I switched from Linux to MacBook Pro M1 2021. An honest review of all the pros after 2 weeks of use

I already made a post about the downsides of macOS, but if there were more downsides than upsides, I would have sold my laptop a long time ago, wouldn’t I? In this post I’ll talk about what advantages I discovered after 2 weeks of using, for the first time in my life, an Apple product - MacBook Pro 2021 - M1 Pro 32/512 on macOS Monterey 12.2.1

Build Quality

I’ve used different laptops with different levels of chassis quality, this one is #1 of all I’ve seen.

• Every detail of the chassis is objectively ergonomic and well thought out. The new chassis shape looks cool, I haven’t seen anything like it before. The laptop gets more of a feeling of a “solid block”, as if it doesn’t even open. I love rounded corners, they’re very well and properly done here.
• It’s convenient to open and can be done with one hand. What I’m seeing for the first time in laptops - the lid opens smoothly, meaning it won’t be closed so tight that you can’t open the first 10% and then open with almost no resistance. Throughout the entire motion, the resistance is calibrated so that it doesn’t wobble and is pleasant to open.
• Very little cooling. No plastic elements to protect from heating parts of the chassis. No grilles covering the entire bottom of the laptop. No protrusions, fan openings, nothing. For cooling, only now when I specifically looked hard did I find three narrow slits under the monitor and on the sides. I’ll tell you shocking facts about cooling in operation later.

The chassis is nearly perfect. I haven’t seen a single flaw. If you want to nitpick - you can only remember the speakers from the earlier post - they’re some weird little grilles on the sides of the keyboard. The chassis is entirely metal, pleasant to the touch and polished just enough not to collect fingerprints while being very pleasant to the touch.

Display

This is the best display I’ve ever seen on a laptop, in my opinion the best in the world.

• I put my old laptop next to this display - the old one looks so bad compared to the new one that I don’t even want to look at it - as if someone drew a crookedly backlit picture with faded markers on paper. Try finding a phone with an IPS matrix from 2017 and put it next to a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra with a SuperAMOLED LTPO 120Hz matrix - that’s roughly the same difference you’ll feel here.
• Viewing angles - 180°.
• Colors are vivid, bright, like real ones, which I’ve always dreamed of before, trying to crank up the gamma and contrast on laptops, unsuccessfully.
• I couldn’t make out individual pixels, no matter how close I pressed to the screen.

I don’t understand why in the world of Windows laptops there isn’t even anything remotely similar? I’ve seen laptops with AMOLED matrices, even they lose to this.

The Notch on the Screen

The notch on the screen is definitely a unique innovation, and it’s simple and genius. Believe me, soon all laptops will have a notch, but it’s most useful specifically on Macs. Checkmate, Xiaomi and other knockoff makers.

• It gives huge bonus screen space with almost no loss for production (relatively, for example, attempts to reduce bezels, which exponentially add to the price).
• To the left of the notch sits the divine global Mac menu (File, Edit, Help…) - which, by the way, I always used on Linux.
• To the right of the notch sits content similar to the taskbar in Windows - tray, clock, icons, settings.
• As a result, the center is never occupied by anything and so far not a single application has gone behind the notch to the left or right.
• The notch disappears in full-screen mode, and thus:
  • You have a normal screen resolution, not a non-standard one, which would lead to strange program behavior or loss of free space
  • Due to the deep black colors on the display, the notch doesn’t stand out at all and it seems to you that the display has changed its shape and become “normal”

Subjectively, I never notice the notch and it has never bothered me once, but I have + free space on the screen, which I already have tons of. You can fully work on a 16” screen like on a huge monitor and not experience problems with free space. This also needs to take into account that I set fonts and zoom to 25% smaller than usual, because the picture is sharp, bright and clear. My inner perfectionist experiences permanent bliss when I have narrow laconic top bars in applications, nothing unnecessary, everything in its place, and windows pleasantly fill the entire screen with their content, while I see everything I need with a quick glance at the top edge of the screen, which increases productivity.

Speakers

These speakers sound better than my OnePlus headphones.

