I have just released a new version of Hyper Plan (v2.10.4) to support the new M1 Macs. It seems the the previous version (built with an older version of the Qt framework) had issues. I am thinking about buying a new M1 Mac Powerbook Pro so I can do testing on an M1. I wonder if anyone had upgraded to an M1 laptop or desktop. Has it lived up to the hype? Are most of your favourite Mac apps working ok on it?

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

Well, I’ve read an awful lot of reviews, and every single one (even by doubting Thomases) has been wildly enthusiastic.

I’m tempted to get a MacBook Air just to avoid heat and fan noise (my 2015 MacBook Pro quite often revs up when I’m using a lot of applications/opening a lot of web pages). The Air is, it appears, totally silent and remains utterly cool (in both senses!). Also, that battery life – users who’ve had them a while are reporting one to one and a half days of use, no worries.

Plus there are some great refurb deals already available on Apple’s website – in the UK, starting at GBP 850. Worth a look!

MadaboutDana wrote:

Well, I’ve read an awful lot of reviews, and every single one
(even by doubting Thomases) has been wildly enthusiastic.

Yes, they seem to get a much more positive response than other Mac laptops over the last few years.

I’m tempted to get a MacBook Air just to avoid heat and fan noise
(my 2015 MacBook Pro quite often revs up when I’m using a lot of
applications/opening a lot of web pages). The Air is, it appears,
totally silent and remains utterly cool (in both senses!). Also, that
battery life – users who’ve had them a while are reporting
one to one and a half days of use, no worries.

There are some reports about problems with limited SSD writes:
https://www.pcgamer.com/apple-m1-macs-appear-to-be-chewing-through-their-ssds/

But I suspect these reports are wrong (as reported elsewhere) and unlikely to be an issue in practise.

The fact that SSD and RAM are soldered in are a concern though. Why did they do that?

Plus there are some great refurb deals already available on
Apple’s website

Hadn't thought to look at refurbs.

I know, Apple’s been soldering in the RAM and SSD storage for a few years now, to the fury of those who like to tinker with their hardware (and even those who don’t, because it enhances built-in redundancy). It started under Jony Ive, I suspect as a way of ensuring that the machines remained as pure and unsullied as his particular aesthetic required, but there’s undoubtedly a commercial and a practical component. First, people have to upgrade more often. And second, you don’t have to support people who’ve inserted all kinds of unauthorised hardware into their Macs (so the opposite model from Microsoft).

For you, a better option might be a Mac Mini – just as powerful (actually, slightly more so) as the M1 MacBooks, but can (I believe) be upgraded (to a limited extent).

I bought my wife a Macbook Air M1 as a replacement of her ageing MBP from 2008 (?). Setting it up and playing around with the apps that I installed for her (granted, none of which were memory or CPU hogs) I found it to be fast and perfectly silent. Given the magnitude of the changes behind the scenes the transition was remarkably smooth.
I will wait until the M1 MBPs are out but would even consider an Air at this stage. The portability is great as the laptop itself is small and the new charger is a fraction of the size and weight of the old one.

Heh, yes – even the base model with 7 instead of 8 GPU cores is ridiculously quick. One reviewer (I’m trying to remember which one) simultaneously loaded all 53 of the apps he had installed (including some heavyweight graphics apps, from memory), and found it made absolutely no difference to the MBA’s rapid responses or overall performance. Support for non-Apple Silicon apps is astonishingly good (via Rosetta 2); there are just a few exceptions. The machine remains cool all the time, and the processor only degrades very gradually, according to reviewers who’ve been experimenting with video transcoding and other processor-intense operations. The MacBook Pro does have a fan, but is apparently very quiet even so.

The *base-level* MacBook Air is actually quicker than tooled-up MacBook Pros running on Intel’s i7 (and even i9) processors, despite having only 8GB of RAM. Some of the figures shown in real-world tests of graphics apps in particular are jaw-dropping. The exceptional battery life is the cherry on the icing.

The one thing to be aware of is that currently, an M1 machine can’t run Windows in any shape or form. That’s bound to change – I’m sure a new version of Parallels Desktop is already on the skids – but it’s a consideration.

I love my M1 MBP. For me the most amazing thing is battery life. I can use it all day without being plugged in, and I still have 2-6 hours left on it when I turn in for the night. My old MBP, doing the same things, would only give me about 3.5 hours of solid use. Speed is great too, but it is the battery life that I really notice.

