M1 Pro ho ho
Christmas in November: after extensive brooding over why I don’t *need* a new MacBook Pro, this weekend I surprised myself with some impulse-buying. So now I am writing from a spanking new MacBook Pro 16-inch, the “entry” 10 core M1Pro, 16GB. A bargain at £2399.
In case you are about to take the same deep dive in your pockets, here’s my experience with owning and setting up such a machine for web development and every day professional life.
A bit of context
I am a tech entrepreneur. I basically live inside my computer (both for my professional and my personal projects) for ~15h / day, every day. Pretty sure this describes everyone reading this. My needs, however are skewed towards the following:
- management: Discord, Google Workplace and Notion for team coordination, Fantastical & Calendly for some heavy calendar usage, Google Meet for my product demos and client meetings. Plus a wide range of memory-hungry web-apps: Zendesk, Nethunt, Sendgrid, etc.
- frontend developer: Figma & Sketch for web design and prototyping, Pixelmator Pro for image editing, some light video editing, iTerm2, Docker & Visual Studio Code for web development. A fast terminal with nodejs running smoothly is a big must.
- personal: not much time left, but when I have some I do what everybody else is doing: FaceTime with family & friends, listen to music (Apple Music subscriber), code for personal projects, do some casual text writing. Fun!
Post-Ive aesthetics
The fff mantra forms follows function was clearly not working anymore in the final years of Jony Ive’s design lead at Apple. The previous line of MacBook Pro’s sacrificed function (ports, battery life, reliable keys) in favour of form (minimalist industrial aesthetics, perfectly-aligned identical USB-C ports, slim keys). As much as I appreciate Apple products belong in any contemporary design museum, their primary role is to serve their customers first. And serve they do today, with Apple doing a 180deg on several key decisions: keys now travel, battery is bigger, ports are plenty and varied, the touchbar experiment is over. I believe the return of the row of function keys (F1 to F12) is a galactic wink for the return of the fff.
My ears…
If you watched the October 18th Apple keynote, you noticed how proud they were of the 6-speaker sound system. Spatial surround sound, deep rich base, wide dynamic range. These are all true. It does sound like it’s coming from the future. So much so that I tried to compare it to my regular hifi sound system. In my experience it handles effortlessly almost any kind of music you throw at it. Almost. One song in particular shows the limits and pushes the speakers into unwanted distort territory: Billie Eilish’s “You should see me in a crown”.
M1Pro vs Intel i7: 2x as fast
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 2 years, Apple is now selling their (almost) entire range of products based on their own silicon: M1. They pretty much rocked the world with their custom built ARM-based CPUs. Performance-wise they left the competition (Intel) in the dust scrambling for some mercy. How much faster can it be? I compared it with my late 2019 MacBook Pro w. Intel i7 processor and 16GB: on average 2x as fast.
And it also feels that way. Applications load instantly, no fans in audible range, cold as a rock. You hardly know there is a machine here doing solid computational work for you. The experience is short of magical.
Compatibility
Switching CPU architectures from i386 to arm64 is as smooth as possible under the circumstances. In my experience only two softwares were not yet running on the M1Pro natively, but instead relied on Rosetta the translation layer:
- Discord (oh, why, Discord, why?) — With all the added speed, Discord runs now worse than on my previous machine. 🥺
- node v14 — Starting with v17, node runs natively on M1. Until we upgrade our dev environment, I need to rely on an entire terminal setup (iTerm, brew, starship, git, node) running under a i386 architecture. Even though this gets translated to Arm64 by Rosetta, the gain in speed is spectacular. So now I have 2 iTerm instances, one for each architecture.
As your mileage may vary, here’s a great resource to check what works on M1 and what doesn’t: https://doesitarm.com/
Goodbye Windows, Goodbye Linux
Ah, yes, here’s the annoying bit. If you are, like me, tempted to try out new OSs from time to time (like the new Windows 11, or Linux distros such as Ubuntu or Zorin OS) you can kiss that goodbye on your new expensive Mac. None of those can run natively (yet), no more dual boot. Boot Camp Assistant: strangely still exists but it is completely useless.
You now must use virtualisation platforms like Parallels or VirtualBox and pay the speed penalty. You are not likely to do any serious work on an alternate OS on your new Mac. Thoughts and prayers!
Wrap up
This M1Pro MacBook Pro is clearly the most amazing computer I’ve ever touched. Super fast, quiet and cold, it does its job without even noticing it’s there. The everyday experience (keys, screen, cam) is absolutely top notch. Speaking of the notch: you’ll get used to it in about 5 minutes and it’s also a neat place to hide your mouse pointer!
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I am co-founder of Hypersay Events, an opinionated platform for digital events.