• They have clean and crisp bass (this is a laptop, Carl, what kind of bass could there be). The bass isn’t too strong, but its softness gives very pleasant sensations when playing music, which compensates for the laptop-ness of the speakers.
• Listening to any content is pleasant, in quality just like on my audio system with a subwoofer and a bunch of wires.
• In volume they’re probably 1.5 times louder than I’ll ever need in life.
• Sound is well distributed directionally, so stereo content is clearly heard.
• This level of sound comes from two small grilles on the edges of the laptop. I thought this was physically impossible before.

Keyboard and Trackpad

• I can’t understand what’s so special about this trackpad - maybe it’s the size (2 times bigger than average for a Windows laptop), maybe the gestures, maybe the high precision and fine-tuned cursor acceleration, but for some reason I switched from a mouse to a trackpad. Just now I worked all week away from home, without access to my workstation, I had a cheap portable flat mouse with me, it’s normal, but I didn’t use it. Switched completely to the trackpad. Those who know me know that I hate trackpads and can’t work with them.
• One thing I can identify right away - it’s cool and pleasant to slide your finger on it, better than I’ve encountered before.
• By the way, “Force Touch” when you can click on the trackpad with 3 different force levels, in my humble opinion - is bullshit. Few applications support it, and it feels very strange and it’s easy to miss the right “force”. I’m declaring it a marketing gimmick and a trinket.
• The scroll on a mouse is terrible. As expected, on Mac most programs aren’t adapted for smooth scrolling and there’s no scroll acceleration. But on the trackpad it’s pixel-perfect and with acceleration. And it works everywhere, not like on Windows and Linux.
• I’ll also throw in Touch ID here. An optional thing, but I liked the fingerprint scanner in the keyboard. I think if it wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be offended. Also a trinket. What probably ruins it is that it’s not supported after reboot and only about half of applications support it. For the rest you still enter a password.

Keyboard

The keyboard is very bad, as I said, but there are some cool moments:

• Tiny distance around the keys (to the keyboard chassis, the “groove”) - skin, hair and other nastiness barely get in there. Thank god, because I’ve never dared to clean a laptop keyboard once in my life.
• The keyboard is black - personal respect from me.
• Cool FN keys, of which very useful are Search, Mission Control (Parachute) and Do Not Disturb.
• Wide Escape. Now in Vim pressing it has become more convenient and you don’t need to remap it to Caps. And in principle it’s an important key, good thing there’s no touch bar, I wouldn’t have bought it then, because there Escape is on the touch bar.
• No NumPad - and the hell with it. Respect from a touch typist. Thanks to it, the distance between keys and their size are perfect.
• Backlight is single-color, not gamer-like, and quite pleasant. Turns off by itself if you configure it. Interestingly, you can’t adjust its brightness from the keyboard (FN) - which is correct, how would I find the button to adjust keyboard backlight on a keyboard without backlight?

There’s nothing more to say about the laptop’s exterior - everything else is as expected from any normal laptop.

Performance

Unreal somehow. This is truly extraordinary.

• I looked at benchmarks - this laptop destroys $12,000 Intel iMacs and any Windows PCs for that matter. This is a laptop, Carl!
• It doesn’t even strain with any tasks I performed. When building two projects simultaneously with 1,000,000 lines of code? Doesn’t care, doesn’t even start the fans. Two IDEs open, video chats and calls, 20 programs, 30 Chrome tabs, video/music playing? Doesn’t care, fans don’t start, no lags, nothing at all. Watching 4K 60fps HDR video from YouTube? Child’s play for this laptop. My Linux at 4K 30fps was already dead.
• In all this time I’ve heard the fans only once, they started up quietly and I only heard them because of the deathly silence at home, when I was building the project several times in a row and running autotests non-stop for about 30 minutes. 30 seconds after finishing the run, the fans stopped. Simply phenomenal. I don’t even know how other companies can compete with this, it’s a complete blowout. My supposedly top-tier AMD Ryzen was huffing and dying at temperatures under 90°C already at the project build stage, without everything else. Sounded like a turbine and couldn’t cope.
• I’m not even talking about the speed of actual work here. I got 2-10x improvements in all code compilation, configuration, and program launch tasks. The only thing I haven’t tested yet is video conversion.
• Only once in all this time did I see a 1-second freeze, and even that was justified by a software bug, not hardware. Overall this laptop never lags at all and won’t for the next 2 years, I think.
• All applications open instantly or subjectively instantly.

