Exceptional laptop
5/5
I'm mainly using this laptop for work, which 90% of the time is general office and web apps. It's overkill for the laptop with these types of tasks. For more "taxing" 2D tasks it doesn’t break a sweat; design, graphing and whiteboards. But with 14 CPU cores, 20 GPU cores and 48GB RAM it'll be future proofed for AI work. I usually keep a laptop for 5 years and although Macs are expensive I know I'll be able to run the latest OS in 5 years and the M-chip will still deliver, so cost is relative.
The 120Hz 16” 1,000 nits screen is fantastic, as expected. No blooming and uniform colour. Apple make exceptional screens. I have it hooked up to an LG 27” monitor that's 5 years old, 1-cable, works flawlessly. Because I've been using an external keyboard and mouse I've hardly used the keyboard and trackpad, but the glass track-pad is best-in-class and feels just like my old MacBook – although it's huge!
The rest of the laptop is Apple's usual industry setting industrial design. Light-up key's have a different tone and get far brighter if you want that. The space grey colour looks pro, but I hope it wears as I've always had silver before, and they've looked like new for years. Humorously the space-grey is not the same space-grey as my phone or monitor – I guess I have a galaxy of greys. Bafflingly the mag-safe charge cable is grey but the power brick is white, eh?! All ports are USB-C/Thunderbolt 5 so I'm gradually moving away from USB-A but will mean I probably have to buy yet another dongle at some point, but there's ports on my monitor so I may be OK – we may finally get to 1 cable for everything.
Finally for the hardware, the sound is impressive with more base than my monitor speakers, apparently there are 6 speaker in there somewhere.
On to MacOS as the laptop is only part of the experience. If you have given all your money to Apple – like I have, by having an iPhone, iPad, and iCloud, the set-up and experience is impressive. Set-up was seamless. After logging-in to iCloud all my calendars, notes, history, and passwords including authentication just worked. The best feature I haven't had before is using my phone from the laptop – receiving a notification for my doorbell that went to my phone appears on my Mac, clicking on it from my Mac opens a window of my phone and opens into the correct app all controlled from my Mac (Apple please extend this to access family devices so we can just fix family devices). Airdrop, copy-paste between anything with continuity just works, it's a joy.
In another month I'll have forgotten the about the cost - this is an exceptional laptop.
Elliot
