Today we are going to talk about Apple’s new MacBook that has their M1 chip in it that was talked about last year at Apple’s yearly worldwide developers conference also known as WWDC. They announced that they are going to start moving away from using Intel processors and migrating over to their own processors. At WWDC they released a Mac mini, the MacBook Air, as well as the MacBook Pro.
I have had the MacBook Pro for about 3 weeks now, and have been using it a lot to finally be able to write a review on the MacBook Pro with Apple’s new M1 chip. Overall, I like how it runs, the battery life is excellent, I am able to go a few days without needing to charge the battery as long as I am not doing heavy tasks, but for word processing and surfing the web, writing emails I would say I can get approximately two days worth of battery life before I need to plug the computer in to charge the battery.
The pros for the MacBook Pro are that it is really fast because I can do things as fast as I need to, the battery last a long time, the keyboard feels really nice, native Apple/M1 applications are really fast. Now, applications that use the Rosetta 2/Intel architecture still are also really fast but they aren’t as fast as Apple native applications.
There are some downsides to the Macbook, there are only 2 Thunderbolt/USB-C ports, where as the previous MacBook that I was using had 4, but I really only use 1 maybe 2 at a time so that really wasn’t a deal breaker for me. In reading reviews online, and watching Youtube videos people have mentioned that you cannot use the MacBook with more then 1 external screen at a time. Depending on if you need more then 2 ports or not then I would say that the new line of Apple products is the way to go because of the fact that it is definitely much snappier then the Intel versions of the same computer, do I wish it had more ports, and was able to use it with more then 1 external monitor, yes, however, since I don’t use more then 2 ports at a time, and don’t really use a dual monitor set up with my Mac set up, its not really a dealbreaker for me.
I did some research and was actually going to get the MacBook Air when I was going to get the computer, however when I was talking to the guy at Best Buy, he recommended that I get the MacBook Pro over the MacBook Air, because if I want the computer to last then the Pro is the way to go. Also with the MacBook Air, one of the GPU cores is turned off so you only get 8 CPU cores, and 7 GPU cores.
I would definitely recommend getting AppleCare, they have recently changed the AppleCare program and once your initial 3 year warranty is up you can now renew the warranty at 1 year increments.