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Review: M1 Max MacBook Pro After Three Months
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I really do love my 14" M1 Max MacBook Pro. I use it all day for web and app development — it's quiet, cool, super fast, and the battery is great. I stopped noticing the notch the same day I got it, just as I did when I first got an iPhone X. It's great to finally have all these fast ports and, as a hobby photographer, I love having the SD card reader.
I don't get the criticism that the 16" is too big or too heavy. If you've got the 2019 16" Pro then the new 16" M1 Max is less than 1mm thicker, is smaller in width by 2mm, is only 2mm more depth, the change over the old model is insignificant, it only looks bigger because it isn't tapered and it's only 0.2kg heavier, honestly if people are complaining about the increase in weight then they must have really weak ineffectual arms and should probably see a doctor.
Personally for design productivity work I can't work off a screen smaller than 15", and the 14" is way too small for my usability needs, I had a 14" Razer Blade and I hated the smaller screen. For me the 16.2" screen is amazing to use in such a small portable device, it's essentially like the old 17" lives again but SO much better. Each to their own, but for graphics work the 16" Pro Max is a thing of beauty.
Personally for design productivity work I can't work off a screen smaller than 15", and the 14" is way too small for my usability needs, I had a 14" Razer Blade and I hated the smaller screen. For me the 16.2" screen is amazing to use in such a small portable device, it's essentially like the old 17" lives again but SO much better. Each to their own, but for graphics work the 16" Pro Max is a thing of beauty.
My 2 cents:
I'm really happy about the MBP Max - the only annoyances I have found are:
Battery life is great. Noise level - which noise? (Coming from both ThinkPad Workstations and MBP Retina i9/16 - it is like magic) - and doing music recordings and not having to worry about fan noise - is just relaxing...
Speakers are great in a small room with you right in front of the computer. But in a bigger room they are not as room filling. But I use a RME Fireface Soundcard/Mixer with good speakers anyway.
I'm really happy about the MBP Max - the only annoyances I have found are:
- Safari sometimes gets really "slow" (macOS 12.1) - and a restart of Safari cures it. Memory leak I guess.
- My Sonnet 10GBe adaptor will sometimes get really bad for download speeds - (Normal internet 650 dwn/ 40 up - in bad mood - 2 up / 40 down) - disconnect and reconnect cure it. (Not related to point 1) - Switch reports up/down as 10GBe/10GBe full duplex. Other computers on same 10GBe switch never have issues.
- Apple handling of 1440 height external screens - terrible. BetterDummy helps but macOS is really bad at remembering Window Positions. 1440 screens look much better with true scaling vs Apple Standard.
- Some companies are really slow at getting M1 optimised versions out. Like SonarWorks SoundID Reference. When you deal with low latency sound - you really want "native" code not running through Rosetta. Steinberg is a bit on the slow side as well - but have started rolling out M1 native code versions with latest release of Dorico 4. Cubase 12 is next in ? March?
Battery life is great. Noise level - which noise? (Coming from both ThinkPad Workstations and MBP Retina i9/16 - it is like magic) - and doing music recordings and not having to worry about fan noise - is just relaxing...
Speakers are great in a small room with you right in front of the computer. But in a bigger room they are not as room filling. But I use a RME Fireface Soundcard/Mixer with good speakers anyway.
I've used many different MacBooks over the years and the new 16" M1 Max is by far THE BEST of them all. Fast, cool+silent, zero crashes so far, actually no issues at all.
I absolutely love mine. I had to rewrite a few ansible playbooks for arm and my old parallels images couldn't be ported but I knew that going in. Windows 11 arm preview runs like a charm, even with steam so I can play C&C remastered.
The battery life is insane, I streamed a whole afternoon of sport to my TV via the HDMI link and the battery was still over 50%. The thing is crazy efficient.
The battery life is insane, I streamed a whole afternoon of sport to my TV via the HDMI link and the battery was still over 50%. The thing is crazy efficient.
The same reason I have an old 17" MBP sitting here. Screen size is one of the specs that I value. I went a year with the M1 MBA and while I appreciated the weight, I missed the screen size from my 15" MBP every single time I used the MBA. I use the 16" max as a third monitor when I'm at my desk, and it's completely comfortable to use when on the go.
To be honest, I'm not really a pro per se - I just wanted to have a really powerful laptop with a great display.I think the reality is actually that you will find all of Apple's laptop offerings being used by both consumers and professionals. The air has actually become quite hot on the business enterprise side which is hardly consumer. Similarly I know a few people who have purchased the M1 Max for their own personal use, not necessarily because they need the power now, but they want to 'future proof' their purchase, which I guess is fair enough.
I use my M1 MacBook Pro professionally. Check here for a review comparing the M1 MacBook Pro with an i9 MacBook Pro in a very similar field to the one I work, you can see why I use the M1 when I'm on the move!!
