Ask HN: Buy the M1 MacBook Pro or Wait for M2? My usage: blogging, image and video editing, podcasting. I don't program any longer and even if I do, it'll probably be putting together shell scripts and some python for text processing. The heaviest usage will be using FFmpeg for some video processing, that my 2015 Macbook Pro handles well enough (for comparison). |
Better Keyboard with more Key Travel than the new Magic Keyboard. Sane Trackpad Size so you dont accidentally move your cursors every few months while typing. MagSafe that actually work the way it is intended if you are clumsy. Reliability seems to be so much better. 2016 MacBook Pro has Flexgate, Staingate, Butterfly keyboard, SSD Failure, Thunderbolt Frying CPU, and now finally "accepted" Battery Non-Charging issues. Latest M1 MBA already has a few logic board dead issues. And somehow all of the above issues were described by Apple apologist as "acceptable failure" of any electronics. ( M1 MBP seems fine so far).
What does all these means. Apart from some performance benefits. 2015 MacBook Pro Models were so good that it seems ~7 years after its introduction it is still hard to beat. And with every introduction of New MacBook Model Apple seems to have messed up one thing or another.
It is one thing that your company buy you a new MacBook for you to play and trash every two years. If you are spending your own money and with immediate need for a new one my suggestion is to wait.
Oh, did I mention for the first time in 10+ years Apple stopped mentioning Mac User Satisfaction rating in their Investor notes or WWDC.
Another thing is that 15 inch model had Intel CPU from previous generation (unlike 13'), because Intel couldn't keep up with production of the latest architecture dies.
I am decoding 4K HEVC just fine here, although at a low 5-10Mbps Bitrate with CPU going to 70%.
Especially since it seems like even pre-pandemic laptops operated 80% of the time from a fixed position anyways.
I think I wanted to wait for the M2 because I had FOMO for the next generation, while also thinking that the M1 was gonna have a bunch of weird bugs. If anything there are known limitations (like with external displays and booting from external drives), but I don’t really fall in those categories so I was okay with it.
If I were you, as long as you’re not in a rush to upgrade, just wait and see what the M2 is like. If you can’t wait, know that you’ll be in excellent shape with the M1.
Is your 6 years old laptop still good enough? Wait. Do you want/need a new faster laptop with an exceptional battery life now? Get a MacBook pro M1.
Second generation usually has the bugs worked out.
Apple has done an impressive enough job with the M1 that if I really needed a new computer right now, I might make exception -- the reviews have been phenomenal -- but barring that, I'd wait for M2.
Perhaps irrelevant to this discussion, but with non-critical things, I also often buy used. It's eco-friendly. I wouldn't buy a used /work/ computer, but for something like school or entertainment, there's a lot of upside to buying used:
* You can find teardowns on iFixit if you need to fix something.
* Someone has figured magical Linux kernel commands to disable NCQ to prevent some oddball crash.
* All the bleeding-edge stuff is supported; drivers are in mainline.
* If there's a keyboard design issue, fan failure, etc. people will have discovered it.
* In a lot of domains, you can also get upgraded/off-lease corporate/industrial equipment, which tends to be cheap and a few quality brackets up. Companies will offload old AV equipment, off-lease laptops, lab equipment (oscilloscopes, etc.), etc. A 5-year-old professional 1080 camcorder will wipe the floor with consumer 4k equipment.
Buying older stuff, you also spend around 1/2 to 1/3, and it's no different from having been born 2-5 years earlier. If you were born in 1990, you'll get the same equipment at the same age as someone far wealthier than you born in 1985.
Except for expiring Android phones and Chromebooks. Google like landfills.
The M1 is essentially what would have been the A14X for the iPad. I don’t consider it first-gen technology. macOS for ARM is first-gen but it seems to exceed expectations across the board.
The big plus of Air is that it is completely passive and silent. As such it will last longer. Depending on the dust level one may need to open the notebook each 6 months or even more often to vacuum clean and to avoid any throttling due to dust accumulation.
• The boot process is very locked down, and is unfinished/buggy. My M1 MBP is acting up in ways that previously would have been solved with SMC/PRAM reset, but M1 doesn't have these and NVRAM can't be reset. I had to reinstall it via DFU mode. It felt like jailbreaking an iPhone.
• The hardware has a poor implementation of Thunderbolt with missing features and incompatibilities. Not only it supports only one external display, but only one specific port, and in multi-port docks you can't chose which one it picks. Some external disks benchmark poorly with inconsistent and slower-than-expected speeds.
• Having ports only on one side is more annoying than I expected.
• It's clearly a "rev.1" machine, and these usually age poorly and get dropped by Apple quicker than later, mature revisions.
