There’s nothing like a new platform to turn things upside-down. And we’d argue that’s what Apple has done with M1. The Mac Studio announcement has inspired many to purchase M1-powered Macs for the first time. We have special advice to mind your Ps and Es, also known as your Performance and Efficiency cores. It’s the bizarre secret of macOS on big.LITTLE.
Which Mac should I buy? The answer is complicated and heavily tied to the characteristics of your workflow. One might think core count, RAM, and storage would be the deciding factors, but our recommendations are very specific and might sound bizarre to some.
Do your most demanding apps run in the background? This is actually the most important question to answer when selecting your M1. This fact has received shockingly little attention, in my opinion. Are we ready to ask unconventional questions?
Observe what happens when I background my 3D render on M1 Pro. After about 30 seconds, the system offloads the task from primarily 8 P cores down to 4 P cores and 2 E cores. Does this matter for you personally? I certainly couldn’t say without meeting you, but this window from the Activity Monitor.app is the only way to see exactly what is happening when the system shifts priority.
This particular type 3D workflow, using Object Capture APIs, is particularly taxing on the previous generation of Intel Macs. On x86, the task brings the entire system to a crawl. Drama, drama, and more drama. The mouse becomes sluggish, scrolling through a web site becomes a chore, and the cursor moves slowly when typing. It’s the sort of intensive process that tells us we need a second machine for another productive task. This was fairly textbook for an intensive workflow.
For this sort of workflow on M1 Pro, we wonder if a single Mac multi-tasker (the regular human variety who only wants a single Mac) could easily be happier with a base M1. While the M1 Pro and M1 Max have only 2 E cores, the base M1 has 4 E cores! Wow, it might just make a positive difference for these background tasks. Is the cheaper Mac actually more ideal?
Ask yourself: Is this my hobby or does it need to be fast? If it’s your hobby, go base M1. If you get paid by the render, M1 Ultra could be your new best friend. Will nerds be able to get their hands on Ultra? I don’t know, but we sure are curious.
We cannot control M1’s (de)prioritization, as far as we can tell. We don’t know how a future OS could change this behavior or how much of it is baked into the SoC. Can it run the entire system off E cores? Is there a magical ultra-low-power mode available in some future build of the OS? As always, we recommend you buy for what it is today and not what we wish it will be. Plan for tomorrow, but acknowledge and understand what it is today. It’s not perfect, but what is?
We still recommend to buy base M1 and M1 Pro. And why is that? Use the money you save from buying base to buy a second Mac. The second can be less powerful and still ideal for basic productivity (e-Mail, web design, browsing, doing your taxes). It’s the big.LITTLE strategy applied to your purchase strategy. One machine performs heavy lifting in foreground and the other performs more casual tasks. And this is advice for the home user, not those traveling light.
But travel is part of the point with M1! As with the mobile phone, ARM-based machines offer tremendous benefit to those on the go. My backgrounded 3D render would still allow for relatively incredible battery life and can stay well-behaved on a busy Zoom call while the render continues to run. Fans are likely to run at 1500 RPMs and that speed is essentially inaudible. Don’t rush the render, but protect the battery and prioritize heavily for the application in the foreground. There’s no lag on the primary task. This is the name of the M1 game. It’s a special thing, especially for those with asynchronous, time-insensitive workflows. We like M1 Pro, but for more casual users, base M1 remains highly practical. Even with 8 GB, we found the M1 perfectly capable for tasks that used to require 16 GB. It’s a stunning feat.
Embrace silent design with insane battery life. For a writer or anyone web-focused, there’s nothing quite like a silent, cool-running Mac.