I have owned about 5 MacBooks in total over 15+ years (beginning with the white plastic one with 2GB of RAM). My 2013 15″ MacBook Pro still works very well: I upgraded it to Big Sur and its 16GB of RAM, 500GB SSD and i7 processor give excellent performance (its battery will need replacing soon as it is good for only about 50 minutes (and has had a pesky “requires service” symbol for over a year). I had bought my 2015 (8GB RAM / 128GB SSD) Air because of its battery life and the ease of taking it to meetings etc. Recently, with increased Zoom resource needs it was flagging in performance and the lower resolution screen was limiting the number of applications I had open, and I’d been using Brave to cut down on the resources for browsing.
I decided to sell my MacBook Air and buy a new M1 Air which would be my ‘go to’ machine and leave the MacBook Pro upstairs as part of my home studio. This should make it easer to sit down and record music because it will be all set up. A great thing about MacBooks is they are all built very well and retain resale value for many years.
Air versus Pro:
The M1 Air is virtually the same machine as the Pro, except it is $400 cheaper (in Canada). There are some minor things like the Pro has a fan which, theoretically, means it could handle heavier tasks but I don’t think those are anything I do ever (like render 3D graphics etc.). In fact most of the performance tests I’ve viewed in online reviews are encouraging and exciting, but simply way out of my general use cases. I do use GarageBand a fair amount and that is probably my most resource intensive work (along with two dozen or more browser windows being open).
So the $400 savings allowed me to ramp up the Air to 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. For my day job I do run Virtual machines and the 16GB gives me the option to do that with the M1 machine as well. From the reviews I’ve read 8GB seems to be enough for the vast majority of tasks people perform.
The Pro is also supposed to have slightly better speakers with a special ‘stereo’ effect. But I did not think that was a big enough reason to select that computer. Both machines have ‘3 mics’ but the Pro has ‘studio quality’, whatever that means. Because I’m a musician I don’t believe they are anywhere near ‘studio quality’ and I have 3 excellent USB mics I use for recording music anyway.
Oh, and the Pro has an 8 core graphics processor while the Air has a 7 core. But so what? Again, I’m not into rendering heavy graphic applications and, frankly, even my older Air was fine for watching movies, YouTube etc.
Nits: the Air has 400 Nits and the Pro has 500. I’m sitting in my well lit kitchen, beside a window, and my brightness is under 60% so 400 Nits is more than enough unless you want to type outside in the sunlight.
One other issue: It was only after a specific comparison video that I realized “oh yeah, the Pro has that irritating Touch Bar!” I’ve never owned a computer with that “feature” and I realized I really just wanted my function keys at the top so that sealed the deal for the Air.
Why buy now rather than wait?
We all know that the ‘next big thing’ will be even more amazing. I wanted to buy now because 1. I use mostly Apple apps so don’t need to worry about compatibility 2. The current specs sound -great- and I don’t need to wait a year for even better specs and 3. my MBAir was getting 2 – 3 hours on the battery and was not so powerful with Zoom calls, audio etc. Plus, I bought it with only 128GB of RAM which was getting a little tired (even though I had bought a separate 128GB SD card). If I was running a 2019 or 2020 MacBook Pro I certainly would have waited another year or two to upgrade.
How fast is it?
It was not ‘fast’ getting here from China with a few days spent in Japan (apparently) waiting for documentation. But I have now used it for more than a week and it is FREAKING fast! Programs start up almost instantly, Safari operates with 20+ tabs and doesn’t slow at all. I feel like for so many things I do, it is just sitting there waiting for me to demand something else. It is really all, and more, than I imagined it would be.
One thing that is always obvious is the simple process of viewing a web page. They just ‘snap’ open. And I would have thought “well, the internet itself is limited by the speed in my house and from the servers on the web”. So you would think there should not be huge difference from one machine to another. But on the M1 Air the pages load REALLY fast. Like, whoa!
