The New MacBook Pros, One Week Later: The Reviews Are In
A week after Apple's Unleashed event, early M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro owners are reporting big real-world speedups for developers and video editors.
It’s been about a week since Apple’s “Unleashed” event, and the first M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro units are now landing in the hands of reviewers and, more interestingly, working developers. That second group is what I’ve been paying attention to, because keynote benchmarks are one thing and a real Xcode build queue is another.
The early anecdotes are consistent: compile times are down dramatically compared to Intel-based MacBook Pros, and video export times for 4K and 8K footage in apps like Final Cut Pro are getting cut to a fraction of what they used to be. That tracks with what Apple claimed on stage — up to 4x the graphics performance of the original M1 on the Max — but it’s still nice to see it show up in ordinary workflows rather than just marketing slides. If you spend your day waiting on a spinning progress bar while a large codebase rebuilds, shaving minutes off that loop compounds fast.
What strikes me most is that Apple didn’t just bump clock speeds. The whole chassis got rethought around this new silicon. MagSafe is back, so you’re not burning your only Thunderbolt port on charging. There’s a full-size HDMI port and an SD card slot again, which is Apple quietly admitting that the previous generation’s “just buy a dongle” era wasn’t beloved by anyone doing real work. The Touch Bar, on the other hand, is gone — no great mourning there from what I’ve seen online.
The catch is the price
None of this comes cheap. The 14-inch starts at $1,999 and the 16-inch at $2,499, which is a real step up from the base M1 MacBook Pro these models supplement rather than replace. Apple is clearly positioning these as pro machines for people whose time is worth the premium — video editors, developers, audio engineers — rather than a general refresh for the whole lineup. If you’re a student or someone who mostly browses and writes email, the existing M1 MacBook Air or entry MacBook Pro is still probably the smarter buy.
There’s also the practical question of availability heading into the holidays. Between chip shortages rippling through basically every hardware category this year and Apple’s own component sourcing, I wouldn’t be shocked if shipping estimates stretch out as more orders come in. If you preordered right after the event, you’re probably in decent shape; if you’re just now deciding, budget for a wait.
The bigger story here, I think, is what this signals about Apple’s chip roadmap. Going from M1 to M1 Pro and M1 Max in under a year, with this much of a leap in GPU and memory bandwidth, suggests Apple’s silicon team isn’t slowing down. It’s hard not to wonder what a Mac Pro-class chip built on this same approach might look like, though Apple hasn’t said anything about that yet. For now, developers with the budget seem thrilled, and that’s a pretty good early verdict for a $2,000-plus laptop.