Hey, I’m currently in the middle of the weirdest day so I felt like probably now was a good time to write about my experiences with the new m1 chip from apple on my MacBook Air, my first new computer (mobile at that) for over a decade. It’s been quite the eye opener, I wanted to break it down in this post.
I’ve still not found my writing vibes again yet so please bear with me while I try and get through this with a good side dish of M83 (Saturdays = Youth) playing in the background remembering me of happy times when I had a great working flow, not sure what happened to it but I do feel like that’s all coming back online again.
So firstly, let me say that it was a chipset that I was very excited about from apple when I first saw the keynote during the pandemic and lockdown, like many others, I was marvelling at the way that apple destroyed everyone else in the industry with their cutting edge adaptation of virtual sets, cgi and just incredible detail to “getting the shot” — the word immersive and experience is what sets apple apart regardless of how you place them in the current “technology” provider setting, you may find them overpriced or “lost their way” when it comes to innovation on many levels but I’d say you’d be mistaken.
I feel they are looking at the long game rather than the short term, through more memory and cpu at it and cool the chipset the best we can, the problems that are obviously out there and have been for decades are slowly getting corrected in many ways with this new approach of “on chip” design the way they handle memory management, power, gpu, everything.
The m1 really is an incredible little beastie. It’s so far exceeded all my expectations and I’ve not even pushed it yet, when it comes to rendering video, encoding ffmpeg audio at 80x everything just cranks a lot, completely silent, producing very little heat. I’ve not really experienced the “throttling” that others might find but then, I was coming from a very aging iMac that I’ve been keeping on life support for the last EIGHT YEARS, that’s the major difference for me with apple hardware, I get my monies worth out of it.
Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m super interesting (read, really want) some System76 hardware too so I can run some “stability” systems around here for streaming and such like but I don’t have the time to be 80/20 admin vs content creator yet, I don’t have the time to learn how to fix things on the daily and while I’m CLI nerdy enough, I just don’t get that vibe that it’s ready for my needs yet (I’d like to run them alongside)
So let’s quickly bullet point some of the key points for me with the upgrade.
CPU/GPU/MEMORY
I freaking love how the computer “feels” from a power management perspective, if you geek out enough about ya hardware you’ll know when ya machine feels “right” — so far in my day to day life of content creating on the go, it’s really living up to everything my previous desktop machine could do (and more) — gpu encoding is solid, having all those cores is incredible for doing multi encoding situation, so much that I’ll have to change my workflow and invest in learning new hardware and shortcuts to get the most from it, to really drive it.
THE INTERNAL SSD IS FAST AS FUCK
You can eat as much nerdy/geeky stats as you want from the internet, my real world experience is that this thing, even in this format, as a laptop, as an air, what you’d really expect a hairdresser or fashion student to use to make shit canva graphics from the web because they wanted the cachet of an apple product when a chromebook could have done it
4k CPU, 74fps, 4k METAL, 223fps
Blackmagic RAW Speed Test
It’s actually a beast, the ssd I’m sure is some kinda m2.ssd hybrid beast, I went for the 512mb, I tend to go for one up from the basic because they are trying to get the machine into a good pricing point and the next step of anything is actually basic user needs, so always go for 512mb now in a solid state, I tend to avoid the other end of the spectrum too, it’s overpriced and well, shoehorning a 2tb in feels like even less tested tech, I’d rather just hook up a decent fast solid state to the thunderbolt 4 (again, fast as fuck)
HEADPHONE JACK & SOUND IN GENERAL
I did not expect the audio coming from the laptop to sound THIS good, I don’t know what DSP they use on these new laptops but it sounds just as good as my Fiio standalone pocket dsp that I was using before, feel like I don’t need it now, I’ve got pretty much everything as .flac now anyway just because, well, crispy right?
The internal speakers on it are out of this world, I’ve never heard the latest audio tech on a laptop and boy, if you don’t have headphones it’s amazing. Like, the sound stage feels so big, bigger than the laptop screen, I guess the word would be “envelope” you in.
TOUCH ID & PAYMENTS
Bear with me here, I’m a complete newbie to Touch ID, I know you might find this a shock but I’ve not had a phone or tablet with Touch ID, I guess I was just one of those dudes that never upgraded, not that I didn’t want too but I just didn’t move with the times, if you don’t have money to spend, then Touch ID is not something you worry about! :) — but it’s been a real time saver — from password auth, to installing apps, not having to type in and auth things is awesome.
I’ve not really used the card payments stuff yet but I do have a virtual card setup for that, I find that the best way to deal with these kinda integration. As a digital asset creator I need to know the experience and how these things work “on the other end” — I recommend that you have a separate virtual card account managed through your startup bank app, that way you can delay/freeze or just load up enough instead of it being your main account.
