs now have native versions, although you might have to look a bit when downloading), but emulation under Rosetta 2 is supposed to be fast. I'll be curious to see what happens if I end up running software via Rosetta in Snow Leopard in VMWare under Rosetta 2.
Two bad things, and these aren't M1 specific-First, I hate the touchbar. In theory it could be good, but I keep doing things like brushing the volume and brightness controls. Current rumors are that the next generation is going to ditch it. I'm a heavy user of the function keys just for general OS navigation, and I much prefer consistent placement. The second is that I'm really sorry I'm forced to use Big Sur. It's improved a lot since the first Beta, but it's added too many iOS features that IMO just get in the way. It's removed functionality that I like such as showing the battery percentage in the menu bar, and unless I'm missing how to re-arrange the bar, I hate that Spotlight(something I use a whole lot) isn't at the far right.
Overall, though, I think this is a win, and I'm excited to see what the next generation brings.
The M1s offer a whole lot of promise, and all the reviews I've read rave about them. I had thought I'd maybe wait for the second generation(which is supposed to bring back Magsafe, USB-A, and a few other things) but I don't know when that will be and I probably need a computer sooner rather than later.
I have a 2015 13" Retina, which is an incredible computer but it's lacking a bit for some of my uses. In particular, at the time you could not get more than a dual core CPU in a 13" Mac, and that left my old 2012 with its several generation old quad core better for many tasks.
I had, however, skipped the interim generation of MBPs-the USB-C only ones with the touchbar. They had too many downsides for me, including redesigning the keyboard 4 times before giving up and going back to a scissor type mechanism on the 16"(which I love, but was out of my budget).
Enter a trip to BestBuy this afternoon, where I went in to browse thinking that buying could be a possibility, and 20 minutes later I was making sure I had enough dongles to get me by for what I need.
I ended up with a base model MBP. I'd have up-specced the RAM if they'd had 16gb in stock, but they don't carry any off-the-shelf configs with 16gb. I could have gone to 512gb onboard storage, but opted out. For one, I'm carrying too much digital baggage anyway, and this will force me to be smart. For another, I have stupid amounts of cloud storage in Dropbox and iCloud. Finally, external drives are fast and cheap now.
On paper, the Pro and Air specs are incredibly close to the point where it can be hard to make an argument for the Pro. The Pro screen is a bit brighter, but to me that's not a huge deal(I cranked it up to full blast and said "no way can I use it there"). The real differences are the battery life and that the pro is actively cooled. Reviews point to the Air throttling under heavy load, and to ridiculous battery life on the pro.
I'm still setting mine up-or really I'm mostly playing with it before I let migration assistant run over night. For one, the fan hasn't even turned, and the computer is completely cool to the touch. I'm using Firefox, which is my preferred browser but isn't the most CPU friendly, and the fan has yet to turn on on mine(my Intel computers would be cooking me, especially with all the other set-up stuff I have running in the background).
The battery really is that good. I've seen reports of 16-20 hour battery lives, or really, truly all-day batteries. Mine was at 66% when I unboxed it. Between installing software and other set-up stuff, I'm still at 55% 2 hours later.
The computer is FAST. I haven't hit it yet with Lightroom(will install that tomorrow) but just general zippiness and responsiveness are better than any computer I've used. So far every program I've run has been ARM native(A lot of the big programs now have native versions, although you might have to look a bit when downloading), but emulation under Rosetta 2 is supposed to be fast. I'll be curious to see what happens if I end up running software via Rosetta in Snow Leopard in VMWare under Rosetta 2.
Two bad things, and these aren't M1 specific-First, I hate the touchbar. In theory it could be good, but I keep doing things like brushing the volume and brightness controls. Current rumors are that the next generation is going to ditch it. I'm a heavy user of the function keys just for general OS navigation, and I much prefer consistent placement. The second is that I'm really sorry I'm forced to use Big Sur. It's improved a lot since the first Beta, but it's added too many iOS features that IMO just get in the way. It's removed functionality that I like such as showing the battery percentage in the menu bar, and unless I'm missing how to re-arrange the bar, I hate that Spotlight(something I use a whole lot) isn't at the far right.
Overall, though, I think this is a win, and I'm excited to see what the next generation brings.