Updating Macs and M1 Impressions

It is way past time to upgrade my office Mac. As you can see, it’s a Mac mini from late 2012. It is ancient and it can’t even run the latest version of macOS.

My “new” Mac is a MacBook Pro from 2015. It’s pretty long in the tooth, but it’s running well enough for a five year old computer. At least it runs Big Sur.

I had been holding off upgrading but Apple’s announcement at this year’s WWDC that they were going to start transitioning to their own custom processors gave me a good reason to pull the trigger. The thing is, I really wanted to upgrade the office Mac mini to an (as yet unannounced) iMac powered by Apple silicon. We didn’t get that at the latest Apple event. But we did get a new M1 powered MacBook Air…

And I got one!

Updates

So the update plan (part one) is to retire the Mac mini, move the Macbook Pro to the office for use during the work day, and have the Macbook Air out in the living room for everyday use — writing, editing photos, and watching stuff when my tv has been taken over…

Despite a few hiccups with moving things around and seting up the new Macbook it’s worked pretty well so far. The only part that was rough was my backups. The Mac mini ran backups for the other computer and for my network storage. It backed up to an external drive and to Backblaze. Changing all of those automated backups to the Macbook Pro was quite a process. It’s still ongoing, actually…

Replacing the Pro with the M1 Air was much less arduous. Some of my needed apps aren’t updated for M1 yet, but I find Rosetta 2 doing a fine job running non-native apps so there is minimal impact on my workflow.

Impressions of the M1 powered MacBook Air

In terms of pure performance, the M1 MacBook Air is a beast. Take a look at my Geekbench 5 scores:

The gaming pc listed above has an Intel Core i7-9700K (3.6 GHz, 4.9 GHz turbo) and a MSI Gaming Radeon RX 5600. That’s why it’s compute score is so much higher than anything else I have.

What’s interesting to me is how much the iPhone 12 outperforms the MacBook Pro and how great the new MacBook Air performs, especially considering it runs totally silent and cool. It runs all of my apps — even the Intel apps running through Rosetta — smoothly and fast. The most intense app I run on any regular basis is Lightroom Classic and it is noticably faster. That will only get better when Adobe releases the M1 version soon.

Honestly, for me the M1 transition is pretty seamless so far. Everything just runs, but faster. The A and M Apple SoC systems are remarkable pieces of engineering.

Upgrade Part Two

The next part of the plan — once the MacBook Air is paid off — is to replace the MacBook Pro in the office. I’m confident there will be an M1- (or M2-) powered iMac with a big 27-inch display that will look great on my office desk. In the mean time I hope to get back into writing and photos using this MacBook Air.