Switching to Mac: a user review of the MacBook Pro M1 Pro

All my life I edited photos on Windows. A desktop at home and a heavy gaming laptop for travel that got hot, roared, and lasted two hours on battery. When Apple introduced the MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro chip in 2021, I decided to try it. Here's my user review and my experience of switching to Mac.

Why I switched

• Battery life. On the road I don't always have a socket. Living in a car in New Zealand, that was essential.
• The display. I needed a good display with accurate colours.
• Quiet and cool. No roaring fans during exports.
• SD card and HDMI. The new MacBook Pro brought back the ports I needed as a photographer.

The Liquid Retina XDR display

The 14-inch mini-LED display at 3024 × 1964 is the best I've ever edited on. Sustained brightness up to 1,000 nits and peak HDR up to 1,600 nits, high contrast and the wide P3 colour space. Editing photos of the aurora or the night sky on a display with deep blacks is a joy. And thanks to 120 Hz ProMotion, everything is smooth.

Performance in Lightroom and Photoshop

Lightroom Classic runs natively on Apple Silicon, and the difference from my old laptop was huge. Importing and building previews for hundreds of RAWs from the Canon R5, masking and denoising: all fast and quiet. Exporting panoramas and HDRs, which made the old laptop boil, the MacBook handles without warming up. Editing 4K video in Final Cut Pro is smooth.

Battery on the road

Battery life is the strongest argument. With ordinary work (Lightroom, a browser, e-mail) I get through a whole day. In New Zealand I charged the MacBook in libraries and in the car from a second battery, and never had a problem. More about working from a car in living in a car.

Ports

Three Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C), HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe 3 and a headphone jack. After years of dongles, a relief. I put the SD card from the camera straight into the computer.

Switching from Windows: what was hard

• Keyboard shortcuts. Cmd instead of Ctrl, Home/End behave differently. It took me about two weeks to get used to it.
• File management. Finder is different from Explorer. An app for better window management helped.
• Games and some programs aren't available on Mac.

What I miss

The notch for the webcam bothers me less than I expected. But I miss a touchscreen, and the price of higher configurations (memory and storage) is high. I recommend at least 16 GB of memory and a 1 TB drive: photos fill up space fast.

Verdict

The MacBook Pro M1 Pro changed how I work. It's quiet and fast, lasts all day, and has the best display I've had on a laptop. Switching to Mac was the start of the whole Apple ecosystem I use today.

Pros: the XDR display, battery life, performance, silence, the SD card slot and HDMI. Cons: the price of higher configurations, no upgrades, getting used to macOS.

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