Review: Apple Macbook Pro 13' M1

For New Year, I purchased a new Apple MacBook Pro 13' M1 512 GB SSD laptop for Inna - as her 2013 MacBook Pro was starting to misbehave (reboot often).

Initially, I was leaning toward the new MacBook Air 13' M1, but the MacBook Pro M1 512 GB SSD/8 GB RAM was offered on sale at Costco.com, and the difference between the two was minimal.

The MacBook Pro has the following advantages over MacBook Air M1:

• Longer battery life (20 hours!)
  
• fan to cool the processor (during heavy workloads)
• higher quality microphone and speakers
• only minimal increase in weight over Air
  

After using Apple migration to transfer files from Inna's old MacBook Pro, I updated to the latest version, Max OS X Big Sur. It works well, and Inna loves the touch ID (which unlocks the laptop with a fingerprint).

Since it's running Apple's M1 chip, many apps need to run under Rosetta, though many apps are being converted to natively support M1.

Apple Macbook Pro 13' M1 (512GB SSD) Review  

Positives

• Longer battery life (20 hours on one charge)!
• Very sharp and bright screen (500 nits)
• No fan noise
• Excellent performance
• The fingerprint sensor works excellently to unlock the computer (no need to type passwords)!

Negatives

• No way to upgrade RAM or SSD
• 8GB RAM may not be sufficient in the future
• Many programs built for x86 need to be recompiled for ARM architecture.