Dongsheng Cai

I must confess that I had low expectation from apple's chip last year, so I bought a macbook pro (september 2020) not long before m1 laptop release, I'm mostly ok with the "pro", my biggest issue is the overheating when I do nothing more than watching youtube.

Then m1 laptop got released in november, the performance goes through the roof. I couldn't resist anymore, so I bought the base model macbook air m1 to replace the "pro", today it's finally delivered.

I followed my note here: setup new macos, it went so well, I was shocked intel based applications just worked out of box. I expected more issues with homebrew, but not really, only major change is updating path, running /opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv shows what you need to do. All packages I need have precompiled binaries, not even need to compile them.

I only use a few must-have gui applications, and they all work really well:

• Chrome
• iTerm 2
• Dropbox
• Hammerspoon
• Itsycal

Some noticeable pros:

• It's really cool and no fan!
• battery life is amazing
• no stupid touch bar
• Instant on when open it
• It runs iPhone apps O_O however not all apps are available
• Connects to external monitor via type-c, and got charged, not sure if it's the same as intel one
• My last Air was the 11 inch one, I always prefer Air's design, but had to choose pro for performance, now with M1 I don't have to compromise anymore

Issues I have so far:

• Screen flickering after disconnecting from 4k monitor
• only two type-c ports, all on left :(
• Cannot connect to my brother printer (MFC-L2710DW)
• hammerspoon couldn't get screen names: issue & PR
• only supports one external monitor
• Fail to build some python packages, for example numpy
• no homebrew pandoc binary for arm yet, need to build from source

I hope next macbook could be even more amazing.