so the internet is filled right now with people positively spaffing themselves demented all over that new apple silicon now seriously there's so much fappage friction going on right now that i'm kind of concerned that the entire web is just going to spontaneously combust but is apple's new all-in-one m1 chipset really as spooge-worthy as everyone seems to make out well to find out i grabbed one of the 16 gigabyte models of the new macbook pro with apple's m1 chip that's almost 2 000 quids worth a kit and that came straight out of my whiskey fund and
you know how much i love whiskey kitties for 1 900 bob i could have bought a lot of whiskey so for the last several weeks in between my other laptop reviews i've been using the macbook pro m1 to be doing pretty much everything video editing photo and script and all that good stuff so is it actually worthy of all of that praise well here's my real world macbook pro m1 review and from all the latest greatest tech please do plug subscribe and hitting that notifications bell cheers so let's start with the design and anyone who's
bought a macbook pro these last few years will really be struggling to see any proper external differences with the m1 model it's definitely a real shame that given the changes that have taken place inside of the macbooks that apple didn't take the opportunity to also freshen up the design on the outside and really differentiate these new m1 laptops from the older intel models but then the aesthetical part of design doesn't seem something that apple's really concerning itself with much these days i mean have you seen the new iphones i mean my kid has a barbie
phone that looks more legit than this thing regardless though that metallic chassis is at least as robust as ever proven well up to a life on the road and while this 13-incher is seriously hefty compared with dell's rivals for instance at least it's kind of compact for a professional laptop of course one issue with the smaller laptops is definitely the limited space for ports and that is certainly a weakness here the macbook pro m1 serves up a pair of thunderbolt 3 ports sadly not the fresh new thunderbolt 4 as found on the new tiger leg
version of the xps 13 and a lot of hp lenovo and azusa's new laptops although that's only really an issue if you want to get a dock connected to your macbook pro in order to hook up a lot of peripherals and different drives and things like that sadly both of those thunderbolts are crammed together on the left edge which is less than ideal but it is a minor grumble at best so suck it up junior moving on you've got that now standard combination of keyboard and touch bar and so far i'm more than happy with
this this is apple's so-called magic keyboard and the magic part of it is that all of the keys still actually work two months later that's definitely a massive improvement of my old 2017 macbook pro wear and i wish i was kidding here by now the space bar had already started packing up this keyboard offers a very comfortable typing experience the keys have got a good bit of bounce but they don't feel spongy and they're very well sized for touch typing adding some excellent backlighting and you've got a solid all-around board and it's the same story
for the macbook pro's touch id sensor built into that power button as well once again this works with charm fast and responsive as always likewise the touch bar is a lively dynamic alternative to function keys that's really coming into its own now that devs have had a bit of time to make use of it it's a fast and easy way to control your media adjust the display brightness all that good stuff and also access essential features when you're using apps and that spacious touchpad is definitely another winner admirably filling that palm rest to the full
extent it did take me a little while to get used to apple's dual click methods you just got to push softly for a left click and then push harder for a right click but once this method clicks sort of speak then it all just works perfectly and no complaints either when it comes to that 13.3 inch ips display the 2560 by 1600 pixel resolution means everything looks pin sharp and despite that compact design i thought i could still comfortably edit photos and video or enjoy some depressing real-life murder documentaries to further sink into my 2020
funk colour reproduction is typically natural which is ideal for creative use 100 of the srgb and an impressive 86 of the adobe rgb are ably handled plus the maximum brightness tops off at 480 nits which is more than strong enough to comfortably work out doors you've got full dolby atmos support here and those stereo speakers pump out a decent beefy bit of audio once you pump the volume all the way up you've also got a headphone jack hazard plus some reliable bluetooth support for gold wire free now if you want to do some zoom in
or whatever to actually see your friends and family at some point you've got a perfectly bold standard 720p hd webcam stuck there above the screen it doesn't have a privacy shield or anything like that when it's not in use but you do at least get this dinky little green led which pops into life whenever the camera is being used by an application just in case you know you want to get up to something dodgy and you're having to completely forget that you're live streaming to the internet and as you can see the picture quality as
standard for this sort of laptop is generally kind of sort of soft and grainy and it is thrown by harsh lighting as well but it'll do the job for a basic web chat as for that built-in mic well it's okay but you will have to speak up to be properly heard and it also picks up on all the background noise going on around you so i'd highly recommend using an actual proper headset but of course the whole reason i was so curious about the new apple macbook pro was that m1 chipset which apple has crafted
