I would be pretty upset if this was my primary development machine. A lot of minor issues, but enough that I still rely on my older machine frequently. Definitely improving, but I'd give it a few more months. I'm not saying there aren't solutions to the issues I'm having, but there are enough small ones that it hasn't been worth the time to chase down each one.
Examples include:
- multiple monitor support
- Facetime issues
- Xcode cannot connect to my phone
- start up is fast, but wake-from-sleep is slow
- an ESC key is nice, but I would still like volume/mute buttons. Especially in COVID times where I am muting/unmuting even more than usual.
The positives are that it is very fast and battery life is great!
That’s surprising; “instant wake” is an advertised feature of the AS Macs.
Are you actually referring to how long it takes to get back to the desktop from the Lock Screen? If so, do you perhaps have lots and lots of Chrome tabs open, more than fit in memory, such that some are hibernated; and do you frequently put your Mac to sleep, change its power state (plug/unplug), then wake it up again? If so, that’s Chrome blocking wake by attempting to wake up all the hibernated tabs to tell them the power state changed. I get that all the time on my 2016 MacBook.
It's hard to take the author seriously when he gushes over the joys of using the touch bar, the life-changing productivity gains of having a faster computer, and - yes - the benefits of down-sizing to a smaller screen. Apple can do no wrong, it seems.
i went from the most expensive 2016 (?) macbook pro 15" with touchbar to the least expensive macbook air M1 and it feels like an absolutely amaaazing upgrade
I'm glad to hear this. My desktop I use for both gaming and work is over 5 years old, and I worry about having my job tied to such an old machine. Since I couldn't source the components I wanted (Ryzen 5800 basically, which did become more available recently), I held off and then got convinced to try an Air M1. So my new laptop is arriving next week.
I've never seriously used OS X outside of struggling through it to develop apps, so I'm a bit nervous. I'm making the switch ironically so I can use MS Office (work is heavy on sharepoint), and for the portability.
Me too! It’s been awesome, it is very snappy and the battery life is 10/10. If I need anything more beefy or better software support I’m just an ssh away.
Excited for Q3/4 release of the new MacBook this year. I believe a nice screen redesign is in the works which will get rid of the outdated bezels and I'm hoping I can connect two displays. Throw in a possible few more cores for the M1X 16inch version and give me a 32GB ram option and sounds like a pc which will last for many years.
I really want this as well, but I'm a bit sceptical: would any company release a product soooo good so that their users don't need to buy new models of such product for many years?
I still have a 2015 MBP that works like the first day although I would like to increase the disk and ram. 5 years with the same model; that's a lot. I know many people who replaces their laptops every 2 or 3 years. Now, I have the impression that a model like the one you just described, is a model that could easily "last" for more than 5 years without trouble. Wouldn't that hurt Apple's sales long-term?
Hey "This guy" here, any suggestions on how to style them better? My blog is still a work in progress, but I am always looking for ways to improve things.
The only blocking issue was Docker so I used VSCode remote until they released the M1 preview. So with that and the release of HomeBrew 3.0.0 last month and many macOS apps adding M1 support, everything is now running smoothly for me and I think it's a really great machine to use as a developer.
Also, the battery life truly is amazing, and boy am I glad I finally got rid of that touch bar and that ridiculous butterfly keyboard.
My M1 MacBook Pro's been an excellent purchase. It's incredibly fast, and silent even when I'm running intensive builds e.g. building new versions of LLVM. Best investment I've made this year.
I have only two nitpicks with my M1 Mac: (1) it's not a good fit for virtualization (whether docker or VMs) -- but this limitation is well-known, and (2) the only time I see slowdowns is occasionally when opening a new tab in Safari -- even when almost nothing else is running. The second one also happened on my Intel Mac, just a bummer that the issue hasn't magically gone away.
Beyond that, I wouldn't change a thing about this machine. Very easy to recommend!
Have you given UTM (https://github.com/utmapp/UTM) a try? It can run ARM and Intel virtual machines. It's basically a wrapper around QEMU, and it can be a little unstable depending on your chosen configuration, but it'll work in a pinch.
I play games on my Air, with it in my lap. Cannot do that with my i9 as it will make me sterile with the heat!