Battery

My laptop discharged from 100% to 10% in 9 hours (!!) of heavy use. I managed to use the laptop for two full days before it died.

My tasks included building a huge project, writing code in a heavy IDE, music constantly playing, TickTick and other applications constantly running in the background, VPN working, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Chrome was open, cloud syncing was working, there were video calls. For about 3 hours I watched series, videos, chatted in messengers, rebooted the laptop several times. I didn’t use power saving mode, didn’t fully close applications (some weird state) and screen brightness was around 60-70% on average.

This is definitely the #1 battery life in the world, destroying my Linux with 2-3 hours of battery life in the same mode with almost a 4x advantage. Now I won’t even carry a charger with me.

macOS

macOS is currently the best quality OS on the market in my humble opinion.

Design and Animations

The first thing I noticed - tons of my favorite little features. I always envied beautiful animations, blur, frosted glass effect, rounded corners - here everything is as I like it. Even third-party applications look much cooler than on Windows because of interface consistency and timely updates of key components.

• Any of your actions is accompanied by a pleasant animation tuned in duration and form. Haven’t found anything that glaringly shines with the absence of animation. Moreover, I notice that in many places the entrance animation is absent, but the exit animation is there, which speaks to attention to productivity. This is what I understand - working with style and pleasure. Just what I was looking for - professional-level software for people who are tired of suffering.
• I also really like Apple’s design philosophy - Google with its Material, shadows and surfaces, I don’t really like, Microsoft with its sharp forms and businesslike simplicity - also don’t like. I like blur, round forms, animations and transparency, I don’t need anything else. Here I found what I was looking for.

First Launch and System

• Pleasant and understandable first launch experience with normally working features. Compared to Windows, where a glitchy Cortana tries to tell you to press the “Next” button on an empty screen and 1-5 minute loads after each button press. Similar to mobile devices - there too the first launch process is smoothly set up and goes approximately like this.

Finder (Explorer)

Normal explorer. Finder only bothers me with its icon, everything else in it is quite pleasant. It’s simple, but at the same time powerful enough. The only downside - lack of items for configuring the context menu (for example, open terminal). Also annoying that you can’t open a terminal from the current folder, only if you go up, select the needed folder and then open.

• Really like the tree view of directories.
• Familiar and convenient standard folders from Linux - videos, pictures, music, documents, usr, bin, etc. Only they’re neatly maintained by the system in cleanliness (more or less).
• Necessary operations with permissions and graphical file properties view - like on Windows, only more powerful.
• No trash and crap in the sidebar - everything can be hidden, dragged, removed, added. No ads and weird “quick accesses”, “libraries”, “cloud services” and other Windows junk.
• Color-coding files (tags) - I don’t use this myself, but I think it’s a cool feature. Tag files and folders.
• Powerful preview engine - you can view text files, PDFs, videos, even Photoshop files from the explorer. Really increases productivity, because Photoshop even on M1 loads for about 10 seconds because of its weight.
• Powerful search - not like in Windows. Files are searched by content, name, parameters. Greatly increases productivity. I’m now generally switching to search instead of eternal clicking back and forth through folders.

Installing Applications

• Your applications directory is just a folder where an application has exactly 1 file. Installing applications - you literally drag the file from the disk image into the applications folder. Done.
• Beautiful application menu with adequate organization by folders and screens. And no one tries to shove their extra junk in there. Most of the icons are made at a high level. All operations are animated, even if you quietly deleted an application from the explorer when the menu is open, it will disappear from the list in a couple of seconds with an animation. In the background there’s beautiful blur.

Automation

Huge automation possibilities. This is the #1 factor in increasing productivity and a giant plus. Nowhere, even on Linux, have I seen anything like this. There even if you write 1000 lines of code, you’re unlikely to get the same script as on Mac done by dragging with a mouse.

