Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

The most annoying thing that can happen to a laptop short of breaking is smudges on the screen. I really don't want to ever have to be required to physically touch the screen in order to complete any operation.

I've found it has uses with pairing.

Otherwise yea I agree.

I used to have a Surface, and when I was using it with the keyboard the most common thing I'd do on the touchscreen was scrolling. You can extend your arm out and rest your wrist off to the side, which puts your thumb in a nice spot to reach an inch or two at the bottom of the screen.

I used pinch to zoom on the web as well. It's just nicer than weird key combos like ctrl-wheel, and your average user doesn't even know that exists. But I bet they know about pinch to zoom.

I have a Yoga 720 with a touchscreen and honestly the only time I use the touch is inadvertently when I'm wiping a piece of dust or the like off the screen. Every time it is a bit of a shock.

The form just doesn't conduce itself to touch. As someone earlier said, even if Apple does eventually add touch, they need to figure out the collision with iOS to allow functional use without requiring it.

I'd settle for turning the trackpad into a second display and supporting Apple Pencil input. I'd keep it turned off most of the time, but it would be amazing to be able to flip it on and have it zoom into part of the main display in order to handwrite or draw something now and then.

My own limited personal experience is that a touchscreen is basically useless in a conventional laptop whose hinge only opens to 135-180 degrees. Once you can open the screen 360 degrees, you have a fighting chance at being able to take handwritten notes and drawings on a somewhat ergonomic convertible tablet. But I've never had to do this much, and have always preferred pen and paper.

>It’s a useless feature in search of a use-case.

This was true until just now. The use case is right at the end of OP's quote. These laptops now run iOS apps that are designed with touch as their primary or only interface. It is weird to include the functionality to run these apps but not the functionality to interact with them properly.

Older people love touchscreens on laptops and use the feature very heavily (I think my mother touches her Surface Book's screen in laptop mode more than the trackpad). I see it as a nice to have when I'm recommending laptops for others even if I hardly ever use it myself. It doesn't have to be a revolutionary new input style that apps transform to make use of, and I think that's where Apple gets stuck because that's so alien to their design philosophy.

I agree with everything you just said except this conclusion:

“It’s a useless feature in search of a use-case”

Sometimes it’s going to be easier to pinch to zoom, for example, than do the same thing with a keyboard or mouse.

Touch is no longer an expensive feature to add, so it makes sense to add it for certain use cases.

Also imagine a Mac being used in a kiosk situation where an iPad isn’t big enough.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually get a Mac that is essentially a giant iPad in form factor which can operate in both modes. On a stand to act like a desktop, or on the table, to act as a giant iPad. It would make little sense to disable touch when in upright mode.

Lots of options for interaction gives less repetitive movements.

> Not only is most desktop software not well suited to touch interactions, touchscreens on laptops are also an ergonomic nightmare.

I think the opposite form factor would make more sense: an iPad Pro that runs macOS. You could have a laptop style dock but allow it to be used in tablet mode too.

You're envisioning using a touchscreen device much like you'd use your smartphone which is flawed to say the least. Having used a touchscreen laptop for the last 6+ years, I assure you there's a place for touch in laptops. The arguments against touch on a laptop are much like arguing against any other peripheral used.

> Try reaching your hand up to touch your monitor and hold it there for a minute. Now try pretending you’ll do this for an 8 hour workday.

This is asinine and you know it. That's akin to arguing that we shouldn't use mice or touchpads by saying "just try typing with an onscreen keyboard all day using point and click."

Input methods are additive to the user experience. No one is proposing that you use touch exclusively on your laptop. It becomes of of multiple input methods, with keyboard, mouse/trackpad, voice, that are appropriate for different use cases and different times. It is about options and flexibility.

I frequently use an iPad on a keyboard stand. I frequently switch controls depending on what I’m doing. Sometimes just to induce variety to help avoid RSI.

I used a Windows laptop with touchscreen for a while. While the touchscreen was never the primary input method it was nice to have it for some operations where more interactivity was called for or just to give my hands a break from the mouse or keyboard. It’s nice just to have options.

I often use an iPad in a keyboard case and I have a BT mouse. I constantly switch control methods depending on the situation. Sometimes you want precision and use the keyboard or mouse. Other times you want more interaction and will use the touch screen. Scrolling is often easier using touch. If I had a touchpad, the mix might shift a little but not drastically. I also like to switch up controls as a hedge against RSI.

Touch is not an ergonomic nightmare and it is not the last resort. It’s just an option where appropriate.

It was noted years ago (https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/1999/HPL-1999-78.html) that dynamic runtime optimization could speed up native programs (aka x86 on x86, or in the above case pa-risc on pa-risc).

But in the end, the reason we don't have similar systems everywhere today is that the vast majority of the benifit has been consumed by modern OoO machines and Profile guided optimization. If your seeing significant x86 speedups in rosetta its likely one of two things are happening.

So you could be running very poorly optimized x86 code, or its a system call/graphics/etc heavy benchmark which is spending the majority of its time in the OS. The latter was a big conversation during the early PPC years when apple was claiming their machines were faster than x86's running x86 code because of this one x86 benchmark that ran better on a PPC mac (can't remember the name). But it turned out it was mostly an OS benchmark, and 99% of the time it was just measuring native PPC macos performance vs windows95.

The former (poorly optimized x86) can happen for a number of reasons, one of the most common is people targeting the base x86-64 instruction set and ignoring avx/etc, or just simply unoptimized builds.

I have also heard that Microsoft put lower priority on the x86 emulation layer, because they felt like if it was really good, developers would have no incentive to make native compiles.

While this sounds instinctively ridiculous to me, as of late I’ve become very cognizant of general laziness in our industry, so who knows…

Docker never really worked well on Mac to begin with.

Can’t wait for it to work how it should have worked from day one.

There already is an insider build :)

Can you share some first impressions? I do front-end web dev mostly, using vim and sometimes VS Code, and usually with a Twitch stream in the background... thinking I might trade in this big 16-inch MBP for the M1 MBP.

For most people CI matching production should be enough. Even if there are issues with dev machines on a different architecture, I don't think that will be enough to stop people from grabbing the latest MBP when their next upgrade cycle appears.

> If you buy an ARM mac, it would be ideal to run ARM instances in the datacenter, but those are uncommon and expensive.

Graviton2 instances are cheaper to run.

The AWS ARM instances are cheap and fast, highly recommend if your workload supports.

Why? ARM server CPUs are already a thing for years now.

I predict it will disappear from the market within 2 years with no replacement leaving people to limp along on an iMac. Not like it hasn't happened before.

Maybe... maybe not, it may not be efficient to make an specific processor for those machines, but with the actual performance of the M1, you just have to put 4, 8, or 16 M1 processors side by side and call it a day. The big beefy intel machines are sometimes dual processor, so it's nothing that it's not already invented.

The air is missing the active cooling.

The next upgrade that puts apple chip in the 4 port pro would be the ideal version to purchase without a Touch Bar impacting usability and battery life.

Yup, this was my main reason for choosing the Air over the Pro. The touch bar is so unfortunate -- Apple could probably do something interesting with it, but ultimately they've basically left it untouched since they released it.

I suspect the only reason for its continued existence is to look cool in marketing photos.

Very interesting. Do you have a reference for that?