Product review: M1 Macbook 2020

Introduction

I received my new shiny golden ARM based Macbook a few days ago, so I thought I’d write this blog posting on my initial impressions. This replaces our aging 2012 MacBook Air which continues to be a good computer, but sadly it isn’t supported by the new Big Sur MacOS release. It is also a bit limited with only 4Gig RAM and a 128Gig SSD. The new MacBook Air has 16Gig RAM, a 512Gig SSD and has an 8 core GPU.

Same Old Mac

The first impression when you turn it on and perform the initial setup, is that it is the same MacOS as you are used to. Everything works the same and you wouldn’t know there is a new ARM based CPU running behind the scenes. The screen is really nice at a resolution of 2560×1600, the keyboard is the updated magic keyboard and is quite nice to type on. The laptop is relatively lite and the battery lasts a long time.

Installing Software

Using software natively compiled for the new Apple M1 ARM processor is the best and there is already a lot of software available this way. All the Apple software, of course, is compiled for ARM. I installed XCode, which took a little while since it is so large. As long as you don’t compile for Intel, you don’t need the Rosetta emulator to run this. I installed Microsoft Office and Google Chrome, both of which are natively compiled for ARM and run great.

Bigger companies all bought or were provided with the developer prototype hardware to get ready for the real release, however smaller developers and open source developers weren’t going to pay the $600 for the prototypes that you were contractually required to trade in when the real release happened. Now that the ARM based Macs are released and people are receiving them, we are seeing lots of projects with test native ARM builds posted. Further, Apple engineers are contributing to a number of open source projects to help them move a little quicker.

After all this, I needed some utilities that weren’t compiled natively yet, so I let Rosetta install. Then the utilities installed and worked seamlessly. I haven’t installed a great many non-native applications, but for the ones I have installed, I’m impressed that they just work and you can’t see any sign of all the magic working in the background to seamlessly emulate an Intel processor.

You Can Run iOS Apps

Besides running MacOS applications, you can run iOS Apps. From the App Store you can select most iOS Apps to install as well. When I heard about this, I didn’t think I’d really need this. However, it lets you do some things that I couldn’t do before. For instance, a complaint about EchoLink, a ham radio program, is that you need to run it on a phone. Now I can run it on my laptop, which I find handy.

There are actually a number of useful phone or tablet apps that are handy to finally be able to run on a laptop.

Summary

The MacBook Air is a very nice laptop. It is well made, light and fast. It’s easy to work on and the long battery life makes it ideal for a mobile workforce. There is tons of software available, naively compiled MacOS, Intel based MacOS and then all the iOS Apps. If you are looking for a new laptop or an upgrade to an old Mac Mini, then these new M1 based Apple Macs are a great choice.