Poll: *** The official 2020 MacBook Air/13" MacBook Pro thread (it has the M1 chip and everything!) ***

What 2020 Apple Silicon notebook have you ordered?

  • MacBook Air

    Votes: 72 70.6%

  • 13" MacBook Pro

    Votes: 30 29.4%
  • Total voters
    102
I pulled the trigger on one of the base spec MBA's as soon as they appeared in the refurb store. A few initial comments from me after some time tinkering over the weekend:
  • Refurb in Apple's view is crazily high quality. It feels/looks/was packaged just as well as a brand new device. If it wasn't for the box I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. After about an hour of setup I looked at the battery and SSD stats - battery was on cycle 3, and the SSD had a total powered up time of 10 hours. If anyone has any doubts about using Apple's refurb store, don't. It also came next day, much quicker than if I had made a new order!
  • I'm not blown away by the speed. Perhaps I got suckered into the hype far too much, but I was expecting to go "wow". It IS fast don't get me wrong, but it isn't transformationally quicker than a decent intel machine and I would struggle to tell them apart side by side (apart from fan noise maybe). I was expecting another jump like when I first experienced SSD, but it feels more incremental. This is from someone who uses it for general desktop use and not video editing etc.
  • I found the initial setup process very frustrating, the "next" button took a while to respond as I was going through the steps (at pace, admittedly). I was considering returning it until I got to the desktop and responsiveness was much more as expected.
  • Battery life is incredible. Truly incredible and difficult to believe. I've been browsing/listening to YouTube for the last 1hr20 or so and the battery has moved c.6%. It feels very strange having iPad beating battery life on a laptop.
  • The lines between tablet and laptop are blurring. It took me longer than I want to admit before I realised there wasn't a "sleep" mode, it just turns the screen off. The chip/wi-fi stays on in a low power state in the same way as a tablet sleeps. You can even set it to continue announcing notifications. If you added a touchscreen and made it a 2-in-1 this would be a pretty unbeatable device from both perspectives. I do miss the touchscreen having used a touch screen Dell a lot recently. If they ever do release this as a 2-in-1 I will be one of the first in line.
  • I've not noticed any app compatibility issues.
  • The screen quality is incredible. Playing 4k HDR demo content looks more impressive than real life in a lot of respects, and far better than my HDR TV or any previous laptop I've used (including a Dell XPS with 4K screen which is now 3 or so years old).
  • Keyboard/trackpad/hardware etc is all as great as you would expect. I'm a little disappointed by the webcam, but other laptops I was considering are all similar but so I won't call that out too much. I just find it a little disappointing that when it comes to Facetime I already find myself closing this and reaching for the iPad.

I think I last owned a Mac in the Snow Leopard days, and always said I would be back once they sorted out their keyboards.

Very pleased overall, especially for the price on the refurb store.
 
You're not blown away by the speed of a modern Mac running BigSur compared to an old Mac on Snowleopard?

I've found my M1 Air insanely fast vs my 2015 I5 pro. I can't think of a single way the old MBP is better.
 
englishpremier said:
You're not blown away by the speed of a modern Mac running BigSur compared to an old Mac on Snowleopard?

I've found my M1 Air insanely fast vs my 2015 I5 pro. I can't think of a single way the old MBP is better.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I mean vs modern x64 machines generally, mainly the XPS I'm comparing it to. Not my ancient Snow Leopard Mac, that was retired a long time ago! From some of the reviews I've seen I was expecting it to feel like something out of this world :o
 
As my old non-work 2015 MBP seems to be having battery issues I decided it was time to give into the temptation of a M1 Mac. M1 MBA is on the way, 8/8/16/1TB. Very excited!
 
shiver said:
As my old non-work 2015 MBP seems to be having battery issues I decided it was time to give into the temptation of a M1 Mac. M1 MBA is on the way, 8/8/16/1TB. Very excited!
Click to expand...

You will love it compared to the 2015 MBP it's just a different league. The screen is only ever-so-slightly brighter, but the speakers are much better. It of course blows it away in pretty much every performance bench mark you can think of. Sockfish for example runs at around 16000kn/s compared to just 4000kns on the 2015 machine.