• It's very fast for a 25W CPU, but in absolute terms power-hungry desktop CPUs are still faster. So my buggy M1 is gathering dust, because right now I'm not traveling anywhere, so I can use a desktop computer that is faster.
-the battery feels like it lasts 3x-4x longer than my 2019 13 mbp.
-it compiles Typescript as fast(sometimes faster) as my brand new Ryzen 5800x based work station.
-great performance on many small things that I never even thought of as slow
The Air has a nicer form factor and basically the same panel as the pro. Only reason to get the pro if you want to keep complaining about the Touch Bar.
Also active cooling if you want to run CPU at full capacity for extended periods of time.
With a newer technology, often priced higher, it's always better to wait for the 2nd or 3rd generation iteration as they usually iron out all the pre- and post-manufacturing bugs, and becomes cheaper over time (don't see that happening with Apple though).
E.g. External boot disks still don’t work properly with M1 Macs: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/02/10/external-boot-disks-stil...
But for my day-to-day use, even with barely leaving the house, a 15-16" display is much better for me. I would appreciate the speed and other features of the next-gen machines but the real deciding factor is the display. Sure, I would use it on my 27" 4K monitor a lot, but I like moving around even if it's just to the porch or couch, and my use of machines with 12-14" has felt fairly cramped when doing actual dev work.
I know the M1 MBP's fan is apparently very, very quiet but if I were recording podcasts, I'd be really tempted to go totally fanless with the Air. No noise, no vents to block, no dust build-up, true all-day battery life, no &#(* touch bar, and relatively cheap.
A huge factor for waiting is if you want to run multiple external displays. The M1 MBP and MBA can only drive the internal display and one external. I personally like one big display but if you need that multi-monitor life, you need to wait (or get the M1 Mini or use a DisplayLink adapter).
But if I do not compile, it is silent even when running a Windows or Linux VM.
(If you were interestedly in contributing time and patches to fixing M1 software issues on M1, then you could of course get one for that, but you'll want to keep your existing Mac as your primary work computer.)
Nothing can beat a 30+ inch ultra wide monitor and a good old desktop. You can always change the keyboard :)
Just Saying.
I would buy it now if I were you; probably you can sell it off for a good price anyway when the new one arrives.
I will probably upgrade the moment a new one comes out, if I haven’t fled macOS yet.
Edit: yes, I know about DisplayLink. I don’t do third-party kernel drivers, and the cost for a good DP module is more than I want to blow.
The iPhone 1, first macbook pro intel, all were refreshed with more capable models.
Personally, I'm wondering what an apple-cpu mac pro will look like... if they refresh quicker than 6 years :)
maybe that's there way of saying "enough's enough" to lagging developers, but I kind of like Microsoft's model better -- you can still manage to get really old stuff running. That's a better way to get people on a newer OS.
Come back in an hour or so, and you're nearly fully juiced up.
Performance-wise, with appropriate software (i.e., M1-compatible, and none of this Rosetta stuff), it'll be faster than your 2015 MBP, even with half the RAM.
I recommend the MBA-M1 with 512 GB storage; the 8 GB RAM is plenty, and still has better effective memory bandwidth than my Core i9-9980HK MBP 15 (with twice that). Really.
Also - latest FFmpeg is compatible: https://isapplesiliconready.com/app/FFmpeg
I was always told buy things that appreciate in value and lease those that depreciate. Given that all of these depreciate, my model is akin to leasing since it have planned disposition (like a car lease after 36 months) and a decent idea of expected value. I don’t trash my shit, so I generally get great sales prices from it.
I bought the MacBook Pro M1 and Mac Mini.
The biggest reason for me is battery life. Going from a 3 hour life to 15+ is game changing.
However, the software transition is still very much ongoing
Check all your software is compatible before making the switch
On a personal note, can't wait to switch off of my 2015 MBP 15', even though I agree with touchbar & touchpad size scepticism.
Honestly, in a post pandemic world I feel like companies should start handing out more desktops. If I’m remote forever, why pay for a display that I’ll literally never open?
I suspect that something like a M1X, an M1 scaled with additional cores and more memory capacity, will target higher TDP Apple laptops/desktops/workstations. More of the same continuous innovation, a good thing, in my opinion. Many of these decisions are pure marketing; a cheaper MacBook Air with an A14 makes sense to me technically as does the 13" MacBook Pro offering both low-TDP M1 and high-TDP M1X.
A departure from the existing continuous innovation might be a Neoverse-style chip like the Graviton for desktops/workstations. The current big.LITTLE architecture of the M1/A14 makes perfect sense for mixed use devices.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization
It's already here. No updates to software or hardware needed.
Both of those are available on M1. Virtualization was even demoed in the keynote discussing the switch to ARM.