The MacBook Pro M1 has been in my hands for the last 3 months
and in that time I have had a chance to test everything I need from a computer
and feel like I have gotten to know this laptop pretty well. Weve had some good times and some….
frustrating moments in the beginning. So, what are my impressions after using this laptop
as my main computer for the last 3 months and can I recommend it?
Hey, Im Jerry and yes, Apples new computers
with their very own Apple Silicon chip came out about 3 months ago to some crazy fanfare.
And Honestly, deservingly so. You’ve seen all the benchmarks by now which show the M1 MacBook Pro,
Air, and Mini just destroying some other computers that cost twice as much, or more.
Whether that is generic tests like geekbench and cinebench, or so called real world tests like
video exporting, ….which I know not everyone edits videos but I think thay are actually
good tests because you can have a consistent test across multiple computers that actually
stresses a computer. You can get a good idea at how much faster one machine is over another with
something like that. And the short story is that these M1 Macs are stupid fast for almost anything.
The MacBook Pro M1 has an 8 core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores,,,an
8 core GPU which Apple claims is the fastest integrated GPU, and then there
is a 16 core neural engine. Now admittedly I have zero idea what a neural engine does
but it does help with specific tasks like machine learning and developers can use
it to perform super complex transactions like auto sharpening in pixelmator pro.
Now let me just explain how I use my computers real quick. Yes I do video editing and that is by
far the most stress I put on a computer. I have done some basic game tests with minecraft and
fortnight but I am not a gamer and would say that I have spent about 4-6 hours testing games in the
last 3 months which is nothing. I spend a bulk of my time in Safari, email, Word, onenote, messages,
notes, remote desktop, and citrix. So it is entirely plausible that my experiences can
be different from yours but for my uses, 3 months in, Ive had basically zero issues with performance
using this MacBook Pro M1. All of my apps open quickly and run just as they should.
Even apps that have not been optimized for the M1 work great, like the games I just mentioned,
They pretty much just run with the help of Rosetta translation in the background and you
never really realize it. You wouldn’t even know that these apps are running in a non-native way,
in most cases, without looking at Activity monitor As you can see form my activity monitor,
I only have a few remaining apps that I use daily that need to be updated like Microsoft OneDrive,
lastpass, and my Logitech mouse utility compared to a couple months ago.
Most of Microsoft’s apps have been updated like word, excel, and Edge…Chrome has been updated,
and even Adobe is working on updates for Photoshop, premiere, etc…..
And actually, this jump to Apple Silicon made me take another look at Pixelmator Pro,
in liu of photoshop and I absolutely love it and have fully made the switch. Pixelmator
is really optimized for M1 and can do some really great machine learning edits
and now I don’t need to worry about installing the super heavy adobe cloud suite anymore.
So to condense all of that down, the performance and stability of
macOS and Apps on the MacBook Pro M1 has been outstanding with no lingering issues.
Apps feel snappy to open and I don’t feel limited in any way by the performance of this MacBook Pro.
In a minute I will address some issues I had seen in my first week.
Now, with all of that performance and stability I want to talk about the heat and fan…..or lack
there of. Yes, there is a fan inside this MacBook Pro M1 but I can honestly say that I have only
heard it less than 5 times in the last 3 months. You…just….cannot say that about any intel based
laptop. At all. The MacBook Pro M1’s fan is so quite that I am not even sure if it is running. I
mean, I am sure there is some kind of utility out there that will show the fan on the M1..Oh wait…..
If we look at the Sensei app you can see the fan is showing zero rpm. That’s with 2 browsers
with multiple tabs, messages, mail, word, and a few other apps open….This thing is dead silent
almost all the time. I have not found a guaranteed way to get the fans spin up on this macbook pro.
My final cut pro exports are not usually large enough to make this computer break a sweat and
even running Cinebench for 30 minutes will only push the fans to about 50-60% most of the time.
