“C’mon, these things have been out for a year and you still don’t have one? Really?”
In my defence, I’ve been trying very hard to not buy one, but after seeing the interoperability between the iPhone, iPad, and AirPods, I figured I could jump on the education discount and see what all the hype was about.
I had other reasons as well.
There’s more and more MacOS around, and getting familiar with a new operating system isn’t a bad thing.
Travel without vacation is a bit easier to manage without taking my work laptop - A simple VDI would let me work from a much slimmer, much quieter device while on the go without having to carry a thicker, louder, hotter laptop.
I want to look into app development! It’s hard to publish apps on the App Store when you need to upload them from a Mac… Xcode is free, so why not?
Overall those are some pretty weak reasons for a new trinket, but here we are. I grabbed the base model M1 Air. That’s right. 8 cores, 7 GPU cores, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD. Am I regretting not getting the 16GB RAM model? Well, we’ll see. For now this is just to dip my toes into the environment, and my use case is pretty simple, even though everything online seems to indicate this thing is a monster. Web browsing, blogging, coding, and some Lightroom work when away from my desktop. I figured I’d just give some bullet point initial thoughts after having this thing for about a week.
The build is great - No real noticeable flaws in seams etc.
The trackpad is actually wonderful. It didn’t take much to get started with the gestures and they stuck really well. I haven’t had a Windows trackpad that works this well. Coming from the Magic Keyboard on the iPad Pro I expected good, but not this good.
The keyboard experience is very nice - Not quite Thinkpad, but there’s a good bit of tactility to it and it’s an enjoyable typing experience.
The screen is great! Plenty bright for working in a bright space, great color, not any noticeable bleed. I’m really fond of TrueTone on my iPhone and iPad, and the MacBook is not different there! 13” is a good size for a laptop for me.
A lot of people note the bezels are outdated for a laptop, but I’ll have to disagree. They look fine.
Fanless is amazing. This thing gets slightly warm to the touch but not any worse. And it doesn’t slow down. My last finless device was a Zenbook and it wasn’t exactly a speed demon. The battery life was awesome, but Lightroom was an absolute joke on it.
The battery life is spectacular - I haven’t dug too deep on battery but I’ve charged it once Monday, and have been using it a few hours a day. We’re sitting at about 55% writing this.
Wake from sleep is instant! Thanks, ARM architecture.
Single USB-C cable works great to the U4919DW. Full resolution, no performance issues, and USB passthrough works a treat for the Logitech Unifying dongle.
Speaking of Logitech… The experience on Bluetooth isn’t great. It was a bit rough getting the Options software to pick up the devices on Bluetooth initially, and even then the mouse felt a bit weird. Not sure if this is Apple or Logitech, but the dongle seems to have smoothed stuff pretty well. I’ll need to play around with the gestures on the MX Master 3 and see about getting Flow setup between the desktop and MacBook.
Rosetta 2 really does do emulation well - There’s no appreciable difference between ARM and X86 built applications in day-to-day usage.
Built in window management is a bit wonky coming from Windows… I think I need to give it more time and look into it further, but it doesn’t feel as efficient as Windows based window management.
WTF is “Command”. I’m joking, but Ctrl to Command is a bit different.
Hello SideCar! Being able to tote my iPad around and use it as a secondary display just about whenever is a killer feature for someone used to a lot of screen real estate.
Universal clipboard and handoff in general is really nice - Tabs sync automagically, you can pickup on something on any device where you left off pretty easily.
I think that’s about all I have for now. I’ll have more as I keep using the device. For the time being, this thing has been a great computer so far!