“For most people–me included–the speed it brings is over kill. But it’s all about future-proofing”

I’ve had my new MacBook Pro for a couple of months now, so I’m at the point where I feel that I can start to give you some proper “Real World” feedback. I never like to write about kit that’s only a few days old because so often the niggles (and indeed the good things) only start to show once you’ve been using it in anger for an extended period.

Let’s start with the spec of my machine. I maxed this out apart from the SSD. It’s the 16in version, with the M1 Max processor. I went for 64GB of RAM, which was the most on offer, but I stopped at 2TB of storage. Why? Because although the laptop itself wasn’t especially cheap, Apple’s SSD pricing really takes the proverbial. And, with careful use of cloud storage, especially things like Selective Sync in Dropbox and Files On-Demand in OneDrive, you don’t need multiple terabytes of local storage unless you’re editing massive 4K or 8K video files. I’m a fan of both Dropbox and OneDrive, although I know that people love to hate them both for various reasons.

One thing that’s important to note here is that OneDrive has native Apple M1 support, whereas at the time of writing Dropbox doesn’t. That’s okay, though, because the M1 Macs can run Intel Mac software via an emulator called Rosetta 2. Apart from needing to install the emulator the first time you fire up an Intel binary, it’s totally seamless. After that, you