M1 MacBook Pro vs. Intel i9 MacBook Pro - Ultimate Data Science Comparison | Towards Data Science
M1 vs. i9-9880H - performance comparisons with synthetic benchmarks, Python, Numpy, Pandas, and Scikit Learn.towardsdatascience.com
There isn't just a single definition of the word 'Pro', albeit most people here seem to think it applies only to those people who edit 8k video on the move which they store on an SD Card and then beam on their work projector using HDMI!
I'm retired now but I used to use 17" boat anchors and commuted with them daily to work where I did development on them in Xcode.
IAC, there's always been a line delineating the real pro machines from the consumer line - and those machines have always been pretty pricey.
The 16" was my first foray back in to MacBook Pros after Apple stopped making the 17" - and it with a core-i9, 32 GB, Radeon Pro 5500M with 8 GB, and a 2 TB SSD price-wise isn't far off from the 2021 with M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, 32 GB, 2 TB SSD I have now.
You can run Windows under Parallels now.
A boot camp solution won't be any faster since x86 stuff is all emulated anyhow, and I have no idea if a native Win boot would know how to access the hardware on an Apple Silicon Mac. Remember: booting Windows on an Intel machine worked because Macs and Intel laptops basically used the same hardware - Apple Silicon is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
You can lever the same SoC into a 14", but that doesn't change the physics of the machine.
Apple clock locks the M1 Max in the 14" to maintain decent battery life and to keep the smaller form factor viable. The 16" M1 Max models are actually heavier than the M1 Pro models because Apple levers in a stronger cooling system, and allows you to enable High Performance mode which unlocks the fan curves - in normal mode I believe Apple throttles the M1 Max to keep the fans from blaring.
Proper review:
Ruined design, ruined OS, basically ruined legacy of Jobs's notebook, but look at dem graphs! Oh, wait, AMD is still top guy when it comes to mobile graphics. Who cares about your performance per watt if you can't carry this ugly brick around?
Ruined design, ruined OS, basically ruined legacy of Jobs's notebook, but look at dem graphs! Oh, wait, AMD is still top guy when it comes to mobile graphics. Who cares about your performance per watt if you can't carry this ugly brick around?
I find the 2021 to be much more portable since I really no longer need to carry around dongles and a power brick.
Used to be I needed a backpack - now I just put it in a leather sleeve.
I think Jobs would've been fine with this beast. Not sure about Ives though ...
As for graphics performance, this thing has a lot more graphics performance than my last Intel 16".
For me the problem is that x86 emulators (e.g., QEMU) run too slow in M1 to be practical. So, I returned M1 MacBook Pro and replaced it with older Intel based MacBook Pro to be able to do some coding at work (VMs are much faster than emulators). It was painful but only option for me.
Love my ultimate 14" MacBook Pro - I knew what I was getting what I got it - a little worse battery life, a little worse thermals vs. the 16". But it's worth it for the superior form factor!
I have an M1 MBA and a 14 inch MBP with the pro chip. I don’t do a ton of high end work with my machines; they are mostly for content consumption and a decent amount of text composition. Not that standard power user for the Pro, and I understand I am not using the machine “correctly”. I wanted it because of the power and the better screen.
Pluses for me: Screen, speakers (by far the best upgrade in the cycle), and keyboard.
Minuses: Size/weight. Sleep battery life: every time I reach for the 14”, the battery is nearly dead or dead. The air is almost always ready to go even after being off the charger for weeks.
Lots of pluses for the 14, but many times I find myself reaching for the air preferentially which has caused me a bit of an existential crisis, haha.
Pluses for me: Screen, speakers (by far the best upgrade in the cycle), and keyboard.
Minuses: Size/weight. Sleep battery life: every time I reach for the 14”, the battery is nearly dead or dead. The air is almost always ready to go even after being off the charger for weeks.
Lots of pluses for the 14, but many times I find myself reaching for the air preferentially which has caused me a bit of an existential crisis, haha.
My 16" Max 64GB/4TB is finally shipping and will be with me next week. Going to need a Thunderbolt 3 (or 4) dock. I was looking to get the Kensington one but it's out of stock pretty much everywhere (I'm in Europe).
The OWC one is available, but I'm hearing stories about how hot it gets. Also, since the YouTube guy has it, I'm wondering if his Thunderbolt issues are related.
Anyone got any recommendations?
The OWC one is available, but I'm hearing stories about how hot it gets. Also, since the YouTube guy has it, I'm wondering if his Thunderbolt issues are related.
Anyone got any recommendations?
Someone on the Cinematographers mailing list (CML) said after tweaking its one of the most accurate displays they have ever seen. I've got a 16" MBP and I'm going to put it next to Sony X310 in a few weeks
I'm not sure about that first assertion. Just like an x86 vm running within parallels on an Intel machine doesn't run as well as on the bare metal I think it would be the same for emulating on arm. You are going to have the WoW emulation stack in either situation on ARM, true, but with a boot camp style solution you remove the paralllels emulation layer which should make things faster.
You're dead on about how it is probably easier for boot camp on Intel to be developed though. Apple will have to build pretty much every peripheral driver which is a lot of work. I suppose there is an advantage in that it is all in house and getting bugs fixed is easier but it is still significant effort.