Apple MacBook Pro M1

 Apple MacBook Pro with Apple M1 Chip

The MacBook pro 13 m1 has been my daily driver now for the past six months and i thought I'd give you some insight into what my experience has been like so let's go the purpose of this Blog is to give you some insight into whether an m1 device is worth buying or not i'll cover how the chip has held up over the past 6 months and if there have been any issues that have shown up over time also revisit some of the support issues that i had back in december with the m1 chip and how the native apple silicon support scene is looking today and also give you my recommendation for whether to buy this or not one of the main things that i was excited about before i got my hands on the laptop was the idea that the company that's creating these super powerful yet cool to the touch tablets known as ipads is now going to develop their own processors for laptops which gave the promise of an ultra powerful laptop that never gets hot essentially.

 

The couch developer's dream and when i first got the laptop this was the first thing that i wanted to test and in my early testing it definitely held up to the promise it never got hotter than what i would call slightly below lukewarm and this was also after heavy use but the question is how is this held up six months later with updates and software installs and basically never turning the laptop off ever well it still never really gets hot and i would say that it gets like lukewarm but never really hot and to me this is just such a huge thing because generally i will actually use a laptop in the way that it's intended judging by the name at least which is on top of my lap and the m1 is by far the most comfortable laptop to do this with compared to any other laptop that i've tried none of them even come close yes it gets a little bit warmer after several hours of use but compared to literally all other laptops it's cold and the fan noise is still non-existent i've heard the fans twice in six months now if you're in like a completely silent room and you put your ear like right next to the laptop then yes you could probably hear something at some points but what i'm saying is like if you go about your working day as you normally would then no you will never really detect the fan noise when i say that i've heard them like twice in six months what i mean here is that i've like been able to detect any sort of noise or noticed that the fan started increasing in speed so this is not to the point where like all i could think about was the fan noise it's just to the point where i was able to detect that there was some sort of noise which you know by itself is really impressive i think but couple this with the performance that this machine is actually capable of and it actually becomes like it really becomes unfathomable what this is all right so i tried to build or like hold some sort of tension about like whether i would recommend this or what i think of it has it held up has it not held out but by now you probably know that i would definitely recommend this laptop but either way let's take a look at some of the negatives of this laptop so if we look back at when i first got the laptop there were definitely some things that were not ideal about it mainly third-party software not supporting apple silicon so let's take a look at what i said about that okay so in the blog i mentioned that homebrew wasn't supported yet and that meant that installing certain things wasn't as easy as just typing brew install but i didn't really have to wait too long because this was fully supported by february of that year so i got the laptop in mid December and it was supported in February which means that right now homebrew is definitely supported fully supported on the apple silicon the next thing that i said in the blog was that flutter worked which was not quite the case it worked but only via the rosetta translator process thingy which means that i was able to work with it but not natively so how does this look today six months later today flutter is almost a hundred percent natively supported some things still use rosetta to compile so it's not fully optimized yet but i should also mention that flutter even via rosetta has worked really well ever since the start and i haven't really noticed any like performance issues or anything like that nor have i actually noticed any real performance gains over time as like flutter started natively supporting apple silicon more and more which i think is really a testament.

How good apple silicon actually is

 

    

• 8-core CPU delivers up to 2.8x faster performance to fly through workflows quicker than ever

that it's able to like deliver this top of the line performance even via a translation process like rosetta after this i mentioned that certain python libraries weren't fully supported on apple silicon yet and this was actually quite a big problem for me because it meant that for like several months i didn't even bother trying to program in python on my apple m1 and this is because like any time i tried to it was just such a horrible experience because of the stuff just not being supported and it just meant that i was like running into bug after bug after bug however now most python libraries seem to work for the things that i've tried scikit-learn for instance which i mentioned in the blog now has full support and if there are any like niche python libraries out there that don't work yet then they will actually work via rosetta and like i said i haven't really found any performance issues or anything like that using rosetta and to me it's just been super smooth even though i would say like i'm not the most rigorous python programmer out there that uses tons of obscure libraries or any thing like that but right now i work in python without any issues and i've been doing so for the past couple months so the apple silicon support system has grown really rapidly in the past six months and i would say that probably in like another six months it will probably be hard to find things that don't actually support apple silicon and also i would say that all the problems that i mentioned are very like developer specific meaning that if you're like a regular user then you wouldn't have even noticed any of these issues if you bought your laptop in the past couple months all right so now let me just take a quick second to talk about brilliant who very kindly agreed to sponsor this blog if you haven't heard about brilliant brilliant is a website and app designed for learning about math and science they have tons of really interesting courses on computer science that i think you guys would really enjoy when i was in school me and a lot of my classmates would use brilliant to learn about certain complex topics in computer science like certain algorithms or math concepts that we felt our teachers didn't do a great job of explaining so brilliant really earns its name by actually being a brilliant way to learn if you're interested in computer science math or science in general then i would highly recommend going to holden to sign up for free the first 200 people will get 20 off their annual premium membership okay so the next thing that i want to mention just quickly is the battery life and this is again of course quite insane which like i mentioned at the start i never turned off my laptop really in the past six months i've turned it off maybe like four times so it's basically always on and the battery life is really really good and i think it's really worth emphasizing because in terms of everyday use i don't even know how long it lasts because i charge it so rarely now that's not to say that it's like it lasts several months or anything like that it's just that it lasts so many days that i forget when i charged it last it's to the point now where it feels kind of foreign to get the low battery notification i feel like this whole blog basically comes across as pretty much as biased as it gets and it probably seems like i'm like the biggest apple fanboy out there and i'm really not that at all i like apple but i also really like dell i like lenovo i like racer hp and all those laptops i get really excited about it's just that now none of them really seem to compare in my opinion one might be slightly faster in a specific test and one might have slightly longer battery life or faster wake up time but none of them seem to be able to combine all these features in one machine the way that apple has done here and knowing that the m1x or m2 or whatever apple we'll call it is probably right around the corner it just feels like amd and intel have a lot of catching up to do in order to beat apple also as a side note the wake up time is still crazy fast like i said i never turn it off and it still wakes up before i finished opening the laptop up so would i recommend this laptop big reveal coming no i would never of course i would recommend this laptop of course i would recommend it a thousand percent i would recommend this laptop i would recommend you to get any apple m1 laptop that you can find actually whether it's the macbook air or the macbook pro uh really i just think that it seems like it's the best choice of laptop that you can get right now and the reason for this is i really believe that this laptop will hold up for several years to come famous last words but in all seriousness i really think that apple went out quite hard here to really distinguish themselves as better than intel and amd so they probably poured almost all they were capable of into this chip to make sure that it was a success i mean their entire 2 trillion yes that's 2 trillion dollar business at least somewhat depended on this chip being successful so my guess is that the m1x or the m2 or the mx whatever apple ends up calling it will probably not be that big of an upgrade compared to the m1 and i'm not an expert or anything like this but i'm just thinking that like if the next chip is as big of an upgrade as the m1 was.