For the New Year, I purchased a new Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch M1 512 GB SSD laptop for Inna, as her 2013 MacBook Pro was starting to misbehave (rebooting often).
Initially, I was leaning toward the new MacBook Air 13-inch M1, but the MacBook Pro M1 512 GB SSD/8 GB RAM was offered on sale at Costco.com, and the difference between the two was minimal.The MacBook Pro has the following advantages over the MacBook Air M1:
- Longer advertised battery life (up to 20 hours). A
- fan to cool the processor (during heavy workloads)
- higher quality microphone and speakers
- only a minimal increase in weight over Air
After using Apple migration to transfer files from Inna's old MacBook Pro, I updated to the latest version, macOS Big Sur. It works well, and Inna loves the Touch ID (which unlocks the laptop with a fingerprint).
Since it's running Apple's M1 chip, many apps need to run under Rosetta, though many apps are being converted to natively support M1.
Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch M1 (512GB SSD) Review
Positives
- Longer battery life (20 hours on one charge)!
- Very sharp and bright screen (500 nits)
- No fan noise
- Excellent performance
- The fingerprint sensor works excellently to unlock the computer (no need to type passwords)!
Negatives
- No way to upgrade RAM or SSD
- 8GB RAM may not be sufficient in the future
- Many programs built for x86 need to be recompiled for the ARM architecture.

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