ALWAYS 16GB
Look, I don’t have to tell you lot, you are savvy enough, we have phones and toasters that have 8gb of memory on them these days, if you are going for 256gb/8gb anything we can’t be friends, it’s that simple — if you are using your hardware to be in the “apple” club and fashionable in the coffee house then you might scrape by but if your gonna use this for actual work on the go, then you might wanna set yaself up for success to start with.
THE KEYBOARD IS FILTH (=GOOD)
Forgive my slang, but the keyboard is fantastic, it’s a close one with my Logitech portable keyboard and it’s probably gonna be weird to go back to that at some point but I really like it and when it’s broken in I think it’s gonna be even better, it’s a really nice experience, it’s why I’m writing more again actually, I wanna get my keystrokes monies worth.
GUNMETAL GREY IS THE NEW MORDOR
Seriously, the grey on this puppy is lovely, that’s the first thing I noticed when I got it out of the box, the box that had passed through SIX countries to get here, at first I was wondering which AGENCIES had installed something on it first but after looking at the tracking I can see this was totally a BREXIT play, also, I’m really interested about the place in South Korea called Incheon, that looks like a slice of the human species sci-FU future.
BIG SUR FEELS UNFINISHED
As much as I like the new OS and I’ve not really gone through everything with it yet I do feel like apple really really need to consider a complete refresh of the OS and I know they are slowly doing that with this ARM tech, power saving, power management, security, memory locking, getting away from INTELS chip mess and kernel issues but still, it’s very messy.
I know for a fact that I should have more control over my OS than I’ve got, it’s all a little “hope for the best” at the moment with the way things work, I’m glad we moved away from the way they were doing a bunch of things but I still feel the future ARM versions, where I have all my apps running non emulated will really make this machine pop further, that said, even some apps emulated — it feels pretty damn great.
TWO PORTS, SIMPLE TOO FAR?
I didn’t realise when I ordered this thing that the whole usb-c thing would be a big move for me, of course I have other things that are usb-c but this whole unified cable was a big shift for me, it’s additional money too, it’s like getting a new camera that suddenly has different format cards to get the best out of it, it’s a discovery period.
At the moment I’ve got a power hub but I know I need to take that to the next level to get the most out of that connectivity, I mean we have 5gb of thunderbolt4 connectivity right there we gotta be seeing how far we can push it, first impressions thou is that usb3 devices finally come alive at 1080/60fps and 4k is possible without frame drop, I’m really happy from that perspective, it does not feel so “laboured” on the system as previous usb offerings.
Soon I’ll be hooking up a new hub with a gigabit ethernet, hdmi output and sd card elements and the same four ports as before, I’ll let you know how that goes but I’m expecting an improvement again there with wired connectivity, second screen driving and the ability to offload content for editing on the machine rapidly for shoots etc.
THE TRACKPAD DOES WHAT NOW
I’ve never been into trackpads, but I have to say the one onboard the laptop might be useful for editing once I start to get into what with the multi touch, it’s just a bit gimmicky for me right now and an external wired mouse is my jam, if I can use no bluetooth devices at all on my machine right now the better, I don’t like having bluetooth on.
A YEAR FREE OF APPLE TV+
i'd completely forgetten about this so added this section in, with every new piece of hardware that apple sells you they give you twelve months worth of apple tv+
normally i'm not bothered by these addon things but i had to check it out and i have to say that everything we have watched on apple tv+ has been brilliant so far -- from the films to the shorts and documentaries, everything has been great.
hightlight have to be that tom hanks naval film, for all mankind, tehran, the billie elish documentary, the morning show, ted lasso, little america, on the rocks, boys state, just so many things, all really good, has a feeling of apple being the personal curator about it, totally here for it.
wonder what the film camera specs are for apple tv? i bet they are much higher than the specs for getting films on netflix -- certainly worth probably putting for a physical apple tv device to watch this stuff on, they have some great stuff now.
IN CLOSING
I’m probably missing a bunch of stuff that I wanted to tell you about it that I’ve forgotten but forgive me I’m running on less hours today due in part to strong winds, rain, tiredness and working through the night last night till the early hours, I’m hoping for good sleeps tonight and hit everything again tomorrow, another friday, just coming around fast as fuck like they always do in pandemic times.
After suffering in silence with a dying SMART drive with a cpu melting and a blocked up internal fan from dust it was time for an upgrade, going mobile for me in 2021/22 was crucial so having a device that I could do that with meant that the lighter the better, keeping me in the ecosystem of applications that I could creatively create with.
I’d probably like to switch it out to a MacBook Pro or even travel with a Mac mini with me and a decent second display to use with the laptop or standalone machine for coding/media playback back at the ranch but for now, it’s fitting into place just nicely.
Will update this post if I remember anything else!
Cheers!
Humble x
pinterest epic wins pinboard → brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin sxsw → video chat with robert scoble → music video can you spot me?