Apple MacBook Pro 2021 M1

10owners with an opinion

67%of verdicts positive

3/0positive/negative since 2024

5 yrslongest happy owner

1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and build quality; criticized for sound.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 5 yearsStill going

I have a 2021 M1 pro and see no reason to upgrade it... ever? I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common. If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI agents, but I'm fine waiting for a good long while on that. I say all this as someone who, five years ago, was a perpetual upgrader: immediately bought new product and got excited for next product. Wonder if the future will see the end of that culture in tech and, looking back, it was a little silly and wasteful anyway. I'm also using an iPhone mini 12 and it's fine.

Likes it

I have a 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro. It's getting a bit old, so it would be nice to replace it with a new MacBook Pro in not too long. But honestly, losing Linux support would be pretty devastating. Docker and virtualization just isn't the same. There's lots of interesting stuff you can do with your hardware in Linux, there's for example Linux-specific software which puts the WiFi card in promiscuous mode and does useful stuff with that. That sort of software doesn't work virtualized. And I have all sorts of issues with loopback devices in Docker in macOS; 'losetup --partscan' doesn't seem to work at all, even in a privileged container. For these sorts of things, having a genuine bare-metal Linux install I can reboot into is invaluable. I wish things had turned out otherwise, and we didn't have to choose between buying a Mac without Linux support and buying a 3-5 year old Mac with Linux support. And I expect that as time goes on, Asahi will just fall further and further behind. I'm not really sure what to do. Maybe this MacBook Pro was just a one-off, and I have to go back to buying Windows laptops and putting Linux on them. But they just aren't as nice.

Likes it

I see this criticism of Apple all the time and it’s completely at odds with my experience. Our family iPad Pro is older than my 8-year old son, and still gets security patches. My wife’s phone is an XS Max, launched in 2018; iOS 26 is the first release that doesn’t support it - it will continue to receive security patches for the foreseeable future. My son’s school laptop is my old 8gb 2020 M1 Air, which continues to have stellar performance and battery life and could run Tahoe if I was crazy enough to want to upgrade it. My work machine is a 2021 M1 Pro that runs just as great as the day I bought it (thanks, Al Dente!). My 3 Apple TV 4Ks are I-have-no-idea-how-old but they are still being updated and just get out of the way like a TV box should. I have no particular love for Apple (or any other company), but they’ve always treated me well as a customer. I can’t really think of another tech co that seems to make people as irrationally angry. Is it their marketing? I hate their marketing too. But their products and support are great.

Likes it

I can confirm that the DAC on the 2021 M1 Macbook Pro is absolutely fantastic. You can also rely on the fantastic quality of the Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapters [0] as "Neutral, clear, clean and very precise. Basically as audibly transparent, good-sounding and clean-sounding to my ears as a device could be...". [0] https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/apple-usb-c-to-3-5-mm-headp...

Neutral

I got a 2021 M1 MacBook Pro a few months ago. Battery life is better than on my previous 2012 MacBook Pro, but not as good as I'd expected. I don't do anything heavy on the computer—browser, Discord (which I know is Electron), Excel, and ssh—and the M1's battery only lasts for about six hours. Can using Chrome as the browser and not Safari make that much of a difference?

Likes it

I have both a gaming laptop running Linux and a 2021 M1 MBP. I prefer developing on the Linux gaming laptop, but anything outside of web browsing and raw development (listening to music, Bluetooth, share audio on video conference, gaming, accounting / office work, etc.) is horrible compared to MBP. The gaming laptop has an RTX 2080, but I play games on the MBP, because Steam works better. I enjoy Steam better on Linux than on Windows, but not enough to waste hours just to relax.

Doesn’t like it

I'm surprised the popping sound doesn't surface much more than that. I recently bought a 2021 M1 Macbook Pro (so a 2K€+ machine) and this popping sound I get when I use the built-in speakers is awful. After Googling around, it seems this issue hits a lot of people and dates back to the first M1 Macs being released (nearly 2 years now) and has still not been properly addressed (and I never found a workaround other than plugging headphones and just not using the speakers). And as you said, Apple seems clueless about it.

Doesn’t like it

OT, also, but has anyone had issues with a "crunchy" sounds from an M1 MBP speakers? Seems to occur on my 2021 M1 during periods of high usage. It's terribly annoying. I've been following this Reddit thread looking for fixes, but no luck on a permanent fix yet. https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookp[]ro/comments/qmpg3k/2021_m...

Doesn’t like it

*Motivation* I wanted to learn about serverless computing and so I built Unofunction, a Python Lambda that wraps LibreOffice’s headless mode and can convert any document format that LibreOffice can import to any document format that LibreOffice can export (e.g. DOCX to PDF). *Implementation* Calling LibreOffice in a Python Lambda required compiling LibreOffice for the Amazon Linux 2 base image (CentOS 7). I originally tried compiling LibreOffice locally (using Docker) on my 2021 M1 MacBook Pro (10 CPU cores) but gave up after a few hours. On an AWS EC2 c6i.8xlarge instance (32 vCPUs, $1.36 per hour in eu-west-2), compiling took ~30 minutes. In case someone else might need a prebuilt headless LibreOffice that has been compiled for Amazon Linux 2, I’ve uploaded the resulting image to https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/unofunction/libreof... A crucial implementation detail is that because AWS Lambda does not permit files to be written, except to the /tmp directory, LibreOffice needs to be called with the argument '-env:UserInstallation=file:///tmp/’. Otherwise, it will attempt user installation in .config/libreoffice and fail. *Thoughts* I enjoyed using the AWS CDK a lot. There is something magical about being able to deploy infrastructure by manipulating it as if it were a Python or a TypeScript object. I preferred it to Terraform’s declarative approach.[1] My only criticisms are that deployment can be extremely slow and that destroying S3 buckets can be clunky (they ne…

Likes it

The MacBook Pro 2021 M1? It is totally something special: 1) The hardware is first class. Everything is back where it should be and improved. You can't get hardware like this anywhere else. 2) It is extremely fast. Nothing ever slows down. I can't figure out anything to throw at this thing that will turn on the fan even. 3) It just works. No drama. This is very valuable if your real value is writing code and not doing sys admin.