Security is where I first ran into actual issues. As mentioned under productivity, 1Password while works, the setup may

All the scores I could generate were 100% consistent with findings published earlier by major sites. If you’d like even more detailed results, I urge you to check out Rene Richie’s video or ZoneOfTech’s own results.

I will likely trade this M1 Pro in as well before the 2 year warranty (yes, I got 2 years, as it’s a premium reseller), for a newer model, but until then I wanted to see what’s the most this amazing little new CPU can handle.

The one important change I was though happy about, was the keyboard, as it’s now the same reliable one they brought back in mid 2019 or so, using an improved version of the very familiar and beloved scissor mechanism. No more butterfly bullshit! What were they thinking?!?

A somewhat less important positive change for me was the presence of the physical escape key, alongside the touch-bar — which I myself like and use quite a lot, but objectively, it’s not seen as the invention of the decade. The only occasion where the lack of Function Keys messes with my workflow is toggling VoiceOver via Cmd F5, which I now do via mouse or trackpad, though in fairness I could always remap VO to other keys in the keyboard settings.

While I would consider myself a fairly creative person, I mainly use three applications beyond iA Writer, which I mentioned under productivity. These three are Apple Motion, Audacity and Photoshop. All work, though Adobe does point out, that the optimised version is something they have not yet released and importing images does feel a tad sluggish.

http://live-stream.munich.es/twr/video-Al-Rayyan-Al-Gharafa-v-en-gb-1ykx30122020-24.php

http://live07.colomboserboli.com/niy/video-Al-Rayyan-Al-Gharafa-v-en-gb-1khz-23.php

http://news24.gruposio.es/ktn/Video-Qatar-SC-Al-Kharaitiyat-v-en-gb-1rxf-4.php

http://news24.gruposio.es/ktn/video-Al-Rayyan-Al-Gharafa-v-en-gb-1ztg-.php

takes into account the liquid supply of Bitcoin in a practical sense. Realized cap ignores the market value of Bitcoins that haven’t moved since 2009 (when Bitcoin did not have a market value). You can think of it as roughly measuring the aggregate cost basis of all the current Bitcoin holders.

My main browser is Chrome, but that’s mainly because I am a developer. Then I have a few secondary browsers such as: Firefox Developer Edition, followed by Safari and Tor Browser (which technically is still Firefox). Brave and Edge for Mac, I keep around out of sheer curiosity. Based on my tests, they all work, and I have not experienced any installation issues either, but worth noting that only Chrome and Safari have native support for the M1 chip. All the others run under Rosetta 2.

Before I answer that question, I think it’s worth looking at the larger picture — does it cover all the software needs I have on a day to day basis. I am not planning to use this machine just for development. The goal here is to end up using this machine for everything other frying eggs and keeping my coffee hot which I now cannot, because this machine is as cold as Tutankhamun.

While some might argue it’s not exactly a design perk, but more of a holistic architecture side-benefit, I think it’s worth mentioning that the Pro M1 is not only silent, but cold. Yes, cold and MacBook Pro in the same sentence! For the first time in history, I think… Not old enough to remember the old PowerPC models, but from what I hear, they were worse than the current Intel chips. While I have been using this machine for three days straight now, I have yet to hear the fans come on or feel any heat radiating off the chassis.

Benchmarks aren’t something that overly excite me, but give the people what the people want, right? So here goes the obligatory screenshots of numbers that may or may not mean much. If you would like to see a comparison between my 2018 15' MacBook Pro and the Pro M1, you can check it out on Geekbench. Long story short, every score is pretty much either double or more on the Pro M1.

For many people productivity is a relative term, but for me it’s everything that has to do with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email clients, virtual meetings and the likes. The Office 365 suite works — or at least Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, do. Note that installation tends to stall at around 95%, but wait it out, it does eventually install. Having said that, getting them to install was unexpectedly troublesome, and the very first steps of the wizard tended to crash the installer until I decided to close other apps that were running under Rosetta 2. Perhaps the translation engine has a “bandwidth” it can handle?

Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Whatsapp also seem to work without issues — though none of them are optimised for M1 just yet. I had a two hour Zoom conversation on this machine just 8 hours after I purchased it and did not notice any hiccups. iA Writer also installed without issues and works as expected. Where I ran into a bit of trouble was 1Password. It installed fine up until the last step, where it claimed it cannot install because I was trying to do it on an unsupported machine. To my surprise though, I then started the app anyway, and ran fine, and still does.

No matter how much the Linus and the Louis Rossmans of the world complain about the unchanged design of the M1 machines, I found the lack of change in this regard, comforting. Yes, it’s the same ol’ slab of aluminium we’ve been used to for a few years now. I for one am perfectly happy with the design and build that stayed virtually unchanged since 2012, with the introduction of the first ever Retina MacBook Pro, which I owned thanks to my best buddy Andrew Gribben.

When it comes to entertainment, I am fairly basic, in the sense that I play no games whatsoever, so it’s just audio and video that I care about. Most of that is delivered via native Apple apps such as Apple Music, Apple TV. The one additional application I occasionally rely on is Plex Media Player, which installed fine and seems to work as expected — except for its mouse and scroll support which is flaky. It feels like the Apple TV app.

I genuinely want to attempt to make the M1 machine my primary daily driver and development machine, be that web, Flutter or native. If it pans out as I hope it will, that leaves my 2018 MacBook Pro 15' available for trading in for potentially an Apple Silicon iMac or iMac Pro in 2021.