in collaboration with arm ever since the launch apple has been absolutely brazen its own beef about the performance of this m1 chipset claiming that these new macbook devices are more powerful than 98 of all windows laptops out there and unsurprisingly that's not true so if you're using a program that is actually optimized for that m1 chip then they tend to run well here on this 16 gig macbook pro but certainly not all of them run perfectly in final cut pro for instance i was constantly seeing dropped frames when editing just a single stream of 4k
video and that's without adding any fancy extra elements and that seems to be because i shoot in the standard mpeg format rather than apple's own pro res format and that's so i can actually edit using a variety of software and devices when needed so lesson one is this kiddies unless you play absolutely by apple's rules using only m1 optimized software and using only apple's own format you can expect to see judders and shonky behavior from these new macbooks i tried using software like [ __ ] and was absolutely appalled at the so-called performance even quite
basic windows laptops like microsoft's surface laptop go which i only recently reviewed offered a smoother experience at a third of the cost although at least fairly demanding games ran with a respectable ish enough frame rate on the macbook pro m1 as long as i kept the graphics settings low but those detail levels up high and everything usually becomes a hot god damn mess and as a rough indicator of performance on the default high settings on rise of the tomb raider the macbook churned out average frame rate of 27 21 and just 23 frames per second
with noticeable drops throughout the one key area where i did actually notice a performance increase on the macbook pro m1 compared with my older 2017 macbook pro is the video processing speed on this thing you can get a video processed in about sort of three or four minutes compared with around 15 to 20 minutes on the older device so again as long as you temper your expectations and use the macbook pro m1 exactly how apple expects you to then all is gravy but to be honest if you've got a macbook pro from the last three
four years with the radiant graphics then i wouldn't rush to upgrade anytime soon as for the mac os experience well big sur has proven reasonably stable so far only crashing a couple of times in the past two months it's an incremental update of course with a few little aesthetic tweaks thrown in and of course the ability to run ipad apps if you ever feel the need the new control panel effort is mostly redundant as a lot of those features can be fast accessed on the touch bar but it will please those with older machines however
i'm definitely not a fan of how you can't uninstall quite a lot of apple's pre-installed apps including the likes of chess not exactly a vital piece of software for the overall running of the macbook you'd have thought and yeah queen's gambit might have been a pretty decent show but it hasn't exactly inspired me to go play virtual [ __ ] chess on my macbook all the time thankfully i've had bugger all issues when it comes to the internet connectivity on the macbook pro m1 though thanks for that dependable wi-fi 6 support i've actually seen some
really nippy upload and download speeds which is obviously great when you're dealing with whop and great files going onto youtube and stuff like that as for the storage well the base model of the macbook pro m1 comes with a measly 256 gigs on board which when you're video editing is about as useful as a condom machine in a nunnery so i naturally said bollocks to that and sparked up another 400 quid roughly 10 bottles of your finest 12 year old malt on the one terabyte version and this registered read speeds just over 3 gigabits per
second and just under that for writing files which is a solid effort overall comparable to rivals like the dell xps 13. and i gotta say while my expectations certainly weren't met on the performance front mostly thanks to apple's ridiculous boss and the ceaseless parotin online the macbook pro m1 definitely did impress me when it came to the battery life i found that even when i was video editing in final cut pro i would get around nine hours of non-stop use from a single charge and again when i was working in the likes of google chrome
i used to do a bit scripting or whatever while streaming media again i would get around sort of nine hours of use which is definitely better than most windows rivals and so after actually using the apple macbook pro m1 as my full-time laptop in between other reviews naturally would i recommend it to fine fork well i know i've dumped on it from a great height quite a bit in this review but that's only because my expectations were rather high because of apple itself and naturally the echo chamber that is the internet the fact of the
matter is the macbook pro m1 is a perfectly fine creative laptop especially thanks to the fantastic battery life on this thing definitely really handy if you want to be editing on the go at some point in 2021 when we can actually leave our houses again and the performance is good as i stated before if you actually stick to apple's own rulebook but if you want to be using third-party software and the like you're not going to get any benefits from the m1 that you wouldn't get from much cheaper windows devices so that's what i personally
think of the macbook pro m1 would be great to hear from you five volk as well though definitely please uh leave your experiences down in the comments below any little foibles that you've found or if you've been absolutely loving every minute of it be great to hear from you and please do poke subscribe and ding that notifications bell for more on the latest greatest sec cheers love you [Music] foreign
