Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Pro Review: This Changes Everything (opens in new tab)

I'm not sure this review gives us anything new. To sum up:

* The comparably priced Dell XPS 17 actually wins in most benchmarks (but the M1 is using Rosetta 2 translation for each of these!)

* The battery life is really amazing.

* The lack of cooling necessary is amazing.

* Software compatibility with ARM through Rosetta 2 is mind-blowing. No one expected it to work this well.

* Don't buy Intel-based Macs any more!

* If you want a high-powered 13" Macbook, this is it.

* If you want larger than 13" or more than 2 Thunderbolt (USB4) ports, hold onto your butts!

As these articles do get tiring with no content in them aside from M1 being fast in charts.

I found this episode more interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMTfPSzrjXs

Several other commenters seem to have missed a detail from the article: in every single one of these tests the software is running natively on both the Dell and Intel Mac and entirely in emulation on the M1.

That said, we already have had plenty of these comparisons done, I don't think there is anything revolutionary here, this is more an article targeted towards people who do a specific task (photography) than tech news in general.

I think a lot of people who have been reflexively buying new MacBook Pros every couple years should do themselves a favor and seriously consider a MacBook Air this time around. It's the same performance most of the time, and for tasks longer than 5 minutes, thermal throttling will only reduce performance by ~20% or so - for many that's still, plenty, plenty fast, when the baseline is a super fast machine. And in return you save some money, save some weight, get rid of the Touchbar, and get the wedge shape that doesn't put an edge right up against your wrists when typing on it the way a Pro does. Unless you really need every ounce of performance, there's a good chance an Air will just be a more enjoyable machine.

> this changes everything

> As you can see, M1 Mac beats Intel Mac in every Lightroom benchmark across the board

Yeah, by a relatively small amount according to your own charts... It's still impressive, not exactly earth shattering.

These reviews are not that informative for me. I’d rather read about how M1 behaves in a certain workflow. For instance, when working on a huge open-source project like VSCode. Or how it behaves when the RAM is under heavy pressure.

Nothing really new in this post, not sure how this still makes the top of hn.

Don't buy the pro, buy the air. The fan is a negative, not a positive, and the case is a lot more handy. Also, real buttons. I was one of the people who liked the touchbar, but I don't miss it at all

Why would you buy this and not the Air? Same max RAM, same CPU, just slightly more battery. The Touch Bar is the only thing and I personally never found it that useful. I guess this has more ports too?

Or am I missing something? If this chip had more cores or was a variant with all 8 performance cores that would be a thing.

Why is 13 inch such a popular form factor still now when bigger laptops can be made lightweight and thin as well? Is it because women have smaller hands?

It took a lot of time to convince my girlfriend to finally switch to at least 14 inch, and she loves it (AMD Zen 2, so it's not 5nm tech of course)

Pedestrian conclusions; bad writing. What's not to like about this article?

Let this be the last M1 review that makes it to the top of hn...

So, a completely down-to-the-silicon vertically integrated system with baked in non replaceable RAM has nice performance per watt. Wow.