I switched about half a year ago from a MacBook Pro with an Intel processor to MacBook Pro with an M1 processor. My overall impression was "when the hell will it run out of power"? I spent the whole working day (without a charger) and it was still at 60%, while I was constantly stressed before when I had to do something without a charger for more than 3-4 hours.
I don't care what any test, but tripling battery life with no visible performance degradation is a huge win in my book.
It ran circles around the old machine despite being the lowest spec. Battery is light years ahead. And it doesn’t even have a fan. So it’s dead silent. Never gets hot unlike the old Intel. There isn’t any mechanical component to fail except the hinge and the keyboard.
I was worried I might regret not waiting for the higher spec M1s. Now that just seems totally unnecessary for me.
PS: Work later gave me a high spec 2019 Intel MBP. It’s slower, louder, and much hotter than my Air. And at least 2.5x the price. Amazing.
I had a 2019 Intel MBP. I hated that machine with a vengeance. It was always hot, and because of that always throttled. I live in a hot place (Israel) and during the summer of 2021 the heat caused a massive expansion of the battery which destroyed the laptop.
I went for an M1 in late 2021 after using a Windows machine for a few months and hating every moment of it.
The M1 is simply incomparable. Fast. Silent. It feels futuristic.
Part of it might be new battery effect too. I just popped a new battery in my 2012 and just doing light dev work I could stretch it to 8 hours or so. This thing was doing like 3 hours on a good day before.
Certainly that plays a part. But my M1 Air is now over a year old and I can still easily edit 4K video in iMovie for a few hours and see the battery only drop from 100% to 70%.
Pretty huge! Don't expect miracles long term though. Batteries are still batteries M1 or not and if you do 4k video editing every day, you will notice wear over time. What sucks about the new macs is you need to take it in to replace a battery, where as you used to be able to do it yourself in like 2 mins or less.
Yeah, both Chrome and Firefox will easily reduce the battery life of my M1 Pro mac by ~30% compared to Safari. I've "solved" this by sticking to Safari when battery life matters (ex, when I'm not at home) and using FF when I'm docked or close enough to one. With Safari, even my 14" gets ridiculous battery life: I spent almost two continuous days with ~6-8h of SoT each day without charging it once throughout.
I got an 8GB Mac mini. I was broke at the time but needed a replacement in a hurry, and even though my two previous machines had 16GB, 8GB should be fine for web dev work, right?
Yeah, I regret it. I like to have YouTube videos on in the background, and usually it's fine, but for some reason live streams in particular just gobble up RAM until there's sometimes skipping audio and noticeable waits when switching apps.
Interestingly hiding the chat seems to help; I wonder if the YouTube "app" isn't flushing those DOM nodes corresponding to chat messages off the page after a certain amount of time or something. When worse comes to worse, Streamlink comes to the rescue: https://streamlink.github.io
Oh well. Making do for now. And as others have said, the performance (when not RAM-constrained) and noise (or lack thereof) have been blissful.
I don't have a MacBook (but have been considering getting one), but I can't imagine that you need more that 16 GB of RAM to run a browser, no matter how memory-hungry Chrome might be.
Is this really an issue? Maybe you're trolling?
I don't understand how adding more memory is going to fix your performance. It's not like you're spinning up a HDD to swap.
The system really starts to bog down with 15 ~ 20 tabs open for things like jira, roam, email, etc. CPU usage will be very low but when swapping is in effect system slowdown is really noticeable. I don't see the same issue with Safari but of course Safari does not have the extensions I rely on.
I love the Air but excited for my 64gb macbook pro arriving in a month.
On my macbook M1 Pro I was able to work for ~11 hours without charging and on Thinkpad P14S GEN 2 AMD (5850U CPU) with a 4K display I can work for ~ 7 hours. So the difference is not that big TBH.
I don't care what any test, but tripling battery life with no visible performance degradation is a huge win in my book.