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MacBook M1 Issues with Performance, USB, and Display

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The new M1 MacBooks came out last week with a bang. I really like mine, but in my first week, I came across a few issues with performance, USB and displays.

The M1 chips are the first Apple silicon SoCs made to run a full Mac, and they instantly blew past the low and mid-tier Intel Macs, cooler and quieter. The cheapest Macs are now as fast, in many situations, as Intel Macs costing twice as much. These Macs are fast, exciting and worthy of praise, but there are issues worth sharing.

Performance

The most notable is in Final Cut Pro, where I edit multicam 4K video: two 4K tracks from my Sony A6400s and a separate audio track. I get jittery scrubbing and stuttering playback, with dropped frames as the playhead goes over a cut, and even dragging my mouse around the titles screen caused beach balls, with and without an external monitor. That was on the MacBook Pro M1 with 16 GB. It was even worse on the Air M1 with 8 GB: the first night, it took me 3 hours to edit the first 2 minutes, with playback stalling for not just a second or two but sometimes minutes, each time I dragged B-roll in; sometimes I had to close and reopen the app, and then it returned. I also started losing audio when dragging clips in. It was after midnight, so I finally moved to my iMac to finish. The next morning I rebooted and haven’t reproduced those issues. Maybe the M1s don’t like Sony footage shot in S-Log2.

I’ve also seen a couple of crashes in Final Cut and Photoshop. I’m not using the Photoshop beta, so I’m on 22.0.1 under Rosetta 2, which has crashed at least four times, doing things like masking an object. I’ve learned to save quickly and often (“hypothetically”).

USB speeds

The two USB4/Thunderbolt ports aren’t fast: not slow, but well behind my iMac and slower than the early 2020 MacBook Air. My T7 is a USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 drive capable of up to 10 Gbps. In Blackmagic, reads: the 2020 iMac 910 MB/s, the early 2020 i3 Air 885 MB/s, and the M1 MacBooks about 780 MB/s. There’s a bottleneck somewhere inside the M1 MacBooks (and I assume the Mini). A dock with Ethernet (I won’t say the brand) was also a bit sporadic transferring files from the M1s to my server, jumping around compared with the consistent speeds of the i3 Air and iMac, though that could have many causes, and iPerf showed a pretty consistent speed.

Displays

  • The M1 MacBooks are limited to one external display, which doesn’t affect me, but it can be harder than you’d think to get 60 Hz on it (without it, even moving the cursor or windows looks choppy). The only way I’ve found is HDMI, either with Apple’s multiport adapter or a dock with USB-C to the computer and HDMI to the monitor.
  • With a fancy Thunderbolt monitor like the BenQ PD3220U, the M1 MacBooks only display 30 Hz. I tried to set the refresh rate manually, but there was no option above 30 Hz when connected this way. The same happens with DisplayPort through a dock: no 60 Hz option. It all works correctly on the i3 Air over HDMI, Thunderbolt or DisplayPort, so the cables, dock and monitor aren’t the problem. For now I can use an HDMI adapter for desktop use but can’t use another dock I really want to: this is an M1 Mac issue.
  • Display not turning on: connected through a USB-C dock to my external display and also using the built-in display, I left for lunch and the MacBook Pro display wouldn’t turn on when I came back. I disconnected and reconnected the dock, and it still didn’t come back. After rebooting, all was normal.

Verdict

After a week, I really like them: the performance, the newness and the insane battery life are too much to keep me from using them. But these are brand new, first-generation products, and it takes time to find bugs. If you’re like me and want to live on the edge, I absolutely recommend them, but be prepared for software and hardware bugs that could halt what you’re doing. If your life or job depends on stable software, maybe hold off a few months or until the next processors. (Making YouTube videos isn’t my full-time job, so I can live with a few crashes a day.) If you’re deciding between the Air and Pro, see my comparison.

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