Apple 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 review: Rewriting the notebook rulebook

Note: This review was first published on 27 Nov 2020.

A new era for Macs

I’m not sure I believe Apple. In interviews following the announcement of its new M1 chips and M1-powered Macs, the company said that the transition to its own silicon was motivated by their aim of creating the best possible products. And that meant custom chips that could tightly integrated hardware and software.

Surely part of the impetus to switch must come from its dissatisfaction with Intel. Just last year, Apple blamed Intel for causing a dip in its Mac revenue. Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer, said, “Next I’d like to talk about the Mac. Revenue was 5.5 billion compared to 5.8 billion a year ago, with the decline driven primarily by processor constraints on certain popular models.” 

And, of course, Intel’s manufacturing woes are well documented by now. The company recently admitted that its 7nm chips won’t be ready until 2022 or 2023. And while Intel continues to struggle with even with 10nm chips today, the competition has long moved on. AMD's latest chips are already on 7nm and Apple's are on 5nm. 

This obviously won’t do for a company with exacting standards like Apple. So few eyebrows were raised when Apple finally announced earlier this year that it would be transitioning its Macs to its own processors. The writing was long on the wall.

So here we are now with the new M1 chip and three new Macs. Not trying to sound too dramatic but this truly is the dawn of the new era. These are exciting times for a Mac user so let's begin by taking a closer look at the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1.

Design & features

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 is almost indistinguishable from the model it replaces. Its size, dimensions, and even weight are unchanged. The only way to tell which is which, without powering up, is to look underneath for the model identifier number – A2338 denotes that it has the new M1 chip.

To me, the transition to Apple Silicon seems like the perfect time to give the MacBook Pro a redesign. After all, the MacBook Pro is starting to show its age, especially with its thick bezels. Also, the design is literally old, the 13-inch MacBook Pro has looked this way since 2016. 

However, there are some obvious upsides with sticking to an old design. It means this new MacBook Pro will slot into your existing setup seamlessly and your accessories like notebook sleeves, docks, and stands will continue to work. Users who have invested heavily in those fancy hubs that were designed to attach neatly to the sides of the MacBook Pro can heave a sigh of relief.

Furthermore, thick bezels aside, it’s hard to fault the design and build of the MacBook Pro. Its unibody construction means it feels supremely solid – as if it's hewn from the rock of the gods – while the 13.3-inch Retina display continues to impress with outstanding clarity, sharpness, and colours. The trackpad is still the best in the business. And happily, the keyboard, after having ditched the ill-fated butterfly-switch mechanism and gone back to more traditional scissors switches, is exemplary.

There are, however, a couple of things that can be improved. To start, the 720p webcam has no place on a modern notebook especially when you consider how often many of us rely on teleconferencing apps tpoday. Plus,  Apple recently fitted new 1080p webcams in their iMac. The images it produces is fuzzy even with Apple's clever imaging processing. Curiously, while Apple has fitted a substandard webcam to the MacBook Pro, it did give it "studio quality" mics. Happily, these mics work a lot better, which only serves to highlight the incongruity of the 720p webcam. Oh, the speakers are great too for a 13-inch notebook – they get really loud and sound wholesome with little distortion even at high volumes.

I get that this new MacBook Pro is supposed to replace the old 13-inch MacBook Pro with two ports, but two USB-C ports on a “Pro” Mac is a little stingy, no? Furthermore, even though the ports support Thunderbolt 3/USB 4, they have the odd limitation of support for just a single external display (up to 6K @ 60Hz fortunately so you can plug in your expensive Pro Display XDR). Fortunately, there are workarounds or you could use the Sidecar feature with compatible iPads. Another limitation with these ports is that they don't support external GPUs.

Wireless connectivity, on the other hand, has been improved with support for Wi-Fi 6. Support for this new wireless standard was curiously missing from all Macs up until this point. This means all of Apple’s newest Macs, iPhones, and iPads now support Wi-Fi 6.

Understanding the new M1 Macs

Apple announced three new Macs while they unveiled the M1 chip. Apart from the 13-inch MacBook Pro here, there’s also a MacBook Air and a Mac Mini. They all have the same chip (the cheapest MacBook Air has 7 GPU cores instead of 8), so how does one differentiate them?

The MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan so it runs silently. If the sound of whirring fans annoys you, the choice is clear. In terms of performance, it should have the same peak performance or thereabout as the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini but it won’t be able to sustain it for long periods since there’s no fan to help keep it cool.

Compared to the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro has a better display (it gets brighter) and it has an active cooling system (aka fan) and a larger battery. Where peak performance is concerned, it should be the same as the MacBook Air but its fan should help it sustain maximum performance for longer. The larger battery also means a longer battery life – 20 hours for the Pro vs. 18 hours in the Air.

The Mac Mini is a desktop solution so unsurprisingly it has the beefiest thermal solution. This should mean that it’s the best at sustaining peak performance. And because it has an HDMI port, it’s the only M1 Mac that officially supports more than one external display.

Say hi to M1

The first Apple Silicon for Macs is the M1. It's based on ARM and also on Apple's A-series processors that are in its iPhones and iPads. Being famously secretive, what we know about the M1 is what only what Apple chose to reveal. Here are the high-level highlights:

• Built on a 5nm process (similar to the A14 Bionic)
• 16 billion transistors
• 8 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores
• 4 high-performance CPU cores, 4 high-efficiency CPU cores
• 16-core Neural Engine
• Unified memory architecture

Apple shared many claims about M1 and the new 13-inch MacBook Pro during its keynote. Some highlights include 2.5x the CPU performance, 5x the graphics performance, and 11x the machine-learning performance compared to model it replaces. 

But the thing that really made an impression upon me was how M1 is claimed to be able to deliver the same CPU performance as the “latest PC laptop chip” with just a quarter of the power and then match the peak performance of current-generation integrated graphics will a third of the power.

The secret sauce, according to Apple, to these incredible leaps in performance and efficiency is M1’s unified memory architecture. Briefly put, M1 has a large pool of fast memory (RAM) that’s accessible by all components of the SoC, including the CPU and GPU. This negates the need for copying and moving data around and improves performance and reduces power consumption.

This all sounds good and well but it’s necessary to mention that all the M1 Macs are limited to “just” 16GB of memory right now. Apple says it’s more than enough for what these machines are designed for, but if you feel like you need more, you are out of luck.

Apple didn't mention clock speeds but benchmarking utilities say M1 is running at 3.2GHz. But that number isn't very instructive because clock speeds work very differently on the M1. Apple say M1 doesn't have turbo boost and that it rans at its maximum clock speeds most of the time and only slows down when it sees that the system can no longer keep the chip cool. That's the opposite of how Intel systems work, which run at lower clock speeds for most times and only ramps up clock speeds when there's a need.

Now, before we look at the benchmark results, it's important to state that the version I'm testing is a configured model with 16GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. How much the extra memory will affect performance is difficult to say but given that these are mostly CPU intensive workloads, I'm thinking the impact would be negligible. Also, when configured as such, it costs S$2,749 (ouch) – the extra memory and storage costs S$300 extra each.

Now lets take a look at the benchmark results.

Geekbench 5

Geekbench CPU is a cross-platform processor benchmark that tests both single-core and multi-core performance with workloads that simulate real-world usage. Geekbench 5 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1000, which is the score of an Intel Core i3-8100. Higher scores are better, with double the score indicating double the performance.

The latest version of Geekbench 5 is a Universal app so it runs natively on the new M1 Macs. Performance was very impressive. Its single-core score was the highest every recorded and it's over 30% faster than even an iMac with a Core i7-10700K processor. It's multi-core score was also higher than the iMac and over 68% greater than the Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro that was launched earlier this year.

Video transcoding test

This tests involves transcoding an hour-long 1080p video using Handbrake and recording the time it took. You'll see two bars for the M1 MacBook Pro and that's because it was tested with two versions of Handbrake – one running natively on M1 and another coded for Intel and hence running using Rosetta 2.

