MacBook Pro M1

Named Chikorita when I had it, this is now Sam’s MacBook, and should have a good few years in it yet.

• MacBook Pro M1 2020 (the first gen of Apple Silicon)
• 8Gb RAM, 512Gb Storage

Still a very usable machine - I only upgraded because my parents very generously offered to buy me an upgrade - see MacBook Pro M2 Max.

While I never found the M1 CPU as startlingly fast as some said, it was decently fast, and managed to be fast while also being almost silent, and still having good battery life. I didn’t really see how the screen could get any better, but my new one is noticeably better, along with being a bit bigger.

The one thing I got wrong when speccing this up was that I should have upgraded the RAM. 8Gb is fine most of the time, but I’d sometimes find things slowing due to swapping. As long as I took care to close apps I wasn’t using, it was fine. And it did limit what games it could play.