About two years ago I was fed up with my Microsoft Windows and finally purchased a refurbished MacBook Air. What a relief it was to have all my personal devices synchronized in the Apple ecosystem as opposed to finding workarounds. Now, thanks to a very generous trade-in offer and a discount program provided by my company, I have upgraded to this year’s MacBook Pro.
This laptop features Apple’s first foray into using its own microchip instead of relying on Intel and WOW, what a difference. With this new M1 chip, the system is faster, stays cooler and has an all day battery life. In a press release, the company said:
Apple today updated the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the new Magic Keyboard for the best typing experience ever on a Mac notebook and doubled the storage across all standard configurations, delivering even more value to the most popular MacBook Pro. The new lineup also offers 10th-generation processors for up to 80 percent faster graphics performance and makes 16GB of faster 3733MHz memory standard on select configurations. With powerful quad-core processors, the brilliant 13-inch Retina display, Touch Bar and Touch ID, immersive stereo speakers, all-day battery life, and the power of macOS, all in an incredibly portable design.
So of course I tested it as heavily as I could by opening up Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop in batch-processing my images. I then opened up iMovie to edit some videos. And of course I had to open Ulysses writer, Reeder, Mail, and Safari. Zoom, zoom. This machine hasn’t skipped a beat and now I am at 94% battery life and is completely silent. There is no built in fan to keep things cool. New-to-me features included the Touch Bar which allows me to push a button to perform actions at my fingers instead of relying on my upgraded Magic Mouse. Throw in a Touch ID button at my fingers to authorize passcodes and purchases and I am in love.