The M1 Macbook Pro is Blazing Fast
Photo by Daniel Cañibano on Unsplash

The M1 Macbook Pro is Blazing Fast

On my old 12" Macbook with an m3 core, the slowest part of my workflow was opening Affinity Photo.

Affinity Photo, a faster and more affordable alternative to Photoshop, is my tool of choice for designing book covers, marketing materials, web design assets, and anything else I need for my writing business.

It’s a great piece of software, and I am a raving fan, but opening that thing on an m3 Macbook was slow. I would click to open the program and then pick up my phone to pass the next half a minute. And that’s the blazing fast Affinity Photo. Photoshop, Affinity Photo’s larger (and slower) competitor, would easily take five minutes to load fully on my Macbook.

All in all, the m3 Macbook is not as slow as you would expect an m3 core to be, but it’s still slow. For writing articles or browsing simple websites, it is a fabulous machine, and I still recommend it to writers who are looking for their first writing computer. But for the more complicated parts of my business workflow — designing marketing materials, configuring my website — it showed its limitations.

The M1 MacBook Pro is a world apart.

After fully setting up my M1 MacBook Pro, the first thing I did was open Affinity Photo. It opened in exactly two heartbeats. One heartbeat for the preview screen, one heartbeat for the main photo editor to load. Done.

I gasped so audibly my mother asked me what was wrong.

The initial configuration process for the machine, a process that notoriously takes ten to fifteen minutes, passed in a matter of moments. I barely processed that I was waiting on my new computer to load before it was fully loaded and ready to rock-and-roll. Indexing the entire machine, which normally takes about an hour, took fifteen minutes.
['Megan Holstein']
['Gadgets', 'Tech', 'Digital Life', 'Apple', 'Technology']