The New MacBooks with M1 came out last week with a bang! Reviews, benchmarks, and superlatives
have filled YouTube airwaves. These are fantastic devices and I really like mine
but I have come across a few issues in the last week related to performance, USB, and Display.
Hey, Im jerry, and yes the MacBooks Air and Pro with M1 are just crazy.
Apple has pulled of something that surprised everyone and exceeded expectations. The new
M1 chips are the first Apple Silicon System on chips made to run a full Mac computer and they
instantly blew past the lower and some tier Intel Macs….And they do it cooler and quieter.
Im not going to go into the benchmarks today, you can watch my other video on that,
but the short story is that the cheapest Macs are now as fast,
in many situations, as existing Intel Macs costing twice as much.
Overall, these new Macs with M1 are fast, exciting, and worthy of praise…but in my
week with them I have come across a few issues that I think are important to share.
I have seen some performance issues on a few occasions. The most notable for me has been in
Final Cut Pro where I edit Multicam 4K video. I have 2 4k tracks from my Sony A6400s and a
separate audio track. I get jittery scrubbing and stuttering playback. Its easy to see in this video
I took…………….
If you watch the timeline as the playhead goes over the cut you will see dropped frames.
Even just dragging my mouse around the titles screen has
caused beachballs. And all of these issues have happened with and without an external monitor.
That was all on the MacBook Pro M1 with 16GB of ram. And I have seen even worse issues on the
Air M1 with 8GB of ram. The first night I had these I tried editing my first video on the Air
and It took me 3 hours to edit the first 2 minutes. I had issues with playback stalling
for not just a second or 2 but minutes. Each time I dragged b roll clips in I would get a beachball
and then nothing would play for sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. Sometimes I needed to close
the app and reopen it but shortly after the issue would return…..Then I started losing Audio when
dragging clips in. And the same thing, sometimes it would return, sometimes I needed to quit.
OK, here is a clip of the issues….the Clip is just over 90 seconds if you want to skip it.
So that was frustrating, and it was after midnight so I was tired.
I finally moved to my iMac to complete that first video. The next morning I rebooted the
machine and have so far been unable to reproduce those issue I saw with the Air. Its possible
that the M1s don’t like the Sony footage shot in slog2. I don’t know, but it was really annoying.
I have also seen a couple of crashes with Final Cut and Photoshop.
I am not using the beta version of Photoshop so I am running version
22.0.1 Under Rosetta 2 translation and Photoshop has crashed at least 4 times on me when doing
things like masking an object. I have learned that I need to save quick and often to make sure
I don’t spend time on 3 masks and lose them on a crash. …you know..hypothetically.
These new Macs have 2 USB4 ports with thunderbolt. I am not getting high speed out of these ports. I
mean…its not slow but it’s pretty far behind my iMac and slower than the early 2020 MacBook Air.
This T7 Drive is a usb-c 3.1 gen 2 drive,
capable of up to 10gbps. The 2020 iMac Does the best with a BlackMagic Read speed of 910MBps.
The i3 Air from early 2020 gets 885MBps Read and the M1 MacBooks get around 780MBps read speed.
So there is definitely a bottleneck somewhere inside the M1 MacBooks
and I assume the Mini as well. If you have a mini and are seeing these issues let me know below.
But this isn’t limited to this USB-C drive either. I have a dock….I don’t want to go
in what brand today, but this dock has an ethernet connection and it was a bit sporadic
when transferring files from the M1s to my server, jumping all over the place compared to the i3 Air
and iMac which had a consistent speed. There could have been a number of reasons for this,
though, and running iPerf actually showed a pretty consistent speed.
….and now….display issues….
First, you probably know that the M1 MacBooks are limited to 1 external display.
Thats not an issue for me and how I use it, but It can be harder than you think to get 60 hertz
on the external display….And if you don’t know, that means that even moving the cursor or windows
around the display will look choppy and slow. The only way I have found to get 60Hertz on an
external display is by using HDMI, either with Apples multipart display adapter, or with that
dock I have which has a USB-C connection to the computer and HDMI to the monitor.
So you may be thinking that that is good, that all I need. Well good,
you can skip ahead, but if you have a fancy thunderbolt monitor like this BenQ PD 3220U,
the M1 MacBooks will only display 30hertz…….. And Yes, I did try to manually set the refresh rate
but there was no option above 30hertz when connected this way. This exact same issue also
happens with the DisplayPort connections through a dock. No 60hertz option in display preferences.
And you guessed it, this all works correctly on the i3 air with HDMI,
Thunderbolt, or DisplayPort, so there is no issue with the cabled, dock or monitor.
For now I can use an adapter with HDMI for desktop use but I am not able to
use another dock that I really want to and this definitely is an M1 Mac issue.
Here is one last issue I saw with the display. When connected via a USB-C dock to my external
display and also using the built in display, I left my desk for a while for lunch. When I came
back the MacBook Pro display would not turn on. I disconnected and reconnected the dock
and the display would not come back. You Know what, Here is a video I took of the issue…….
After this video I rebooted and was all back to normal.
SO, After a week with these new MacBooks M1, I really like them and am really excited to be using
them. The allure of the performance, the newness, and this battery life that is just insane, is
too much to keep me from using it. But most people need to know and realize that these are brand new,
first generation products and its going to take time to find these bugs….. If you are like me
and you just want to live on the edge and test new things then I absolutely recommend these….
But be prepared for bugs in software and hardware that could bring what you’re doing to a halt.
If your life or job depends on stable software then maybe just hold off for a few months or
even until the next processors come out. Making YouTube videos is not my full time job
so I can live with a few crashes a day………………If you are ready to make the jump
and are still deciding between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, check out this video over here.
Hit the thumbs up button if you liked it, hit subscribe if you want and Ill see you next time.