There has been one common theme in the readers’ emails I’ve been receiving for the past two months or so: people asking for buying advice regarding Apple Silicon Macs. While I intend to respond privately to each and every message, because everyone comes from a different, specific situation, I’ll write here my general take on the matter, one week before the WWDC.

If you want the TL;DR version, there you have it in the title of this piece. The longer answer is a reflection on the current state of things both from a hardware and software standpoint.

Hardware

Since the Intel-to-Apple Silicon transition started, Apple has introduced one new chip, the M1 SoC, and as one would expect from Apple’s history designing their own chips for iPhones and iPads, the M1 delivers an impressive CPU/GPU performance and power efficiency. I just wrote “as one would expect”, but in truth the M1’s performance vastly surpassed everyone’s expectations. 

Currently there are four Apple Silicon Mac models powered by the M1: the 13-inch MacBook Pro, 13-inch MacBook Air, Mac mini and the 24-inch iMac. With the exception of the MacBook Air and entry-level iMac (both lacking 1 GPU core), these Macs all perform in the same excellent way. The models lacking 1 GPU core perform slightly worse but I guess that a regular user won’t really notice the difference.

At the moment, there’s no real performance differentiator between these machines; it’s not like the PowerPC or Intel days when you had, say, two Macs with the same CPU class but different clock speeds, or a different number of CPU cores. The only thing making a difference between one M1 Mac and another is perhaps if you choose a variant with 16 GB of integrated RAM instead of 8. At the moment, the main differentiator between these M1 Macs is their form factor and I/O connections. 

Should you buy one of these Macs now? At this point the transition to Apple Silicon Macs is more or less halfway through, maybe even less than halfway. Apple still has to introduce the second wave of Apple Silicon machines, the prosumer/professional tier. Putting together various rumours, we should expect a 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, a more powerful iMac with a bigger display, a new Mac Pro, and there’s even a more powerful Mac mini on the way. There are also rumours of a new, colourful MacBook (I’m not sure if it’s going to be a redesigned MacBook Air, or if Apple is thinking about reintroducing a laptop that is simply called MacBook, without Air or Pro designations).

All these not-yet-announced Macs, supposedly starting to appear over the next months all the way into next spring (I’m speculating), should all be equipped with a more powerful chip than the M1. 

So, let’s get back to the question, Should you buy one of the current M1 Macs now? Here’s my reasoning:

• Do you currently own an older Intel Mac and you’re getting frustrated by its performance for certain tasks, a pro-level Mac would be overkill for your needs, and you can’t postpone an upgrade anymore? Then get one.
• Do you think a colourful 24-inch iMac is just the right desktop Mac you were waiting for, are satisfied with what it offers and you think its price/performance is just right for you? Go for it.

Otherwise, wait. Even if you’re coming from a Mac mini and find the M1 mini appealing for the performance boost over your Intel mini at a relatively low price, wait for the purported M1X Mac mini. It could offer you even more performance and it may still be an affordable machine.

Wait until the transition to Apple Silicon Macs reaches the next stage. Wait until you’re starting to get a clearer picture. To see what the pro machines offer and at what prices. You will literally make a more informed choice.

Software

Apple Silicon Macs have of course a different architecture than Intel Macs, and even if an Intel Mac and an Apple Silicon Mac running Mac OS Big Sur look identical superficially, behind the scenes things behave differently. 

You should really keep an eye on Howard Oakley’s blog, and I suggest you take the time to check what he has written so far under the M1 Macs category. In Would you regret an M1 Mac?, he writes:

M1 Macs have a complicated security model, quite different from that enforced by the T2 chip, which is difficult enough at times. Although this allows an M1 Mac to boot from an external disk without changing its security settings (in the way that you have to with a T2), recognition and use of external storage for such purposes is continuing to trip M1 users up, particularly when combined with relatively immature Big Sur installers. In recent versions of macOS 11 this hasn’t improved as much as it needs, and now even the NVRAM seems to have become locked down from the system. 

And:

Macs, even those with T2 chips, have always offered the user choices as to how they’re used. Although the most popular is to boot each Mac you use into your account on its internal storage, many prefer to go around with their own bootable system on an external disk. This is ideal for someone who wants the same environment, apps and documents when they’re in the office as when they’re at home.

The good news is that’s now possible using M1 Macs, with some significant cautions in addition to the current limitations over updating bootable Thunderbolt disks.