Disk speeds are in the 2800MB/S region vs a measly 500MB/s write and 1000MB/s read on the 2015.

The newer design is also much smaller and lighter than the 2015 models whether MBA or MBPs. The keyboard is nicer too, which was a surprise for me.
 
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Oh yes, I 100% expect it to be way more performance than I need for a personal Mac but specifically liking the idea of the battery life and portability compared to a 15" MBP from 2015. Currently scheduled for delivery between 5-12th March!
 
I ran into a problem recently with my Plugable NVME M2 USB-C SSD enclosure. It would constantly disconnect when connected to my M1 Mac via USB-C. It seems Plugable are aware of the issue and sometime ago changed from a JMicron chipset to the Realtek 9210.

The issue applies to all M1 chipped Macs so be sure to check the chipset of any enclosures or even drives that you might buy.
 
shiver said:
All setup. Loving the keyboard so far. Of course everything feels lightning quick, even compared to not-so-old work Macs
Click to expand...

Great stuff mine is a Pro with only 8GB Ram but I have not found/used anything that troubles it. I have been playing several strategy games on it and it’s nice to play games like Civ with no fan noise.
 
I need to stop coming into this thread and reading how great these machines are! pls Tim release details of the new one so I have something to aim for!
 
I have to ask (mostly for my own sanity) but everyone keeps going on about how quick the new machines are but how much quicker can they be?
I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s new M1 parade, far from it, but honestly ever since I disabled font smoothing on my 16 Pro it’s been lightning fast and hasn’t struggled with anything I’ve thrown at it.
My other gripe is that most YouTube ‘comparison’ videos do speed tests with things like video rendering etc but none actually compare real world desktop/web browsing experience.
I mean, how much faster do we need Safari to open?
Is there really much of a difference?

Or is it one of things that needs to be seen in person to appreciate?
 
GMac11 said:
I mean, how much faster do we need Safari to open?
Is there really much of a difference?

Or is it one of things that needs to be seen in person to appreciate?
Click to expand...

I’m guessing the speed of the SSD makes it seem like everything is loading from RAM. My Win10 machine isn’t exactly underspecced but I’m never in any doubt that when I load something that there’s a degree of separation between my request and the computer’s ability to complete it.

Anyway, I have a Mac mini arriving on Monday so I’ll soon find out if it’s as snappy as everyone says.
 
GMac11 said:
I have to ask (mostly for my own sanity) but everyone keeps going on about how quick the new machines are but how much quicker can they be?
I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s new M1 parade, far from it, but honestly ever since I disabled font smoothing on my 16 Pro it’s been lightning fast and hasn’t struggled with anything I’ve thrown at it.
My other gripe is that most YouTube ‘comparison’ videos do speed tests with things like video rendering etc but none actually compare real world desktop/web browsing experience.
I mean, how much faster do we need Safari to open?
Is there really much of a difference?

Or is it one of things that needs to be seen in person to appreciate?
Click to expand...

That's one of the difficult things about modern equipment. Realistically for general purpose, do they need to be quicker? For web browsing / editing the odd document for me an iPad is completely fine, same for consuming media etc.

For specific work cases, this is where the speed comes in. From Video Rendering, to Code Compilation and Computational Work they can still get better and better. I think real world web browsing benchmarks are difficult and fairly pointless, I know there were a lot of Javascript benchmarks done early on, but web browsing isn't just your machine as it's just Safari or whatever web browser you want, other things take it out of the applications hands such as Internet Speed, Site Optimisation etc. For my personal workload, they need to get no better than the Mac Mini M1 Processor, but they will and I will continue to purchase upgrades because I like technology, but it's getting for me who only writes code, uses CLI and uses Web Browsers to implement and manage most things it's getting a harder and harder sell to upgrade, and in fact I now upgrade less and less.

YouTube comparisons are always gash, I ignore them. Despite what all the big YouTubers seem to want to believe, they don't need to be using RED Cameras and shooting in 8k and then editing natively using all the fancy stuff, but it's a talking point and a bit of show off for them, and a good showcase for the capabilities of the machine.
 
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