The MacBook Pro of 2021
My 14″ “second level base tier” laptop arrived yesterday. It’s solid as a rock. Not that the MacBook Air wasn’t; in many ways that computer feels like the better travel option, especially when it’s a full pound lighter. But this is faster. Snappier, just more alive. More “pro”, for sure, which is amazing because the M1 was absolutely fine. I only felt the slowdown on the MBA when I was pushing it really hard, usually stupid Chrome for web-work, and there was no cooling to help things.
Getting this out of the way: the notch is…weird. Super weird, actually. I didn’t think that it would be so strange, but it is. And there have already been issues with the notch and the menu bar, for me. Namely, that I am someone who utilizes a ton of menu bar items. I put things in the menu bar when the option is there. The big ones for me are 1password, iStat, CleanMyMac X, Sound, and Wifi, but there are many others. I can control all of those functions using something like Alfred, but it’s habit at this point to scoot on over to the top right hand screen and futz with a UI when I need to change sound preferences.
Currently, the notch does indeed hide some of these items. There has been a big deal about the iStat experience and the Notch, and it is kinda ridiculous. The menu items are there, but they are hidden. It’s so strange, I don’t even know yet what the actual UX is supposed to be. Are the items supposed to get smaller and smaller or closer together if you have a ton of menu items? Is this a 3rd party developer thing? Or an Apple thing? I just know that it’s weird, and hope very much that it will be fixed.
Enough of the annoying things. Beyond that, it’s great. Same lovely trackpad, slightly improved keyboard (that was already a dream), the speakers are better, for sure. They made a big deal about this, and I don’t really care because I’m mostly listening from headphones or nice external speakers, but yeah. More bass, more separation. The spacial audio thing is in full effect, and it’s pretty cool, actually. The screen is amazing. I didn’t notice the refresh rate, really, but now that I am remembering that it has a 120hz refresh rate, it makes sense: that would account for the “snappiness” I mentioned above. I love keeping the brightness on half and it’s already about as bright as the MBA. Full brightness is almost obscene.
Oh, the comfort of HDMI! and card reader! And freaking magsafe. Wow. All those things that were so sorely missed. Yes, we bought dongles, and they mostly work fine. But when you can eliminate the middle person…
The 14“-ness of it is also great. I can feel the difference. Websites that could use just a little extra space: the 16/10 ratio—that the 14” provides—are great.
First impressions! Once I get into editing things and building things and using memory-hungry apps like Brave I will have more to say, but for now it’s a very worthy pro upgrade.