You probably don’t want to try this with just any M1 Mac, though. Getting your wandering drive to work with a new M1 Mac is quite a fiddle, and not something you’d want to do every time you go into the office. With just two or three different Macs, it appears quite usable within the limitations now imposed by macOS. 

These are just excerpts, make sure you read the article in full. Howard then concludes:

Are M1 Macs ready?

Yes, but you should still tread warily if you need:

• more than 16 GB memory;
• more than two Thunderbolt ports, or to use a dock;
• to boot from an external disk;
• to boot more than one Mac from the same external disk.

My very condensed take is this. Apple Silicon Macs, due to their different architecture, feature a different security model, a different boot structure, a different recovery system in case things go wrong, and despite we’re by now four minor releases into Big Sur, the situation is still a bit rough around the edges. I know we’re in the middle of a transition, but I wish things were somewhat smoother. And I wish Apple outlined these significant changes more clearly for the end user. New customers entering the ecosystem only now and through an M1 Mac won’t care much, as it’s all new territory for them, but users transitioning from Intel Macs should be made more aware of such changes.

In this regard, if you’re a regular user who uses their Mac for everyday tasks, has a minimal backup strategy mainly consisting of Time Machine backups and the occasional manual backup of the most crucial stuff, doesn’t tinker with their machine, and so forth — then the transition from an Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon Mac should be relatively painless. 

Power users, developers, and assorted nerds should get an Apple Silicon Mac if they want, but I would suggest to not get rid of their trusted Intel Mac setup just yet. (I suspect they already know this, I’m just writing it down for completeness). Support for external disks seems to have been fixed in Mac OS 11.4 for M1 Macs, as Howard Oakley explains, but anecdotally I’m still hearing from people with M1 Macs reporting issues with some of their disks, and a friend recently told me via email that while he’s thrilled by the performance of his M1 MacBook Pro, at this moment he would feel uncomfortable if this were his only machine: I always feel that my experience is ‘on rails’ with this Mac, that whenever I want to try something more ‘experimental’ I’m either going to encounter some glitch, bug, or displease the OS in a way or another [winking face emoji].

Again, like we saw at the end of the Hardware section above, unless you’re in bad need of performance and your older Intel Mac is dragging you down, waiting a few more months shouldn’t hurt. At the upcoming WWDC 2021 we’re going to have a preview of the next version of Mac OS, and hopefully Apple has been monitoring all the feedback received about Big Sur, so perhaps later this year you can get an even better Apple Silicon Mac with an even more integrated and functional operating system. (Between you and me, I dearly hope Mac OS 12 is going to be a more ‘technical’ release, aimed at fixing and refining what doesn’t work in Big Sur, otherwise we’ll enter yet another round of ‘new features, new bugs, let the old bugs rot’).

What about me? What am I going to do?

This is what people often ask me when asking for upgrade advice. 

I’m going to do exactly what I’m suggesting in this article — wait. I’ve always avoided the Early Adopter Train during a major Apple transition. I’m what you would call a power user, but for what I do I don’t need the latest and more performant machine, so I can play the waiting game without much hassle.

Whenever I decide it’s time to upgrade, I always aim for a slightly more powerful Mac than I need, because I plan to use such Mac as long as possible as opposed to upgrade frequently. 

I admit I was curious to try an M1 Mac and was initially thinking about purchasing a base M1 Mac mini to use pretty much as a test machine while at the same time having good hardware in case I needed to perform the occasional resource-intensive task. 

Then the 24-inch iMacs were introduced, and for a moment I thought I could go on and just replace my current 2017 21.5‑inch 4K retina iMac. But I’m not a fan of the design compromises Apple has chosen for these iMacs, I still think my current iMac and its assortment of ports are more versatile, and I have the feeling that I will like the new ‘pro’ iMac better anyway.

Then the recent leaks about the design and I/O connections of the purported M1X Mac mini (see my brief thread on Twitter) rekindled my interest in having such a compact and powerful solution in my setup, and at the same time are proving my point; that is better to wait if one can. If I had bought an M1 Mac mini on a whim, I’d certainly have regretted it now.

This stage of Apple’s transition to Apple Silicon Macs is like a very inviting round of starters at a banquet. If you eat too much of them, when the even tastier main courses are brought to the table you’re going to be already full.

Finally, I insist on waiting until more Apple Silicon Macs are introduced (and Apple shows their hand) especially if you’re a budget-conscious customer who can’t afford to upgrade their Mac frequently. You can save the money of an impulse purchase of an M1 Mac now and get a better Mac at a later stage.