Some people, however, have had strange kernel panics, connecting to some thunderbolt displays or things like that. Not seen this myself, but worth mentioning. My thunderbolt Drobo won't work until they update the firmware, so I don't know if it would cause problems or not.

Keep in mind that this is a first-gen Apple product and, historically, those have always been problematic a few years down the road. I'd listen to history and wait for the next gen. One problem on the horizon is that M1 machines have been writing data to the SSD at an alarming rate which -- if Apple doesn't fix the issue -- likely will shorten the SSD's life-span significantly. Since that drive is soldered, that's an issue ... probably just after the Apple-Care warranty expires. There are other issues which have been cropping up, too.

Need multiple displays? You can't get them on the 1st-gen M1. Need Windows? That's unavailable, too. Then there's the lack of ports and the 5 year-old design of the current M1's -- Apple simply dumped their new tech for this gen into machines designed in 2016. That design wasn't great in 2016 and it hasn't aged well, at all. The next gen machines will surely fix that, together with offering much better displays.

If you can't wait, I'd get the least expensive M1 MBA I could find now and plan on upgrading in a few years. Don't sink any more money into this than you absolutely have to.

I’d agree with @Listerene – don’t get a specced-up MBA. You don’t need to! Here’s the review I mentioned before (found it in my collection of odd articles; it was 57 apps, not 53):

https://www.itpro.co.uk/hardware/laptops/358189/apple-macbook-air-apple-m1-2020-review-the-worlds-best-ultraportable

And a couple of extracted paragraphs:
...
Enough theory: what’s it like to use? In a word, fast. In two, stupidly fast. There’s a level of snappiness that you simply don’t see on other laptops. Open the lid and the desktop is already there. Click on an app icon to start it and it loads – Microsoft Excel takes about one third of an ‘icon bounce’ to get running. For sheer silliness, we tried loading some 57 apps at the same time – the entire macOS app platform, plus all of Microsoft Office, and Logic and Final Cut Pro, and Blackmagic DaVinci and a pile of benchmark utilities. It took around 15 seconds.
...
The benchmark results speak for themselves. We tested the M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM, and compared it against a five-month-old MacBook Pro with an eight-core Core i9 processor and 64GB of RAM, a two-month- old Mac mini with a six-core Core i7 processor and 64GB of RAM, and a 2013 Mac Pro desktop with a Xeon processor and 64GB of RAM, as well as to the M1 MacBook Pro. In all of our tests, the MacBook Air was at the head of the pack, but it was in the Geekbench 5 single-core tests where it really shone, demonstrating a 36.7% lead over the Core i9 MacBook Pro with an astonishing score of 1,724. A result of 7,476 in the multi-core test was similarly stonking, although the gap between it and the rest of Apple’s stable isn’t quite so broad here, with a lead of less than 5% over the i9 Pro.
...

Listerene wrote:

One problem on the horizon is that
M1 machines have been writing data to the SSD at an alarming rate which
-- if Apple doesn't fix the issue -- likely will shorten the SSD's
life-span significantly. Since that drive is soldered, that's an issue
... probably just after the Apple-Care warranty expires.

I had seen reports of that. But apparently some people think the numbers that this are based on are wrong. I guess we'll find out who is right soon enough.

The performance certainly sounds impressive. I am curious to try it out with my Easy Data Transform app, which is very memory and processor intensive for big datasets (e.g. joining 2 CSV files with several millions rows each).

Has anyone seen benchmarks of how much slower an x86 app running in Rosetta is than the same app built for ARM?

--

Andy Brice
https://www.hyperplan.com

I've owned an M1 Mac Mini (16 gb of RAM, 500 gb SSD) since early December (replacing a previous Mac Mini with 16 gb RAM which had worked well for seven or eight years). Everything I've read about the speed of the M1s has been confirmed in practice; I hope that remains true, at least for a few years, as developers make applications more sophisticated in order to exploit this attribute.

I have not (touch wood) suffered any of the Bluetooth, wi-fi or screen issues that I've also read about. I have not heard the fan once. I hope that the SSD re-writes have been reported wrong, or don't apply when you have 16 gb of RAM, or are correctable by an Apple Big Sur update. So far, I'm very pleased with this machine.