The results are, again, impressive. Even while running via translation, the new M1 MacBook Pro took just about as long as the latest Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro. But when running natively, the M1 MacBook Pro took a considerably shorter amount of time to finish the task and wasn't too far off from a 16-inch MacBook Pro with a Core i9-9880HK processor that has roughly double the TDP.

WebXPRT 3

This is a browser benchmark that consists of six HTML5 and JavaScript-based workloads designed to mirror everyday tasks like photo editing, album organising, stock option pricing, and spreadsheets.

The M1 13-inch MacBook Pro's score of 299 puts it well above any other MacBook, including the 16-inch MacBook Pro with a Core i9 processor. It was only outperformed by an iMac with a desktop-class Core i7 processor. But even then, the iMac didn't outdo the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro by much.

Cinebench R23

Cinebench measures the rendering performance of a CPU. We are using the latest version, R23, which has been compiled to run natively on M1 Macs.

With a score of 1480, the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro recorded the highest single-core scores of any Mac we have tested – that's nearly 23% greater than a 2020 iMac with a Core i7 desktop-class processor. It's multi-core scores were impressive as well. It was just a smidge less than a 16-inch MacBook Pro which has a Core i9 processor. And as you can see, the Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Pro that was released earlier this year was no match at all.

Unigine Valley

This might be an old benchmark but it's based on the Unigine engine and runs in OpenGL which should give us a good idea on real-world gaming performance at least on older titles.

The M1 13-inch MacBook Pro was leaps ahead of any Mac with integrated graphics. It was about 85% faster than the 2020 Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Pro with Intel Iris Plus graphics. The 16-inch MacBook Pro still has the advantage thanks to its Radeon Pro 5500M GPU but its lead isn't as big as it should have been considering that it's a powerful mid-range mobile GPU. 

The real-world user experience

Benchmarks tell just part of the story, what’s more amazing is just how much more usable this new M1-powered Mac is in everyday use. Universal apps (more on this later) launch instantly and the notebook never slows down no matter what’s running and how many apps you have opened. I could max out CPU usage by transcoding video and I could still switch between my 80 or so browser tabs between Safari and Chrome without a hitch. I couldn’t do the same even on the iMac with a desktop-class Core i7-10700K processor.

You might attribute this to the fact that the test machine has 16GB of memory but iStat Pro tells me only half is being used most of the time and that most of the data was actually committed to SWAP (I had up to 12GB in SWAP at one point), which is bizarre because that should make the system less responsive (because it's accessing from the SSD). Clearly, M1 and macOS Big Sur work in ways that are very different from Intel Macs.

What’s also bizarre is that this MacBook Pro hardly gets warm and its fans seldom spin up. Even during the super CPU-intensive transcoding test, the fans didn’t spin up until after three minutes and even then it was merely a whisper. On any Intel Mac, the fans would have spun up in mere seconds. Insofar as performance is concerned, this is the most amazing notebook I have ever used.

Battery life

Even though this new MacBook Pro has the same 58.2Wh battery as the model it replaces, Apple says it will last up to twice as long – 20 hours of Apple TV movie playback and 17 hours of wireless web surfing vs. 10 hours of Apple TV movie playback and 10 hours of wireless web surfing.

In the past week running my usual suite of apps that include Safari, Firefox, Pages, Photoshop, Music, Airmail, and bunch of other apps running in the background like iStat Pro and Bartender, I could easily get through a typical 10-hour workday. What's more, I was doing all of this at around 80% - 90% screen brightness. This was something I could never do with my Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Pro. Furthermore, some of these apps, like Firefox, Photoshop, and Airmail, are not running natively on M1 yet which means they were eating up more battery. We’ll have to wait and see to properly evaluate the battery life of this new MacBook Pro but even as things stand now, it’s incredible.

Will my apps run?

Given that M1 is based on ARM and therefore uses an entirely different instruction set to Intel, there’s a considerable amount of apprehension from users as to whether their apps would run, and if they did would they run well. 

On Apple's part, all of Apple's own apps like Pages, Music, Keynote, Safari, and more, have all been coded to run natively on M1. These are what Apple calls Universal apps – apps that have been built to run natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel.

