| My perspective: Going from a 2019 15" MacBook Pro with 16GB of memory to an 8GB M1 13" MacBook Pro You don't start to feel the 8GB until you: * have a lot of tabs open in Safari (like ~30+) * have heavy web apps (GMail & Outlook, I'm looking at you) * run a virtual machine (Only so much you can give a Parallels instance w/ 8GB) * run some known performance & memory hogs (Slack, Teams, etc.) * vpn seems to slow things down a bit I generally will close down apps when I don't need them (but that's _always_ been my habit). I do find the M1 to be fully sufficient (and still faster than my previous MBP) when doing my day-to-day (including VS Code, JIRA, Slack, Xcode, Node, etc.). I also use my M1 for music performance and composition, and that's worked just fine for my purposes (but so did the previous MBP). I will (as I did before) switch contexts by closing apps I don't need, so it's hard to say if apps from development impact the apps for music or not; they rarely run side-by-side. Things that have greatly improved my productivity: * This thing is as cool as a cucumber, and absolutely sips its battery. This means I can be more comfortable taking my MBP to the couch, or to the patio (when it was warm) and not worry about watching the battery %. * This thing _in general_ is much snappier. Native apps load quickly, and performance in the apps I use is about twice that of the previous MBP. * I can type on this keyboard! * Using a single external monitor is fine; I work from a couple of locations, and both my Dell P2415Q and my LG 24MD4KL-B 24" Ultrafine 4K work fine. There are edge cases here where the M1 falls short: * I can slow the poor thing to a crawl for a few seconds if I attach a 4K monitor and then try to AirPlay to another 4K display. It catches back up and is generally fine after, but you see the beachball for a while. * Lots of tabs in Safari will cause slow tab switching, and some web sites just chew through CPU. Battery life is still _way_ better than the previous MBP, but it definitely impacts the feel of the device. * Bluetooth mice -- ugh. I bought a Logitech MX ergo and had to switch to using the receiver instead because the MBP bluetooth felt so laggy. * Most iOS apps just aren't well suited for the device. Apollo (for Reddit) works pretty well, but even that has its quirks where sometimes keyboard shortcuts will just stop working. * VMs. If you run Windows in Parallels, you _will feel it_. I do not run VMs all the time for this reason, but spin them up and down as needed. |
Thank you for your time writing this detailed comment.
Few things which caused degraded performance were obvious e.g. tabs, VM.
But things which surprised me,
> * vpn seems to slow things down a bit
With great single core performance and WiFi-6 I would have expected networking to fine.
> Bluetooth mice -- ugh.
Digging further, Bluetooth/WiFi/USB issues seems to documented by others as well[1] unfortunately these gets buried under other reviews following a common narrative for M1 macs.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xyFIF9jA5w