First M1 Macs ship to customers – here are some first impressions

Mac

Apple has started shipping M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini to customers and users have been quick to share their early impressions and benchmark results on the Internet. Here is a selection of some first impressions that we have gathered from various websites like YouTube, Reddit and Twitter.

M1 Chip

First M1 Macs ship to customers

Unboxing videos with YouTube, video editing, Xcode, and thermal impressions

This M1 MacBook Pro unboxing video had a few interesting observations:

  • Even with 25 YouTube videos running at the same time, all videos playback fine, and he was able to do more tasks with the 8GB RAM capacity.
  • It’s not easy to heat up the new M1 MacBook Pro. In the YouTuber’s own words: “Not exaggerating but I was working on editing video and running xcode for a while and the fan does not even turn on yet! I put it on my lap and I couldn’t feel any heat.”

Not a scientific test by any means, but this YouTube video shows that Affinity on M1 MacBook Air launches faster than a MacBook Air with Intel Core i7.

Another video by the same Reddit shows the M1 MacBook Air remaining cool even after heavy workload. Take this with a grain of salt as we don’t know what the ‘heavy workload’ was. We chuckled at one of the YouTube comments which said that even MacBooks are getting COVID-19 temperature checks.

iPad apps on M1 Mac

This Reddit post shows iPad apps running on an M1 MacBook Air:

iPad apps running on M1 MacBook Air from mac

M1 MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM vs iMac Pro with AMD Vega 56 and 128GB RAM

A Chinese photographer from Australia shared his impressions of the M1 MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM vs an iMac Pro with AMD Vega 56 and 128GB RAM. Guess what? The M1 MacBook Pro won multiple tests, as per a MacRumors user who could read his Weibo posts.

Exporting H.264 Sony 10 bit 422 footage with just one rec709 lut takes:

– 11 minutes and 30 seconds on his iMac Pro with Vega 56 and 128gigs of ram.
– 10 minutes and 20 seconds on thenew MacBook Pro with 8gigs of ram took. Wow.

In another test:

30 seconds long H.265 canon 10-bit 422 footage at 100fps takes

– 80 seconds on his iMac Pro but
– only 45 seconds on his new MacBook Pro with ONLY 8 GIGS OF RAM

Here’s one more:

10bit 422 canon h265 8k ipb footage for 30 seconds with one rec709lut.

– 2 min and 47 sec on his iMac Pro vs
– 62 seconds on his MacBook Pro.

Photoshop, VS Code, Safari, iPhone/iPad apps and more on M1 MacBook Air

Here is a Twitter user showing Photoshop running on the M1 MacBook Air using Rosetta 2. He says that the first launch was not slow at all, unlike earlier expectations. He has also been sharing screenshots of apps like VS Code etc running on the Air.

Here are iPhone and iPad app search results in the Mac App Store:

Also, Safari is snappier. For real, this time. The Twitter user says that it’s faster on the M1 MacBook Air, than on the iMac he bought recently.

Cinebench R23 benchmarks

In Cinebench R23 benchmarks, the M1 MacBook Pro outperforms Intel Xeon X5650 and Intel Core i7 7700K. It scored: 1498 in single-core, and 7508 in multi-core. This is ridiculously amazing.

Geekbench Score

In Geekbench, the MacBook Pro scores 1745 in single-core, and 7308 in multi-core. Not a lot of difference compared to MacBook Air, but we doubt anybody is complaining at this point.

M1 MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro vs Mac mini

Here is a comparison of the new M1 MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro vs Mac mini, which compares thermals, app launch performance and more. This is a live video, and still going on at the time of writing.

Read more:

About the Author

Addicted to social media and in love with iPhone, started blogging as a hobby. And now it's my passion for every day is a new learning experience. Hopefully, manufacturers will continue to use innovative solutions and we will keep on letting you know about them.