Comparing the MacBook Pro M1 to the i9 16” MacBook Pro
Running Cinebench on both of these computers The fans on the 16” macbook pro
were running at over 5000 RPM and were much louder and more annoying than the MacBook
Pro m1 which was only running at around 3200rpm. Here are the sounds of the fans…..
Fan noise is not the only thing to think about when using a laptop, there is also the heat. If
you are going to be using a laptop for hours on end from a couch or something you don’t want your
legs to be slowly roasted or hands to be sweaty. To show the difference in temperature I let both
the MacBook pro M1 and the 16” macbook pro sit asleep for an hour. Then I booted them and used
them for about 20 minutes to do similar things like browse, check email and open a few documents.
The MacBook pro M1 temperature was about 77 degrees on the keyboard
and the 16” macbook pro was about 84 degrees. This room was a bit chili at about 68 degrees.
When running the previous cinebench test the macbook pro m1 got to 95 degrees on the keyboard
and the 16” macbook pro got up to 108 degrees.
That’s enough comparing the M1 Macbook pro to the 16” but I just wanted to show you that the
M1 MacBooks are very comfortable to use in terms of heat and fan noise.
Then there is battery life. You’ve heard it all by now. Crazy claims of insane all day battery life
on the M1 MacBooks. Apple says you can get up to 17 hours of web surfing on the MacBook pro M1….I
don’t know about you but I couldn’t test that for that long,
but the battery life is amazing and I totally believe that is possible.
Here is an example of just couch surfing for almost 3 hours. I was checking youtube stats,
shopping, researching, …just all over the web and the battery dropped 4%. So ya,
I think you can get a lot of web surfing in on this thing. But what if you are actually working?
Here is an exampe of a typical workday for me using all the apps I have talked about
in this video. Web, office apps, remote access with citrix, some final cut pro,
and photo editing. This went on for almost 9 hours straight and I was only down to 35%.
If was using any other laptop I would have gotten maybe 4 hours max while working that way. If you
take out the photo and video editing I would have been above 50% so it is totally possible
to use this laptop for web, email and office apps and probably get about 2 days out of it
which means you can just pick this thing up and go, leaving the battery anxiety at home.
So that’s all the internal stuff and I want to touch on some of the other physical and external
features like the screen. Its amazing. I am a big fan of the retina displays on the MacBook pro.
It scales everything to what feel like the correct size, its bright
at 500 nits, and its got some amazing colors. I am sure there are more accurate displays out
there but this display is very pleasing and enjoyable to use. Some people would
argue that the bezels are too big for 2021 but I honestly don’t have a problem with the bezels.
I feel like they are fine and when I am working I don’t even see them.
Of course smaller bezels in a new design will be nice but I just don’t care about these….
The keyboard is great. I am not a big keyboard connoisseur but I like the magic keyboard.
They of course changed out and got rid of all the butterfly keyboards and
they say everything is rocking the same magic keyboard but I still feel like the
external magic keyboard is a little bit better and has a little bit more travel.
I can type comfortably on the built in keyboard and it does what I need .
The Touch Bar, I could do without. I don’t want to dwell on it but I much prefer physical keys
but at a minimum I have changed the touch bar to always show the same function keys and I do like
that you can add a Do not disturb button and a dictation button, just like on the M1 air.
The trackdpad is what you expect from Apple. Its big, its glass, its multi touch and it
works better than any other laptop trackpad out there. Period. The MacBook Pro trackpad does make
a different sound than the trackpad on the MacBook Air which is a little smaller. The pro trackpad
makes a sound almost like its more metallic more like a tink sound where as the Air make more of a
dull thud click sound. Im not sure if this is how the haptic engine is made or if apple purposefully
makes a noise that is different for them but I prefer the sound of the Air trackpad much better.
I know stupid thing to complain about but hey I have to find
some things I don’t like about the Macbook pro M1.
The only other hardware features I can think of are the speakers, mic, and webcam.
Apple says the webcam is better and it is but I don’t use it often enough to make a
real observation on. The camera on my ipad pro is miles ahead so I use that for web calls.
