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14in MacBook Pro M1 Pro: A Year Later – Almost Perfect



I’ve had this M1 Pro base model Macbook pro since it’s day one launch, and its been my main laptop ever since, But now after a year, I think I’ve really figured out what I like about this laptop, what I’ve disliked, and just about everything in-between. Let’s get started with a long term review.

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Affiliate link to product discussed:
Apple M1 Pro 14in MacBook Pro: https://amzn.to/3tOxGFd

Amazon Affiliate Links to Gear I use:
Sony A7S III: https://amzn.to/3jD0fxC
Vanguard Alta Pro 263AB Tripod: https://amzn.to/2O7V8Yn
14in M1 Pro MacBook Pro: https://amzn.to/3RNYXRv
Godox VL150: https://amzn.to/3rA5BjZ
Sennheiser MKH50 Mic: https://amzn.to/3CeRxBk

Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
0:33 The Ports
1:23 Sponsor: Anker
2:53 Ports continued
3:37 How the Body Has Held Up
4:50 User Experience and Performance
8:40 Conclusion

The M1 Pro Macbook since the beginning has been able to handle everything I throw at it. I use it to edit a significant chunk of my videos, I use it to plan out my next videos, I use it to edit YouTube thumbnails, and to do boring stuff we all need to do to survive, like pay bills, create documents and spreadsheets, write emails and do my taxes. All the different ports on the Pro have been absolutely fantastic for my own workflow. For example, if I’m editing a YouTube video, I have a magsafe charger plugged in, an sd card, and an external SSD. Leaving me with 2 usb-c ports still open for use.​​ All these ports fill up when I’m video editing with 2 external monitors but that’s when I’m in “power user” mode.

The body of the laptop itself has held up pretty well, I have only minor scuffs on the lid, the rubber feet and a little around my most frequently used ports. The keyboard builds up finger oils and then starts to look a little shiny, but this is what all macbooks deal with and will get worse overtime. On my other usb-c macbooks, I found that after a while, the usb-c ports become less responsive, maybe because the older macbooks only had 2 usb-c ports for charging, dongles and peripherals so they were always in use, but on this one, they’ve been very consistent.

The notch, while you know it’s there, fades into the background and honestly, I stopped noticing it after a week of owning this thing. The Mini-led pro-motion display is still probably the nicest looking display I have in the entire house. The combination of how bright it gets, the resolution and refresh rate, makes it enjoyable from watching movies, to making videos to just everyday usage, paying your bills, and google sheets never looked so good. And in real-word usage, I never see Mini-LED blooming, since I rarely have the display brightness all the way up to notice. The laptop doesn’t really get warm during general usage, and is normally just room temperature even when I’m using it on my lap. If I’m using it and the laptop is just sitting on the couch, it obviously gets warm but never enough to get the fans reving up. During video editing in FCPX it does get warm but even then I don’t really hear much fan noise coming out of this macbook. Overall, outside of the fanless macbooks, this has been one of the quietest macbooks I’ve owned. Since ownership I don’t think I’ve experienced many instances where I throw something at the macbook pro and it can’t handle it. My time spent between the m1 pro macbook pro and the mac studio is pretty 50/50 but even then, 95% of the things I do on the mac studio, could probably just be done on the macbook pro. This laptop has really been my workhorse and I never felt like I needed more power than what I already have here. For video editing, I’m often editing 2-4 streams of 4k .264 video with light color grading in FCPX, I don’t use any proxies either and it cuts through the raw footage like butter. This has been my favorite on-the-go editing machine. Battery life is good, even after a year, but I find that while asleep the macbook pro doesn’t seem to last anywhere near as long as my old M1 air did and needs to be charged more often if left to sleep for days. It’s a shame that with the transition to Apple silicon, Macs no longer can run windows natively. And that’s definitely affected my habits. Before I would use bootcamp to just store a small windows partition with all the casual windows only games I’d like to play if I’m itching enough to reboot into windows. But The M1 Pro is decent at running windows in a VM but obviously, it’s not perfect and certain software like Genshin just doesn’t run well in a VM.

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