More ports are almost certainly coming to future iterations of the M(x) processor as Apple Silicon is developed further.īeyond the lack of ports, the computer is identical to its predecessor. This might be a deal-breaker for some, but if it is, all you have to do is wait. The only thing setting these two computers apart on the outside is the Thunderbolt 3 ports: the top-end Intel Macs still come with 4 ports, while the new Apple Silicon Macs feature only two 1. Same chassis, same keyboard, same trackpad, same fingerprint sensor, same webcam (sigh), same Touch Bar (meh), no SD card slot (ugh). On the outside, there is almost nothing to distinguish an M1 MacBook Pro from the 13-inch Intel-based machine we reviewed earlier this year. If I were recommending a configuration for photographers, I’d tell you to get this same computer with only 1TB of built-in storage instead of 2, which brings the total price down to $1,900.

That extra 1TB of hard drive space adds a lot to the price.

ML Processor: 16-core M1 Neural Engine.

The nonsense YouTube kids that post clickbait around this need to stop. This concept that we all should micromanage our swap, or that using it is bad, needs to die. It turns out that loading an entire program / an entire program’s dataset into memory, all at once, can sometimes be incredibly inefficient, and it’s far smarter to page it out to disk when you don’t need to access all of it. In a machine with an MMU (almost every machine since the 386DX) that’s exactly what you want to happen - so you can run stuff that can page parts of itself out of memory when required, all controlled by the OS, and all protected by the OS into a kernel layer and a userland layer. Every modern OS (looking at Linux & Friends, Windows NT+, and modern MacOS) all have swap files and use them routinely. VM, swap, page files, page activity, and using the machine as Apple designed it is not a bad thing. Oh, and MacOS until OSX was limiting too, with swap, but no real protected memory + preemptive multitasking. The last OS that I can remember that simply couldn’t do this was AmigaOS from 1986 or so, and while it was incredible in some things (fast multitasking, for what little fit in memory) it had massive limitations (memory limits, no memory protection being key items) that go part and parcel with swap. If your argument is “If my OS didn’t swap, I’d have less wear and tear on my drives!”, well, I suppose in some conceptual way that’s true, but you’d have a far weaker OS, unable to flex as memory demands ebb and flow, which would be incredibly limiting in many common situations. We don’t buy it to let it sit on a shelf.

I feel like you are really, really throwing a word salad around here.Īn OS can’t “abuse” swap, any more than booting up a drive (or using a HDD to write data) “abuses” it.

M1 macbook air lightroom classic