I am passing on the M1x Macbook Pro for now. I just bought a 2019 Macbook Pro 16 instead

After living in the M1 world for nearly a year now, I could never shake the feeling that my M1 Air was crippled by the lack of Boot Camp. There are Windows programs that I use and Games I want to play. Some worked in Parallels, some worked in Crossover, some did not work at all. The whole process of using windows on the M1 is just so cluttered and inefficient right now. The whole advantage of having a Mac for me was that I could move freely between both Windows and macOS with no VMs needed. I do not really care about exporting video 27% faster at the cost of having half of a computer. So on the eve of a new Macbook Pro release, I did the unthinkable and bought a two year old architecture Macbook Pro. I will give the apple silicon a couple of years to bake and hopefully the Boot Camp for ARM will materialize when Windows 11 is ubiquitous.

My iMac 2020 has become my favorite machine of all time and I want it with me when I travel. I was only able to aproximate that on one path, the Macbook Pro 16.

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What a tribute to Apple right there!

Just the fact that someone can say, with a straight face, that their ā€œM1 Air was crippled by the lack of Boot Campā€ or that they had to put up with fabulous battery life and blinding speed ā€œat the cost of having half of a computerā€ because it wouldnā€™t run Windows very well is shocking to me.

Iā€™m glad you figured out what you really wanted, that it was available to you from Apple, and that you were able to buy it. Me? Iā€™m waiting for a Windows machine that runs macOS up to the standards that I require! :rofl:

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my notebook is nearly always plugged in during use and I do not need to run omnifocus, fantastical, or devonthink any faster. so those really are secondary to being able to choose the OS I need at any moment. I am sure people that pay for their shoes by running macOS blazingly fast are happy with the M1.

thatā€™s exactly what I found in the Macbook Pro 16. Itā€™s a Windows machine when I want it to be.

(I see that I should have issued a ā€œhumor alertā€ with my reply.)

So, you bought the wrong thing in a fit of enthusiasm for new and shiny and now you have bought the right thing. Good!

I understood the humor, but just wanted to explain my thinking a little better. As for the M1 Air, it was actually free more or less. I used the trade-in process to dump my my 2017 Macbook Pro back on Apple as I was beginning to have problems with it. The Air was supposed to be a placeholder for the new Macbook Pro and luckily during the past year, it showed me that I donā€™t really want an M1x Macbook Pro yetā€¦

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Funny, i so ready to go the other way. The 16ā€ pro i purchased right when it came out never lived up to its expectation for me. Except for its screen size and quality, it disappoints on speed, stability (bluetooth issues) and battery performance. The machine runs hot quickly and is not particularly fast.

I donā€™t hate it but i donā€™t love it (as i did the 2012 retina notebook i have) either. As soon as anything Mx + 16ā€ display comes out, its mine and this one goes on ebay.

BTW, i run parallels on the notebook also. Parallels version 14 on big sur isnā€™t as stable/capable as it was years ago it seems - not sure if that is parallels or macos or both.

wow. whats your workflow or main use for it?

I have been running Parallels 17 since the tech preview, and I have been really happy with the performance on the M1 for Windows apps. The games I like are just not doable right now.

Software/firmware/hardware development is my main one. This often means I have Xcode open along with a firmware development environment (usually code composer studio from TI), VSCode for the python tools/utilities I run and a hardware design CAD program. Often have Safari with a bunch of tabs open for research on components, code snippets etc. Sometimes I have modeling software running at the same time. It sounds like a lot of stuff and it would be if Iā€™d be cramped on RAM but with 32G I am not generally running out of memory.

I do some UX design also, this is usually a combo of Affinity software, omnigraffle, sketch etc. Again, screen can look pretty busy but shouldnā€™t be a big deal.

Lastly, I have a few data analysis projects which require python, spreadsheets, and a bunch of specialized tools around the problem at hand.

Biggest annoyance I have is that Bluetooth can be jittery losing connection to the mouse often for days only to be rock solid for weeks after and then unexpectedly failing again.

Yeah, it can be busy on the screen but I donā€™t feel I am totally pushing it. My son has an M1 air and also does some firmware/hardware development. Nothing he throws at that machine seem to bother it and its battery just goes and goes and goes, no lap/leg heating either.

Correction on that Parallels version; I am running 16. When I first started with Parallels it was version 10 I think - with Windows 7. I still have that combo on the 2012 retina and it is very workable. Parallels 16 on Big Sur running W10 is horrible, Ubuntu is quite nice and a VM with Big Sur (for testing) ridiculously slow.

If it was for work, I may have leaned away from the 2019, but as my personal/play/travel machine, it seems to be the best fit right now.

Funny I can say almost the same of my late-2018 15ā€™ā€™ MBP. Compared to an ageing 2013 work MBP it was almost the same in terms of speed, and even the ancient mid-2010 MBP that it replaced was more expandable and stable. Itā€™s not bad, but itā€™s not great.

2016-2018 Macbook Pros were abominiations. I was so happy to swap my 2017 for an M1 Air last year.

I have just cut the chord with my last Intel device selling my beloved 5k iMac and replacing it with an M1 iMac, such a great decision. I found my intel machines so clunky after getting my M1 Mac mini in the office. I canā€™t imagine going the other way, despite how powerful the intel device might be/

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I can understand that if you donā€™t really play games. My 2020 iMac is now my ā€œgotoā€ machine for anything. It replaced my gaming pc and I definitely prefer the iMac for anything macOS related. Since my M1 Air cannot do reliable PC gaming, I find very little reason to take it on trips over my M1 iPad Pro unless I need to use adobe and lumafusion is beginning to replace that for me on the road.

I have an M1 Air and a 2019 16" MBP (64GB RAM) and I love them both. For ā€œseriousā€ work, the M1 machines just donā€™t have the RAM, GPU, or multiple display support that I need, but for everyday work and travel, I absolutely love my Air.

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After 1 week, I do not even think about my M1 Air anymore (boxed in the closet, out of sight, out of mind). I took a trip with the MBP16 and it was just awesome. I erred by buying the M1 when I traded in my 2017 MBP last year. Missing boot camp, it just never felt right for me. Despite all of the deserved M1 hype, there is still a place for intel Macs in the world. Thankfully, I came to my senses. :grinning:

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Your thread actually makes me reconsider my choices in that Iā€˜m currently using only Parallels instead of Bootcamp, which is causing some frustrations in day to day usage.

Maybe, the occasional reboot is not as bad as being annoyed by subpar performance for both, the host and guest system plus constant high temperatures. :thinking:

Exactly, and there is no evidence to suggest that it is ever going to get better. In a couple of years maybe it will all sort itself out. But I am not going to wait. playing Sea of Thieves while I travel now makes me so grateful for the MBP16 and I lose nothing on the macOS side by using it.

I also have a 16ā€ MacBook Pro and M1 Air. My reasoning is similar for having both, I need access to Bootcamp and need be able to use an eGPU also. For the type of work I do I need more than 16gb and it blows the M1 out of the water when rendering with a desktop class GPU (4x faster in my tests with Final Cut).

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I had not even considered an eGPU. What are you using?

I use a Blackmagic Pro which is not made anymore. The most popular is the Razer Core X.

You need to choose the card carefully. The best for MacOS is AMD, but theyā€™re hard to get working in Windows. The best for gaming are nVidia, which work flawlessly in Windows, but donā€™t work on iOS.

I only use it for video rendering, not gaming.