I’ll give an example: I set up a “Work Mode” script for myself, which runs automatically by time, manually, with a key combination or even by voice through Siri. Here’s what it does:

• Requests a code number from the two-factor authentication application
• Runs a simple .sh-script with this code as a parameter, which connects me to VPN through a third-party program
• Turns on “Do Not Disturb” mode with selected applications for work, giving me the option to choose when to turn it off
• Sets brightness to 85%
• Opens Spotify, Slack, Zoom, Calendar, Mail, Chrome and IDE
• All unnecessary applications are minimized
• In Spotify the last playlist starts playing
• Sound volume is set to 10%
• Starts a new pomodoro timer in TickTick
• Opens the work tabs I need in Chrome

There’s also a program called “Automator”, which apparently is a more advanced version of shortcuts. I haven’t even gotten to it yet, because upon opening there are hundreds and hundreds of possibilities, which are even excessive for me. Each script can be made into an application or attached to a folder in the explorer, for example. There are no less than 100 possibilities, here you can execute database queries, simulate clicks, burn disks and convert files - insane.

Additional Pros

Finally, I’ll just dump everything positive that I notice now and for which I thank the laptop every day, things that make me happy:

Peripherals and Connections

• Professional mouse connected to Mac instantly and forever both through dongle and through Bluetooth. The mouse when turned on in less than 1 second via Bluetooth connects to Mac. On Linux I remember having to periodically turn off Bluetooth, turn it on, start searching, unbind the mouse, bind it, and when it wasn’t needed, the delay was about 5-10 seconds.
• Cheap mouse from Aliexpress connected exactly the same way, doesn’t drop, doesn’t glitch, works like clockwork and connects automatically.
• Wi-Fi turns on in 1 second and searches for networks as it should, without a 30-second delay when I try to connect to mobile internet.
• Working keyboard and mouse drivers with system integration.

Applications

• Native TickTick application - can’t compare with Windows and especially the web version (which I had to use on Linux):
  • System integration
  • Automation
  • Pomodoro
  • Icon in status bar
  • Global hotkeys
  • Notifications
  • Beautiful interface
  • Perfect performance
  • Animations
• Working Zoom with filters, blur, no noise, high quality video.
• Native Telegram client, all animated and with features, which looks simply divine.
• Cool terminal like on Linux with zsh out of the box. Installed Powerlevel10k and Homebrew package manager, similar to yay / pacman. And with blur in the background.
• VPN works through 1 script / 3 clicks - no dancing with a tambourine, bugs and stable.
• Slack client doesn’t glitch and works well.
• Awesome mail client with aggregation of emails from multiple sources.
• Awesome beautiful calendar with loading and unloading from/to Google, ability to accept meetings and invite guests.
• Downloaded a gorgeous IINA video player - open-source and works gorgeously. I watch YouTube videos and other videos in it.

System Functions

• I’ll mention the global menu again - genius.
• Most powerful search, which I now use instead of explorer, which searches throughout the system - applications, calendar, internet, files, documents, works as a calculator, translator, currency and unit converter. Don’t want a definition of the word “China”, search through the text of all your documents, including books in .fb2 format, song tags and even pictures?
• They respect and value me - the system tells me what it collects about me, analytics can be disabled and viewed. Many features, like search, work exclusively on the device.
• No ads and no one annoys me with requests like “Please please try the best browser Edge”, doesn’t force me to open Safari - the default browser opens even in search, doesn’t force me to use default applications.
• Digital wellbeing - like on a phone, at 8 pm they gently force me to finish working, even giving the option to sit “just one more minute” (only once). Full statistics, behavior is flexibly configured.
• Siri - not dumb like Cortana, but a really working assistant. And no Bing for every question. Although I just checked - system integration isn’t perfect and there’s no support for conversations with multiple phrases.
• Nothing breaks during updates (almost).
• There’s support for Windows file systems (read-only though, but this can be fixed by remounting or software).
• Can’t play games and there are no normal games. Thanks a lot Unix-base, thanks.
• Most applications for Windows are made for Mac, which can’t be said about Linux. Found myself an office, clients for all necessary applications from the phone and analogues of various Windows utilities.