I recently went and bought a base model Pro M1 as my 2013 Air is now on it’s third battery in less than 2 years thanks to ebay. My 2012 pro which I use for djing is starting to show it’s age however this computer won’t replace it unless either a mircle happens and bars open again as it is still functional. Also the M1 Air was sold out, no biggy because I actually when I come to think of it perfer the Pro in many ways.
Either way, it wasn’t a wasted purchase as I work for a managed service provider and it’s good to get ahead of the curve because clients will start buying M1 stuff and I am considered the Mac guru in the office so might as well keep that crown.
My thoughts? Mind. Blown. I knew ARM was getting pretty good in phones, but I really underestimated how these CPUs are compared with it’s x86_64 counterparts. ARM is in everything from your router to your toaster and probably lightbulbs so I’m thinking well it can’t be all that great and how can you compare ARM to Intel etc… How wrong I was.
The speed of these things just unzipping a file, booting up and even emulating 64-bit Intel is just insane. I even had the scenario of ARM emulating Intel emulating a Motorola 68000 based Amiga 500. As a DJ I had to also try out Pioneer’s newly released M1 drivers, and installed Serato DJ which is Intel and no where near supported. Guess what? Absolutely pooed over my 2012 in everyway.
My biggest fear? It does not get supported for as long, or last as long as my old Intel Macs. The “soldered” nature does make me sad because if something does fail you can’t replace it like you could with the 2012 RAM and HDD/SSD and the 2013 Air SSD but overall reliability hasn’t been an issue for me.