For all other apps, Apple has has a translation software called Rosetta 2 – long-time Mac users will be familiar with the name. To aid in the transition, Rosetta 2 will take apps compiled for Intel and translate them so that M1 can run them and the process is as seamless as Apple claims it to be. You’ll be prompted to install Rosetta the first time you run an Intel app and Intel apps do take a little longer to launch because of the translation involved but that’s about it. In my experience, it just works so the matter of translation is mostly a non-issue.

For example, even though Adobe Photoshop isn’t officially supported and doesn’t run natively on M1 yet, I had no problems with it. The same goes for Firefox, Chrome, Grammarly, Airmail, Logi Options, and Microsoft Office apps like Word and Excel, and many more. I even tried some games on Steam like Dawn of War II and Civilization IV and they both ran well. I did experience problems with an app called Karabiner-Elements that I use to remap keys on my mechanical keyboard, but mostly, apps that haven’t yet been compiled for Apple Silicon run just fine. In fact, they work just as well if not even better on the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro. The only issue I see now is that these M1 Macs can’t run virtual machines yet. I say yet because Parallels (the people behind Parallels Desktop for Mac) have said that they are developing one for M1 Macs.

The switch to M1 also gains users the ability to run iOS and iPadOS apps. But before you get too excited, not all the apps are available. Popular ones like FaceBook and Instagram are missing and so are popular iOS games like Genshin Impact and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. And even those that are available sometimes have odd UI and scaling issues, which is to be expected since they weren’t designed to run on a Mac. We’ll have to wait and see how developers react to this, but for now, it’s best to think of it as a bonus and not as a key feature of these M1 Macs.

Also, I know iPadOS now supports mouse inputs but it feels like the MacBooks should come with touchscreens now to take advantage of this new added support for iOS and iPadOS apps. Apple used to say that macOS was designed for the keyboard and mouse but I think it's time to change that now.

A simply incredible notebook 

By all accounts, Apple has handled the transition to its custom silicon exceedingly well. App compatibility is a non-issue and that’s due in part to the excellent work done by the macOS team and also the incredible performance of M1.

To say that the performance of the M1 chip is amazing would be a gross understatement. We don’t know what Apple’s roadmap for its custom silicon Macs is like but seeing that the M1 appears in the MacBook Air (traditionally Apple’s cheapest and least powerful Mac), it’s safe to say that M1 will likely be Apple’s entry-level chip for Macs. And despite that, it’s already knocking on the doors of chips that are positioned much higher. That’s a scary thought. If I were Intel or AMD, I’ll be having sleepless nights.

If you have been holding out for a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, then there's no doubt that this is the Mac you've been waiting for. This new model is absolutely worth the upgrade. It’s not perfect but it gets bloody close. And although I haven’t tested the M1 MacBook Air yet, I have a sneaking suspicion that it the Air is the one that will offer the most bang for the buck, especially if you aren’t one to dabble in sustained workloads like video-editing or heavy photo-editing.

Having said that, this new MacBook Pro isn’t just a worthy upgrade for existing Mac users. I think even Windows users who mainly use their notebooks for productivity tasks might be tempted to make the switch too because no Windows notebook can compete in the same price bracket. Apple continues to offer the 13-inch MacBook Pro with four ports, but that's powered by Intel processors. And after seeing what this M1-powered unit is capable of, I think you would have to be out of your mind to buy that.

Of course, the question to ask now is this: what else does Apple have up its sleeves? Presumably more powerful Macs are coming, ones that meet the “pro” workloads that power users demand. And while it might be tempting to hold off longer, there’s no question that these machines will be even more expensive. Plus there’s also the question of when will they actually arrive. Right now, unless you have very specific requirements that aren't met by any of these new M1 Macs, I think this new 13-inch MacBook Pro will more than suffice. Remember, this notebook has performance that rivals a high-end Core i9 16-inch MacBook Pro for crying out loud.

I have been covering notebooks for a long time and I haven’t seen leaps in performance and usability that can compare on any level to what I have seen here with the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro. Not only that, I haven’t seen a transition to a whole new type of processor carried out so effortlessly and seamlessly. Apple hasn’t just rewritten the notebook rule book, they straight up tossed it into the shredder. 

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