Garage Band loads in under 2 seconds. Then to get a new project up and running with ‘software instruments’ it is under 2 seconds as well (or as fast as I can click/type).
So I see myself using this for years. Really. I mean, my 2013 MacBook Pro is still very solid, and this machine is so much faster.
The keyboard is also very good. I like my 2013 MacBook Pro keyboard a little better perhaps (A-), and the 2015 Air was ok, but not great (C+). The M1 Air is about a B/B+. The 2013 Pro keyboard has a bit more travel and bounce in the keys which I prefer.
Battery Life:
This is pretty fabulous. One day I took it around the house, played music, surfed the web and watched 2 streaming music concerts for a total of around 4 – 5 hours on battery and it was just down to 50%. So it seems very good which was another reason for my purchase.
Speakers:
I am a musician so sound and music are important to me. These speakers are really good with immersive sound and great stereo performance. You will always be able to buy far better external speakers, and ear buds etc. will offer a richer and more immersive sound, but these are really solid. You can play something from YouTube/Apple Music and actually hear all the parts clearly, even the bass line. You can even put this in a room and play a songlist and it sounds great throughout the kitchen, living room etc., no need to connect a better Bluetooth speaker unless you -really- want to rock it out. So the vastly improved speakers make it very convenient to listen to music and enjoy the experience.
Problems? Quibbles?
The M1 has just two ‘thunderbolt/USBC’ ports. It’s hard to know what to call them actually. This is probably what I dislike the most because almost everything I use (microphones, audio, external drives) are USB2. And even my old MacBook Air had an SD slot, but not the M1 machine! One good thing is that with the excellent battery life, you don’t have to worry about using one port to charge the computer for quite a while. But these shifting standards are very frustrating when you have so many peripherals that use USB. Or even lightening for iPad, iPhone etc.
There was a 2 week gap between ordering and my laptop arriving, so I ordered a pack of 2 tiny thunderbolt-USB2 adaptors. They are about an inch long so really work as an extension to any cable you plug in. I’ve used them and they work for recording audio on my Lewitt 650 mic which I think is a good test since that is something most likely to fail.
If I used a Mac for professional work, or with external monitors and advanced recording setups, I would probably wait for the next generation when I’m sure more ports will be available. It is also irritating that both ports are on the left side which reduces flexibility even further.
Compatibility:
One of the big arguments against ‘early adoption’ was the fact that “sure, Apple applications will work well but what about 3rd party apps?” Various reviews have stated that Rosetta has worked extremely well for allowing these apps to run very fast on the M1. Most of the apps I use are all from Apple: Garage Band, Pages, Safari, Apple Music etc. But I have run into a couple of glitches.
- Google Drive. I use this a lot and have used 61GB of my 100GB storage I pay for. I installed it locally but every time I tried to sync even a portion of that data onto my local drive, it crashed! This was irritating but I have not investigated it yet. However, I connected to Google Drive through Safari and this machine is so FAST that moving/opening/saving files through the browser interface is just as fast as using the drive! The only irritation is that when downloading files, I cannot put them directly in Drive: I have to download to the \downloads folder and then move/copy them into the web version of Drive.
- Evernote. I use this a lot as well, and when I opened the app, I could not type in it! Or read some of the notes! It was very frustrating and I got no real answer from the online forums. So I opened it in Safari and the web interface works perfectly (which is what I’m writing this review on).
So two fails so far but neither is having a serious impact. I care about Drive working more than Evernote so we’ll see if that gets fixed soon.
Conclusion:
For my purposes, this was an excellent purchase. I love the convenient size, the high resolution screen, much improved speakers, battery life and…..POWER. Despite a few imperfections, I am very happy with this small beast and I’m sure I’ll keep it for many years.
My configuration is MacBook Air, Apple M1, 16GB RAM / 1 TB SSD. MacOS BigSur 11.1
Ted Parkinson's Weblog 