Equipment: M1 macbook pro 13 inch screen, 256GB storage, 16GB ram circa 2020.

What makes it great? It never gets hot, battery lasts a really long time and it is fast even 4.5 years after being released.

Sure the later versions of the macbooks are faster and better, however after using laptops since there inception this is by far the best laptop architecture. Its exceedingly capable and the only issues are needing to run x86 virtual machines or wanting to run games that are only x86 capable such as Tiny Glade.

Emulation for x86 mac apps, including games works great but things that require crossfire or a VM just don’t. It is a small price to pay given how much of a leap forward apple silicon macs are to portable computing. Even a used system like mine is still worth getting if you can find one that is inexpensive enough to justify not getting a new M4 based system.

This M1 is used for mainly mundane tasks like wordpress and netflix. However there are times that it powers through video transcoding without issue and searing my legs like old macbooks used to. Running Civ5, because thats the best Civ works great. FFMPEG works great and even my ARM linux VM runs extremely well (Ubuntu running KDE).

The good:

• Amazing performance
• Amazing battery life
• Doesn’t get hot and hardly ever spins the fans
• Great screen, touch pad and keyboard

The bad:

• If I had to find something it would be that I wish there was an other USB C port on the other side of the laptop

Nothing ugly about it…