Thread by @anildash

I've had one of the new 14" MacBook Pros for a few days (replacing my last machine, which was a similar 2016 MBP) and here are some thoughts that might help you assess whether it's a useful upgrade for you.

The primary thing, of course, is that it's absurdly faster, but not just in the "rendering visual effects" way — the biggest quality of life improvement is that apps pretty much just start instantly. You almost never see a beachball or wait for the UI to respond.

Physically, the machine is *hefty*. I suppose the outside dimensions are nominally the same as before, but it is so squared off and heavy that it most resembles the PowerBook models of the early 2000s. Still manageable, but not a lightweight machine.

The screen is the usual Apple standard, pretty much the best that you can get. I especially like the very-responsive refresh rate (they market that as "ProMotion"), and the notch is honestly no big deal, no matter how much folks fuss. The speakers are notably great.

After performance, the single biggest quality of life improvement for me is the keyboard. Though I knew enough to avoid the touchbar on my 2016 machine, I still had the very worst keyboard Apple has ever shipped. The new one is good, almost as good as the desktop magic keyboards.

The daily use experience is so much more pleasant. Battery life is far longer, and this is the first Apple laptop I can remember that simply does not get hot; I've never heard the fans (*lots* of prominent vents on this machine). Benchmarks are wildly faster.

Except in the most extreme, video-processing-heavy scenarios, I cannot imagine that 90% of users need to step up to the M1 Max chip vs. the M1 Pro. It's a vanishingly small difference for the vast majority of use cases. Spend money on memory or disk, not CPU.

I'm still waiting to see what build quality is like over time. My old MBP was one of the worst Apple products I've owned (keyboard was garbage, battery swelled up, etc.) so I have to see how much of my very positive impression now is just getting a glass of water in the desert.

But if you are in the market for an Apple laptop, need more power than the Macbook Air, and your current machine is more than ~2 years old, this is a definite step up. If your machine is more recent than 2 years, and your keyboard works, then it's just FOMO, you can wait.

Oh! I forgot one thing: The Apple Silicon machines can run iOS apps, which I largely thought was just a gimmick. But as it turns out, if you have just one or two iPhone/iPad apps that would be handy to use sometimes on a Mac, it's a nice little bonus. Not huge, but nice.