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Comment by julianbuse | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how this would stack up against my m1 pro equipped mbp 14.

I am waiting on an M1 Pro MBP 16 (I currently have the Intel MBP 16). Although right now I am thinking of cancelling that and ordering a MacBook Air and using that until the M2 Pro chips are released.

I switched to MacBook Air M1 from MBP 16 Intel a month ago, and

a) it still feels weirdly faster then the MBP

b) I can spend 6h outside working from the garden on one charge (running vitejs or react native + metro, plus slack, Spotify etc...)

c) I'm still a bit pissed that I didn't wait a month for the 2nd gen

return it!

Anything you miss from the 16?

I have a M1 Pro 16 as a work machine and a personal M1 Air. The screen on the 16" is much better (higher refresh and brighter)

Having ports on both sides of the machine. I use a usb-c display and need to flip the laptop upside down when docking. Otherwise my cables would get a bit messy or I’d have to rearrange my desk to avoid direct sunlight falling on the main screen.

Tbh, I have barely used the desk since I bought the machine, so we’ll see how much of an annoyance this will become in autumn:)

Do note that supply-chain issues plagued later orders of the M1 Pro/Max MBPs, so I wouldn't be surprised if it would take a decent bit of time to actually get an M2 Pro/Max, even after it actually gets announced in a few more months.

> I am thinking of cancelling that and ordering a MacBook Air

An M1 Pro or Max laptop should still be faster than an M2 Air, and can address a lot more memory (if that's what you ordered).

Is it though? Still remains to be seen. I am considering the 14 inch Macbook Pro with the M1 Pro chip or the M2 Macbook Air.

An M1 Pro starts at 6 CPU P-cores (2 e-cores) and 14 GPU cores at twice the memory bandwidth.

Think about what you do and what you need. I bought an M1 MacBook Air to keep me going until the Apple Silicon 16" Pro, and ended up staying with the Air.

16GB is fine for a typical web dev setup with three Docker containers. When I go out for more than a day I take an external monitor with me, the total package weighs less than a 16" Pro and has way more screen real estate.

Of course there's some people who definitely need the 16" Pro.

Which external monitor do you use if I may ask?

Lenovo M14. The design and hinge is great and the panel is fine, but I actually wouldn't recommend this one as it's 1920x1080 which scales poorly with MacOS. For VSCode or a web browser it's fine though, I just use CMD+(+/-).

Ideally I'd recommend anything with 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 resolution.

It looks like it has more power efficiency, which will matter more for some people than others. They certainly didn't want to trash their previously-flagship laptop processors...

Given that the die size is even bigger, I'd expect them to have even worse thermal issues than the M1 Pros, but only time will tell

The M1 pro is the coolest device I have ever used, not sure what you mean by "even worse"

> worse thermal issues than the M1 Pros

What thermal issues?

What thermal issues? I can build PyTorch with all cores and the fans do spin up, but they are barely audible in a normal environment. When you touch the laptop it's warmer than idle, but not hot at all.

Even worse thermal issues than ... a laptop with no thermal issues and a fan that never even seems to audibly turn on?

The M1 Pros occasionally get hot enough you can hear the fan over a quiet conversation. Are you referring to the previous generation Intel MBPs which routinely maxed out their cooling system and thermal throttled?

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