My opinion about last Intel MacBooks is not quiet favourable. For 5 years I was using the MacBook Pro 15″ (2018). The laptop was powerful and smoothly runs everything I wanted like Android Studio or xCode… during first year of using. After a few updates of the OS, problems that were previously minor, now began to disturb my work. The battery time and the temperature of the bottom of the MacBook were unacceptable. The noise from the fans was a problem even with the headphones on. After replacing the battery after some time the Mac started occasionally powered off and that was enough for me. Now I am a lucky owner of brand new MacBook M3 Pro and after one week of working with it, there is a huge improvement comparing to the 2018 model. Some quick pros and cons:
Pros:
- chassis, screen, keyboard, cam – still top quality
- forget about the fan noise or overheating, this MacBook is damn cool and quiet. Didn’t use so pleasant computer so far. Compiling projects in Android Studio and xCode are so quick (2 times faster than before) and most important that the laptop is not even warm. Simulators and emulators of mobile devices start after few seconds
- battery life is astonishing – I just did 8 hours work on it – 3 or 4 hours more than on the 2018 edition with Intel.
- Accidentally I turn on the TIDAL on the internal speakers and I was shocked with the quality of the sound which is clear with a small bass – best speakers in the notebook I used so far.
Cons:
- notch
- no support for VirutalBox on the ARM Apple cpus – tested qemu with utm ended with crashes of the windows 11 vm.
- heavy and bulky, if you look for more mobile laptop, maybe 13″ is better option
My spec is:
- 12 CPU/18 GPU
- 36GB RAM
- 1TB SSD
- Silver
Of course, these are the impressions after a short period of use, let’s hope it will stay like this for a longer than after switching to 2018 edition.