2020 macbook review
Looking at the new MacBook pro that Apple has launch this year, it has become evident apple has suddenly become the dominant competitor in the laptop market. Apple has managed to create the most compelling laptop in 2020, with excellent build quality, excellent software support, and performance that is unrivalled in its class.
To start off, apple has kept the same high-end build quality they are known well for. It is built on a CNC milled aluminum chassis, which gives the machine extremely good structural integrity. Apple has also kept the popular thin and light design that they are leading in, with the laptop coming in at on <0.61 inches><<apple>> in thickness, and only <3> <<apple>> pounds. Apple has also completely resolved the thermal and noise situation that plagued the prior generation of this machine, it is now totally dead silent, and no longer has any issues with performance degradation after short periods of time that were caused by heat buildup.
More importantly, and the crux of the matter, apple shook the tech world when they announced what is powering this chip. They decided to move from intel’s stalled processor production to their own in-house SOC. Once more, they have managed to build a laptop SOC that manages to match or beat many mainstream desktop processors in raw performance < multithread Geekbench 7461 vs 6111 for intel i7-1185G7, and for real world workloads, such as data compression, it beat everything ><<arstechnica>> . Incredibly, they managed to do this while keeping the power envelope for the chip at 15 watts <cite>, which gives them currently the best performance per watt of any vendor by quite a wide margin. This has all led to an amazing amount of stamina out of an ultralight class machine. Apple claims that the machine can approach 20 hours of runtime <cite apple>, and this has been proven to be pessimistic on the part of apple, as third party reviews have shown this figure can be easily be beat with this product, depending on what workload is being done. Most vendors must seriously compromise performance to achieve these stamina figures in an ultralight, while apple has not had to.
Apple has also done well for itself in the software support arena. With apple moving to its own SOC, this has necessitated an architecture switch from X86 to ARM, which normally breaks compatibility with most applications. Apple has responded to this by creating a userspace translator called Rosetta, which restores compatibility with most applications that do not require access deep into the system internals. Incredibly, they managed to do this while only sustaining a 25% performance impact <cite petapixel>, which when starting out with the performance of the new SOC, means that emulating the applications run faster on the new SOC in many cases than the intel CPU they were designed for. Additionally, since the new macs are on arm, they can natively run many applications that were designed for apple’s other platforms based on ARM, namely the iPhone and iPad <cite developer.apple>. This opens an enormous array of applications on the mac that were previously impossible to run. They also did this without bringing in many of the limitations to the IOS platform that runs those apps, namely the lack of administrative access and locked bootloader. It is still possible to have deep access to the system, which allows fine-grained modification and control of every aspect of the system.
As the saying does however, there is not good without a helping of bad. Apple still has issues with the stability of It’s LDAP binding. There are many reports of this to apple, and having reproduced the issue on MacOS 11.0.1, it is disappointing to see, and limits the uses in larger organizations. Also, despite the system bootloader being unlocked, Apple has discontinued its “bootcamp” feature that supported alternative operating systems from installing. Hopefully apple changes direction on this, as a major use-case of the mac platform has been cross platform development. Another drawback is that apple has been using the same 720P webcams for the last decade. One would think that would have been a place for additional upgrades, especially since it would have been a major selling point during the COVID pandemic when this feature is in the forefront of many people’s minds. Another rather annoying bug can be found with the default web browser for MacOS, safari. There is an issue with the autosave password feature locking up the browser after logging into many sites. It is unknown how widespread this issue is, however.
In conclusion, Apple has created an extremely compelling product, despite some of the drawbacks that Apple needs to address. Its new SOC enables many new features and a massive performance increase. It has the best stamina in its class, without sacrificing performance like many of its other competitors. Lastly, it still retains the solid build of the prior generations, which was already a at high standard.
Sources
https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ accessed 12.9.2020
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-apple-m1-a-seriously-fast-x86-competitor/
https://petapixel.com/2020/12/08/benchmarking-performance-lightroom-on-m1-vs-rosetta-2-vs-intel/
https://developer.apple.com/macos/iphone-and-ipad-apps/