New MacBook Pro review: Believe the hype, because this is the best Mac you’ve ever been able to buy

There was something faintly silly about Apple’s announcements of its new Macs, something that felt too good to be true. A 20 per cent or 30 per cent gain is nice to talk about, the kind of gain a company should be making between devices if it’s doing well; a 200 or 300 per cent gain is not just showing off, but feels so plainly ridiculous that it must surely not be true.

All those claims that Apple made about its new MacBook Pro – and the M1 chip that powers it, as well as the MacBook Air and MacBook Mini that were revealed at the same time – are decisively true. The computers are definitely silly, but only in the sense that they are ridiculously fast and capable.

Anyway, it’s not really the performance that is the most striking thing about this computer. You expect it to be fast – not least because Apple has spent the last week telling everyone it can just how fast it is.

What you don’t expect is how much it changes the very idea of what performance in a computer means; not how quickly you can do tasks with it, but how you do tasks with it. It’s a profound achievement for a computer that on the outside looks identical to the one it replaces.

The first thing you notice when you take the new MacBook Pro out of the box is that it doesn’t look new at all. From the outside, it’s indistinguishable from the 13-inch MacBook Pro you could buy from Apple last week – and while the design is undeniably a classic, it’s also getting a bit old, and a freshen up on the outside might not have gone amiss.

Even when you turn it on, there’s nothing all that special. Despite the entirely changed chip that’s doing the work, the start-up process is just the same, and you can install all the same apps, on the same operating system.

But then you’ll just, well, keep on doing that. The battery won’t die; you won’t be sent scrambling in the box for a charger. You can try what you like to deplete this machine – watch videos, turn the brightness up, force it to grind through long and onerous tasks – but it doesn’t seem to want to run out of battery.

Like the performance of the rest of the computer, the battery is so good that it changes your relationship with the computer: it’s not only improved, but better to such a degree that it becomes something else. Time spent with the computer unplugged becomes normal and carefree, not anxiously wondering when you might need to plug in, and there’s no need for using the charger to be the default state any more.

Then, when you’ve eventually finished whatever you’re doing, you’ll shut it down again. And perhaps some of the most exciting features happen while it’s shut.

Apple made a big fuss about the fact the new chip allows “instant wake”, and while it can sound a little trivial to describe, the experience is very charming. You probably haven’t realised how long you wait when you open up your laptop, but as soon as that time is gone, it really becomes very clear.

What’s more, while it’s shut, the computer is really working. Opening up your computer for the first time in a few hours doesn’t mean that you’ll be hit by a barrage of message alerts and calendar notifications, because it hasn’t really ever been off, but just asleep.

It’s one of the many features that the MacBook Pro borrows from the iPhones and iPads. And that really is the way to think of this computer: it’s a Mac that has finally learnt the best lessons from its smaller cousins.

It can run their apps, yes, as a result of the shared architecture; the M1 chip that Apple was so excited about is really just a beefed-up version of the A14 that arrived in the iPhone 12 and new iPad Air.

But it’s much more than that, because the new MacBook has all the features that make using phones so easy: pick it up and it’s ready to go, a day’s worth of charge. And even the performance is something like an iPhone: this is a computer that’s so fast that you don’t really need to worry about how fast it is.

If you are worried, though, there’s no reason to be. This computer is astonishingly quick: independent benchmarks suggest that for single-threaded tasks it is faster than any Mac Apple has ever made (apart from the new Mac mini with the same chip), and for multi-threaded ones it can stand its ground against Apple computers many times its price.

Those benchmarks may seem theoretical, but the performance isn’t. Throw a giant image at it in photo-editing tools like Pixelmator, and it will take it in its stride; open up a Logic Pro song with scores of tracks, and there they all are, loaded-in and ready to play with.

In much the same way that you don’t need to worry about the performance of the iPhone, the MacBook will do what you ask of it. Even when it can’t, straight away – if you’re left waiting around for some very long and complicated process to finish – the performance is such that you know it’s coming.

If there are weaknesses in the performance, they’re much the same as the iOS devices, too: the graphics are far from astonishing when compared with the rest of the computer, and many games that you might want to use are not available for the Mac anyway. But that is not a new issue, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this computer is not going to be a replacement for a gaming PC.

The biggest drawback is instead what might be coming in the future. M1 is a low number, and using this computer makes you dream of what might follow it: bigger, even more powerful computers, MacBooks that finally get an external redesign that’s as profound as the one that has happened on the inside.

But whether or not even better ones come in the future, this, for now, is the best Mac Apple has ever made. It is the conclusion of a number of processes – new and old, within the Mac and outside of it – which have coalesced together to make a stunning piece of hardware.

It’s so screamingly fast that using it is a joy. But it’s so competent, able and thoughtfully designed in (almost) every other way that, in the best sense, you might forget how fast it even is.