I can say that the mic does seem to do a better job at picking up my voice and the speakers
on this small 13” laptop are pretty good. External speakers will always be better but
they aren’t bad. As a comparison, The Speakers in my 12.9” ipad pro from 2018
are both louder and clearer with more bass to my ears. But like I said, they are pretty good.
Now, I do want to follow-up on my first week performance issues. You may have seen in one
of my previous videos, I was experiencing a few issues within my first week. When I first got the
MacBook Pro M1 and the Air M1 I was installing everything I could to see if it would work and
checking performance against my other MacBooks and iMacs. When it came time to edit my first video
on these machines I ran into major performance issues that prevented the timeline from working,
the audio would stop playing and they became almost completely unusable for a period of
time. The next day I installed BigSur 11.1 and since then I have not seen those issues
return. Looking back on that I am guessing I may have run out of disk space from APFS snapshots
which cleared over the night and then the 11.1 update probably helped a few other things.
I also talked about the speed of external USB-C drives being much slower than on my intel Macs and
that issue is still there. I was getting around 910MB per second with a Samsung T7 USBC 10gbps SSD
where as the M1 Macs would only get around 780MBps which is a pretty steep drop. To me,
this seems like a limitation of Apples USB or thunderbolt implementation on the M1 chip and
I am curious to see if that gets addressed in the next set of chips.
But to be clear, even though the max speeds for usb seem to be less than the intel machines,
it is still plenty fast and has not affected my workflow at all.
Then there are the display issues. In that first week video and 2 followup videos
I found numerous issues with external displays when connected to the M1 MacBook pro and Air.
No matter if I was using displayport, hdmi, or thunderbolt I had issues with
waking from sleep and the display being blank, to crazy green screens, limits to refresh rate,
and completely messed up resolutions that spanned across to even my internal display.
I was using an expensive, but amazing BenQ PD3220u display
and I went and bought different Samsung displays to try and rule out a display
issue. I tried different cords and adapters to try and rule all that out. No matter what I did
I had constant problems when connecting displays or waking from sleep. This is me typing anothiner
line into my text so that I can demonstrate the keyboar don the new macbook pto kkkk
Luckily, the big sur 11.2 update solved at least some of those issues.
Since 11.2 I have had no issues using an external display on my MacBook Pro M1 via displayport.
HDMI still has some random connectivity issues and I cant try thunderbolt because I returned
that expensive monitor that I couldn’t use. For me, I am running along just fine now with my M1
and an external display and I hope to get a nicer display sometime soon but let me know below if
11.2 fixed your display issues, especially if you have a USB-C or thunderbolt display.
Now, with all of that information, can I recommend the 2020 MacBook Pro M1?
It is a great computer that has become my primary device. This laptop is the fastest
overall laptop I have ever used, everything feels snappy, and it never feels limited
even with non optimized applications. I use it for work, youtube, and everything
else. My normal setup is at my desk with an external monitor, mouse, keyboard and speakers
but I love that I can just unplug it and take all this power with me and not need to worry about
plugging it in…Sometimes for days at a time. This laptop is not yet perfect, though.
I still have some concerns with external displays, the web cam is still 720p, and I
want cellular connectivity dang it. But..3 months in, this is the best computer I have ever owned
and If I needed to buy another laptop today, I would NOT buy a MacBook Pro M1.
I bet you didn’t see that coming. But I did not misspeak. I think that the MacBook Air M1 is the
better overall value because the Same M1 chip is in both computers and that 300$ price difference
is better spent on 16GB of ram and additional storage vs the little bit brighter screen and
a touchbar. The performance and experience is almost identical between them and if you think
you need more power than the Air you should wait for the next version of the MacBook Pro.
…but that’s just my advice, what do you think? If you bought a MacBook pro m1
has your experience been the same as mine? If you had to do it over would you get the air?
Let me know below. If you havnt seen my crazy display test where I tested all combinations
of display connections with the M1 laptops you should check out this video over here.
Hit the thumbs up if you liked it, hit subscribe if you want and Ill see you next time.