These are games like factorio and CIV6. Only two years ago, a similarly priced (~$1000) dell ultralight was unable to play CIV6 at all (ok, it managed 1 frame every 2 seconds). My M1 Air plays it for hours.
> I feel like the people that complain about this are the ones who have a hard time changing their workflows to use the TouchBar, and still do things the old school way using function keys
This was particularly painful to read. The mandatory new option that is the touchbar upended what was working fine for something that, for touch typists, is totally inferior. There's no feedback! This is a foundational aspect of usability; for apple to ignore this is a huge mistake.
This was my initial reaction as well, because I absolutely loathe the touch bar.
One thing I've been pondering - I've been asking myself: "why on earth would someone actually like the touchbar...ever?". And I wonder if the answer has something to do with the new generation of technologists. The generation that has been using touch on phones/tablets from the beginning of their technology journey.
I have no idea if this has merit, but as someone who hasn't looked at a keyboard while typing in two decades (unless it has a touchbar), that's the only thing I can imagine. Maybe I'd be ok with it if I grew up with it.
I liked the touchbar, and I worked to make it the best it could be. I used BetterTouchTool and spent tons of time hacking my preferred widgets in – Spotify, weather, calendar, etc.
And then I bought a 2021 MacBook Air, without a touchbar, and I found it so much more pleasant. I find the touchbar to be a failed experiment. I no longer want one ever again. I just want buttons for my brightness and music.
I could not agree more. Taking away the volume buttons seems like such a small change, but I mess with volume 100x times a day and it went from something that requires one touch without looking to multiple touches and a lot of activating SIRI by mistake. I get why people make fun of such complaints, but it's a very front-and-center pain point.
I have to disable most of the Touch Bar (set it not to change with context, and replace most of it with a blank "spacer") to make it usable. I tend to just barely brush it when striking number keys during normal typing (which happens a lot for parens and such when programming—and just now, in fact) which makes it do crazy stuff like open iTunes (because I "pressed" the media play button). Real buttons don't do that because you have to push down on them to activate them, not ever-so-slightly brush the bottom edge, which is why I'd never noticed, in my 25ish years of touch-typing, that I did that, until I used a TouchBar MacBook.
I also have to disable force-touch (or whatever it's called on there) on the trackpad, for models that have that, or else my drag-&-drop success rate is reduced from about 100% to more like 30%. Took me quite a while to figure out why that was happening. Luckily I have no clue why I'd want that feature in the first place, so I don't miss it. I don't have any kind of motor-function disorder, I just can't drag-&-drop while maintaining perfectly even pressure, I guess.
I am so glad my M1 Air does not have a touch bar. I use my i9 pro almost exclusively with a magic keyboard (which has function keys). Die Touch Bar, die!
I'd bet that Apple is killing the touch bar in the next hardware design revision. [0]
They kept the same body while changing out the chip, I suspect the next update will bring the end of the Touchbar.
The M1 is awesome though - it makes the Intel MBA seem like garbage. I was helping my SO set up some stuff for a presentation (Zoom, Mmhmm) and the Intel MBA fan was screaming, the video had unusable lag, the entire thing was locking up.
We switched to my M1 with no fan and everything was fast and flawless.
Only 2 ports? My Mac has all 4 USB-C ports in use, two of those connect to hubs so I can multiplex them, and I have to unplug something to connect my backup drive because 4 isn't enough. I look forward to a more reasonable number of external ports.
I’ve had people, before Apple Silicon came out, tell me I was full of it when I said all evidence pointed to it being pretty damn impressive. So I feel a bit of schadenfreude seeing these posts.
I still don’t have a new MacBook with it because they don’t support multiple external monitors yet, but hey, maybe this year.
[+] [-] issa|5 years ago|reply
The positives are that it is very fast and battery life is great!
[+] [-] derefr|5 years ago|reply
That’s surprising; “instant wake” is an advertised feature of the AS Macs.
Are you actually referring to how long it takes to get back to the desktop from the Lock Screen? If so, do you perhaps have lots and lots of Chrome tabs open, more than fit in memory, such that some are hibernated; and do you frequently put your Mac to sleep, change its power state (plug/unplug), then wake it up again? If so, that’s Chrome blocking wake by attempting to wake up all the hibernated tabs to tell them the power state changed. I get that all the time on my 2016 MacBook.
