The M1 Macbook Pro is Blazing Fast

On my old 12" Macbook with an m3 core, the slowest part of my workflow was opening Affinity Photo.

Affinity Photo, a faster and more affordable alternative to Photoshop, is my tool of choice for designing book covers, marketing materials, web design assets, and anything else I need for my writing business.

It’s a great piece of software, and I am a raving fan, but opening that thing on an m3 Macbook was slow. I would click to open the program and then pick up my phone to pass the next half a minute. And that’s the blazing fast Affinity Photo. Photoshop, Affinity Photo’s larger (and slower) competitor, would easily take five minutes to load fully on my Macbook.

All in all, the m3 Macbook is not as slow as you would expect an m3 core to be, but it’s still slow. For writing articles or browsing simple websites, it is a fabulous machine, and I still recommend it to writers who are looking for their first writing computer. But for the more complicated parts of my business workflow — designing marketing materials, configuring my website — it showed its limitations.

The M1 MacBook Pro is a world apart.

After fully setting up my M1 MacBook Pro, the first thing I did was open Affinity Photo. It opened in exactly two heartbeats. One heartbeat for the preview screen, one heartbeat for the main photo editor to load. Done.

I gasped so audibly my mother asked me what was wrong.

The initial configuration process for the machine, a process that notoriously takes ten to fifteen minutes, passed in a matter of moments. I barely processed that I was waiting on my new computer to load before it was fully loaded and ready to rock-and-roll. Indexing the entire machine, which normally takes about an hour, took fifteen minutes.

If you’d asked me a year ago whether a lightning-fast machine would matter for my workflow, I would have said no. Sure, it’s easier to get work done on a faster machine, and you’ll spend less time waiting for things to load, but for a patient freelancer whose budget is thin, it doesn’t really matter.

I still think that, actually. But Apple rolled out their new silicon in the entry-level MacBook Air, a machine who’s list price is only $999, a bargain for an Apple product. For Christ’s sake, there are iPhones that cost more.

Given how blazing fast this machine is, it’s hard to imagine telling someone to get last year’s Macbook Air when this year’s is only slightly more expensive and exponentially faster.

I’m so excited about this computer that I typed this entire article in twenty minutes on it. It’s not hard to come up with things to love about this new MacBook Pro, even though it is basically just the old MacBook Pro with an updated chipset. The updated chipset is just that good.

As excited as I am about this computer, I’m even more excited to see what the future holds.

As Apple proliferates their silicon to the larger MacBook Pros and the rest of their product line and fully transitions their operating system to the M1 infrastructure (and third-party developers follow suit), end user experience is only going to get better.

And then after that, they’ll surely be working on hardware and feature updates for their machines. There’s no reason to carry around big clunky cases and components if Apple can crunch your motherboard to the size of an index card. They make machines that trade off battery life and chip size in favor of tiny, ultra-portable form factors. Or maybe we’ll see exponential improvements in battery life or display quality next. I don’t know. I’m not an engineer. I just know that the M1 chip is the tip of the iceberg.

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