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MacBook Pro M1 3 months Later! Performance Issues Follow-Up

14:31 video

The M1 MacBook Pro has been in my hands for three months. After using it as my main computer, what are my impressions, and can I recommend it?

Performance

The M1 Macs are stupid fast for almost anything, as the benchmarks showed against computers costing twice as much. The MacBook Pro has an 8-core CPU (four performance and four efficiency cores), an 8-core GPU (which Apple claims is the fastest integrated GPU) and a 16-core Neural Engine (which I have zero idea about, though it helps machine learning tasks, like auto-sharpening in Pixelmator Pro).

My usage: video editing is the most stress I put on a computer. I’ve done basic game tests with Minecraft and Fortnite (4 to 6 hours total in three months), and spend most of my time in Safari, email, Word, OneNote, Messages, Notes, Remote Desktop and Citrix. So my experience may differ from yours, but I’ve had basically zero performance issues in three months. Apps open quickly. Even apps not optimized for M1 work great through Rosetta: you wouldn’t know without Activity Monitor. I only have a few daily apps left to update (Microsoft OneDrive, LastPass, my Logitech mouse utility). Most of Microsoft’s apps have been updated, Chrome has, and Adobe is working on Photoshop and Premiere. The jump to Apple silicon also made me take another look at Pixelmator Pro instead of Photoshop, and I’ve fully switched: it’s optimized for M1, with great machine-learning edits, and I no longer need the heavy Adobe suite.

Heat and fan

I’ve heard the fan fewer than 5 times in three months, which you can’t say about any Intel laptop. In the Sensei app, the fan shows 0 RPM with two browsers with multiple tabs, Messages, Mail, Word and a few others open. I’ve found no guaranteed way to spin them up: my Final Cut exports aren’t large enough, and even Cinebench for 30 minutes pushes the fans to only about 50 to 60%.

Compared with the 16-inch i9 MacBook Pro running Cinebench, the 16-inch’s fans ran over 5,000 RPM, much louder and more annoying, versus around 3,200 RPM on the M1. For heat, I let both sleep for an hour, then used them for about 20 minutes (browsing, email, documents) in a 68°F room: the keyboard was about 77°F on the M1 and 84°F on the 16-inch. Running Cinebench, 95°F vs. 108°F.

Battery

Apple says up to 17 hours of web surfing, and I believe it. Couch surfing for almost 3 hours (YouTube stats, shopping, research) dropped the battery just 4%. A typical workday (web, Office apps, Citrix, some Final Cut Pro, photo editing) for almost 9 hours straight left me at 35%; any other laptop would have given maybe 4 hours. Without photo and video editing, I’d have had over 50% left, so about two days of web, email and Office. You can leave battery anxiety at home.

Display, keyboard, trackpad and the rest

  • Display: amazing, scales everything to the right size, bright at 500 nits with great colors. Some say the bezels are too big for 2021, but I don’t see them when I’m working.
  • Keyboard: the Magic Keyboard is great, though I still feel the external one has a little more travel. The Touch Bar I could do without; I changed it to always show function keys and added Do Not Disturb and dictation buttons, as on the M1 Air.
  • Trackpad: big, glass, multi-touch, better than any other laptop trackpad. It makes a more metallic “tink” than the Air’s duller thud, which I prefer (a silly complaint, but I have to find something).
  • Speakers, mic and webcam: the webcam is better but I don’t use it often (my iPad Pro’s camera is miles ahead). The mic picks up my voice better, and the speakers are pretty good for a 13-inch laptop, though my 2018 12.9-inch iPad Pro’s are louder and clearer with more bass.

Follow-up on first-week issues

  • Timeline problems. In my first week, editing my first video, the timeline didn’t work, audio stopped, and the machines were almost unusable for a while. The next day I installed Big Sur 11.1 and haven’t seen it again. I’m guessing I ran out of disk space from APFS snapshots, which cleared overnight.
  • External drive speed. Still slower than my Intel Macs: about 910 MB/s from a Samsung T7 USB-C 10 Gbps SSD on Intel, but about 780 MB/s on the M1, a steep drop and, I suspect, a limitation of Apple’s USB/Thunderbolt implementation, which I hope the next chips address. It’s still plenty fast and hasn’t affected my workflow.
  • External displays. In my first-week video and two follow-ups, I found numerous issues with external displays on the M1 MacBook Pro and Air (DisplayPort, HDMI or Thunderbolt): blank displays after sleep, green screens, refresh rate limits, and messed-up resolutions that spanned even my internal display, with an expensive BenQ PD3220U and several Samsung displays, different cords and adapters. Big Sur 11.2 solved at least some: since then, I’ve had no issues over DisplayPort. HDMI still has random connectivity issues, and I can’t try Thunderbolt since I returned the BenQ. Let me know if 11.2 fixed yours, especially with a USB-C or Thunderbolt display.

Can I recommend it?

It’s a great computer, my primary device, the fastest overall laptop I’ve used, snappy and never limited even with non-optimized apps. My setup is at my desk with an external monitor, mouse, keyboard and speakers, but I love that I can unplug it and take all that power with me, sometimes for days without plugging in. It isn’t perfect: I still have concerns about external displays, the webcam is still 720p, and I want cellular, dang it.

But three months in, this is the best computer I’ve owned, and if I needed to buy another laptop today, I would not buy the MacBook Pro M1. The MacBook Air M1 is the better overall value: the same M1, and the $300 difference is better spent on 16 GB of RAM and more storage than on a slightly brighter screen and a Touch Bar. The performance and experience are nearly identical, and if you think you need more than the Air, wait for the next MacBook Pro. If you bought the M1 MacBook Pro, was your experience the same, and would you get the Air if you did it again?

In this video

  • 0:00 intro
  • 0:31 performance and stability
  • 3:24 heat and fan
  • 5:54 battery
  • 7:04 screen
  • 7:45 keyboard, touch bar, trackpad
  • 9:06 speakers, mic, webcam
  • 9:43 performance issues follow-up
  • 11:16 display issues follow-up
  • 12:32 do I recommend?

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