[+] [-] Tronno|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snissn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrik|5 years ago|reply
I've never seriously used OS X outside of struggling through it to develop apps, so I'm a bit nervous. I'm making the switch ironically so I can use MS Office (work is heavy on sharepoint), and for the portability.
[+] [-] fsociety|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redisman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bestinterest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmarcos|5 years ago|reply
I really want this as well, but I'm a bit sceptical: would any company release a product soooo good so that their users don't need to buy new models of such product for many years?
I still have a 2015 MBP that works like the first day although I would like to increase the disk and ram. 5 years with the same model; that's a lot. I know many people who replaces their laptops every 2 or 3 years. Now, I have the impression that a model like the one you just described, is a model that could easily "last" for more than 5 years without trouble. Wouldn't that hurt Apple's sales long-term?
[+] [-] robertlf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksubedi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MasterScrat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvanmil|5 years ago|reply
The first couple of weeks I used the Rosetta Terminal as described in this and many other blog post, until I found out this was not necessary at all for Node.js as described over here: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/issues/2350#issuecomment-73413....
The only blocking issue was Docker so I used VSCode remote until they released the M1 preview. So with that and the release of HomeBrew 3.0.0 last month and many macOS apps adding M1 support, everything is now running smoothly for me and I think it's a really great machine to use as a developer.
Also, the battery life truly is amazing, and boy am I glad I finally got rid of that touch bar and that ridiculous butterfly keyboard.
[+] [-] lyptt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octos4murai|5 years ago|reply
Beyond that, I wouldn't change a thing about this machine. Very easy to recommend!
[+] [-] lyptt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisjarvis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowbloodsugar|5 years ago|reply
These are games like factorio and CIV6. Only two years ago, a similarly priced (~$1000) dell ultralight was unable to play CIV6 at all (ok, it managed 1 frame every 2 seconds). My M1 Air plays it for hours.
[+] [-] cosmotic|5 years ago|reply
This was particularly painful to read. The mandatory new option that is the touchbar upended what was working fine for something that, for touch typists, is totally inferior. There's no feedback! This is a foundational aspect of usability; for apple to ignore this is a huge mistake.
[+] [-] haswell|5 years ago|reply
One thing I've been pondering - I've been asking myself: "why on earth would someone actually like the touchbar...ever?". And I wonder if the answer has something to do with the new generation of technologists. The generation that has been using touch on phones/tablets from the beginning of their technology journey.
I have no idea if this has merit, but as someone who hasn't looked at a keyboard while typing in two decades (unless it has a touchbar), that's the only thing I can imagine. Maybe I'd be ok with it if I grew up with it.
[+] [-] mplewis|5 years ago|reply
And then I bought a 2021 MacBook Air, without a touchbar, and I found it so much more pleasant. I find the touchbar to be a failed experiment. I no longer want one ever again. I just want buttons for my brightness and music.
[+] [-] issa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hc-taway|5 years ago|reply
I also have to disable force-touch (or whatever it's called on there) on the trackpad, for models that have that, or else my drag-&-drop success rate is reduced from about 100% to more like 30%. Took me quite a while to figure out why that was happening. Luckily I have no clue why I'd want that feature in the first place, so I don't miss it. I don't have any kind of motor-function disorder, I just can't drag-&-drop while maintaining perfectly even pressure, I guess.
[+] [-] lowbloodsugar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravedave5|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|5 years ago|reply
They kept the same body while changing out the chip, I suspect the next update will bring the end of the Touchbar.
The M1 is awesome though - it makes the Intel MBA seem like garbage. I was helping my SO set up some stuff for a presentation (Zoom, Mmhmm) and the Intel MBA fan was screaming, the video had unusable lag, the entire thing was locking up.
We switched to my M1 with no fan and everything was fast and flawless.
Meanwhile Intel is pushing nonsense like this: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/02/08/2221233/intel-b...
Intel is in trouble - this is an e-risk for their business.
[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/15/apple-removing-touch-ba...
[+] [-] dwheeler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] boardwaalk|5 years ago|reply
I still don’t have a new MacBook with it because they don’t support multiple external monitors yet, but hey, maybe this year.
[+] [-] bhouston|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sroussey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ashanmaril|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] robertlf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greendave|5 years ago|reply