Product Review: MacBook Pro (Fall 2021)
Not since Aragorn reclaiming the throne of Gondor have we seen a comeback as glorious as the 2021 MacBook Pro update.
Perhaps it is hyperbolic and painfully nerdy to put it so, but you’ll have to forgive me as I have long had a love/hate relationship with MacBook Pros.
I got my first over a decade ago during my first startup software development job. The sleek silver laptop was not just a cool-looking work computer, it was also a status symbol at the company, as only the programmers got them while all other employees made do with cheap Windows desktops. Once I got used to the OSX user interface I came to appreciate its versatility. Here was truly a laptop for producers, not consumers. Here was a machine just as usable as Windows yet infinitely better for coding with its Unix environment and ecosystem.
And then the MacBook Air came along. It was around this time that the Pro started to lose its way. The device got thinner, ports started disappearing, the keyboard got worse, and the Pro’s identity as a workhorse started to falter as much more powerful Intel-powered Windows ultrabooks started hitting the market. At the same time I was getting deeper into the world of DevOps and cloud engineering. Spending so much time debugging Linux servers via SSH made me appreciate the power of Ubuntu. Dual boot Linux/Windows became my standard approach for laptops. It was easy to get way better specs in a Windows gaming laptop compared to a MacBook Pro that couldn’t even run Dark Souls.
The last few years I have kept a relatively low spec MacBook Pro around just for jobs that absolutely required OSX. The vast majority of my computing, both personal and professional, has been done via Windows or Ubuntu. It just so happened that this year in November, due to a new job and a move to a new country, I came to be in the market for a new MacBook Pro. When I saw the new offerings in 14 and 16 inches, I was pleasantly surprised.
The new MacBook Pros do three things that I have long waited to see return:
- Unarguably top-end performance in terms of CPU, GPU, and RAM.
- More ports so as to no longer need to carry around annoying dongles
- A better keyboard with real function keys instead of a gimmicky touchbar.
The new M1 chips offer unparalleled performance. Go look up benchmark test videos on YouTube if you don’t believe me. It’s not even close when you look at other ultrabooks or even gaming laptops. The battery life is nuts too. I have been sitting writing this review unplugged for the last hour while listening to music and it still says “100%” in the indicator. This thing is a beast for development. I love that 16 gigs RAM is the new baseline. It’s overkill frankly on an M1 architecture and you can opt for super overkill at 32 gigs. The only minor annoyance was re-installing all of my Python libraries and development tools for the new chip architecture though this wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be.
The keyboard is also much better than the previous couple of generations. I know some people liked the touchbar, and that’s fine; I’m not one to kink shame. For my part I rejoice at the return of my function keys. More than that, I rejoice at the return of my ports. Dedicated magsafe charging, HDMI, and three USB-C/Thunderbolt ports ensure I can always keep my machine charged, connected to mouse and keyboard, and displaying on dual monitors with zero need of dongles. We also get high impedance headphone jack and an SD card reader, two very nice bonuses that I use regularly.
In short, the Macbook Pro is back to being a proper workstation. It is again a producer’s laptop meant for professionals as the name implies. It has the horsepower, build quality, and port configuration to serve as a desktop replacement, which is precisely how I have used it the last couple of months. It is a pleasure to use. I love that, particularly with the 14 inch variant, it is so easy to work on the go and enjoy cozy cafe work stretches. The 2021 Pro is straight up the best laptop I have bought in many years.
Call it The Return of the King.
