Love it! 
A few more first impressions.
The 96 W power brick is ridiculous. Itâs big, bulky and looks oddly out of proportion. Itâs as if Apple had never heard about GaN. The braided MagSafe cable is nice. Shame Iâll hardly ever be using it.
If you plan on using MA to transfer data you absolutely should try using a TB3 cable. Itâs amazing to see it show peak transfer around ~2 GB/s essentially limited only by the read speed of the source MBPâs SSD. Iâve never seen the actual data migration part run by so quickly. Sustained transfer of ~250 MB/s including tons of small files is a joy to look at.
The new KB feels great. Obviously better than the ~2016 garbage, but also better than the 2020 scissor re-intro. Its sounds great too. Much less clickety-clackety than any previous MBP.
The speakers are awesome. In terms of pure volume, there appears to be much better dynamic range. Quiet is really quiet. Loud is really loud.
The new trackpad is a bit odd to me. Light taps on the upper parts often seem to get missed. Especially ctrl-taps to open a link in a new tab. Have to press much harder. Odd. Maybe it just needs to be broken in. 
Apple stickers came in black. Apple on lid still needs lighting restored. Thereâs now some iPad-esque globe icon on the fn key.
The screen is gorgeous. Crisp and bright and less âwashed out blueishâ compared to my 2020 Intel MBP. Canât say the 120 Hz is something Iâve really noticed so far though.
4 Likes
-
The brick is about the same size as my old 60-watt Apple brick. For travel, I bought a 100W GaN Nekteck charger thatâs only 0.5cm smaller in length and width than the Apple charger. However, it was a lot cheaper.
-
I agree about using a TB3 cable. Remember that if you have a TB3 hub, the cable that you use for connecting it to the host computer can be temporarily repurposed for the transfer.
I forgot to say Appleâs brick is also silly heavy. Iâll be using a much smaller and much lighter 65W GaN from RAVpower for travel for sure. Even back in 2020, it was just $35 on Amazon. I should have gotten several (theyâre no longer on sale because they stupidly tried shenanigans apparently so bad that even an outfit like Amazon threw them out).
Another thing. But I guess this is a Monterey issue. Is there really no more option to show battery percentage in the menu bar next to the battery icon? Or am I just too dense to find it? 
Ravpower is still online - I just bought a travel charger from them a few weeks ago.
Their 100w charger is sold out, though.
I think their âshenanigansâ was including material that offered a coupon if you posted a positive review on Amazon. I can understand why Amazon booted them for that, but it doesnât make their products not worth buying.
I fully agree. Their products are awesome. At the same time, buying good reviews is just scumbag tactics. How little faith do you have in your own product if you think you need to bribe customers?
I experienced this with another seller once and informed Amazon about it. The ultimate result was that they removed my review while the seller was left selling even though I had sent Amazon photos of the fake âAmazon Gift Cardâ in the box and other buyers had reported the same thing. I figure if RAVPower actually got booted for pulling this same stunt by the very same Amazon, they must have really screwed the pooch.
Apple did sort of hide it. The checkbox is in the battery tab of the Control Center section of the Dock and Menu Bar preference. Since, with the notch, menu bar space is tight, I actually use another battery usage app (Fruit Juice) in the menu barâI let the standard battery icon sit (with the percentage) in the Control Center.
2 Likes
Thatâs what I didnât have. I donât have any TB stuff, so I tried using a USB-C to USB-C cable, but it didnât work. Ended up migrating via wifi, which took many hours. But at least it worked well.
I only ran into two hassles. One was BackBlaze, which crazily kills your backups when you migrate to a new machine. Itâs a really convoluted to fix, too, involving uninstalling and reinstalling the entire product. I had to two that twice as the new machine killed the old machineâs backup, so I had to do it on both machines. I think I got the old machine to re-connect to its old backup, so it wonât have to re-upload everything on my slow internet, but it does have to re-index everything and confirm it already has all the files. I guess the answer next time is to uninstall BackBlaze on the original machine first, before migrating it, so the new machine doesnât try and overwrite the old backup. But I do that so rarely I forgot about the BackBlaze problems.
The second issue I had was Rosetta 2 wasnât automatically installed. (No idea why Apple does it that way. I wonder if itâs a licensing thing and Apple pays a license fee for each install?) The weird thing is I was having several problems with Safari crashing on launch, screen zoom not working despite being set correctly in Sys Prefs, and some other apps not working. When I tried to launch an Intel app and got the âInstall Rosetta?â prompt and did so, all the other problems went away! Apparently there were some Intel-dependencies somewhere that were causing other issues. Once Rosetta was running, it fixed those and everything works great now.
1 Like
Itâs the same with Big Sur. I only discovered that just now when reading this thread â before I had only looked in Menu Bar > Battery > Battery Preferences.
Thank you. Never occurred to me to look there. I had been searching the battery sys pref for what seemed like an excessive amount of time.
USB-C will work, but it has to be the right data cable and itâs not trivial to tell these things apart. A simple USB-C PD cable without support for 3.1 will not. But good luck seeing from the outside which is which if you do not recall exactly which cable you purchased with which exact specs.
Another M1 Pro MBP discovery. Battery is awesome. Sure, no surprise there. ButâŚ
Zoomâeven its Apple Silicon incarnationâwill still go through battery like thereâs no tomorrow. A 1-hr video call I was on today went through more than 20%. I would not get beyond 5 hrs of Zoom. I bet $20 Zoom has been hacked together using all kinds of high-level generic stuff with zero regards for lean use of resources. Itâs been behaving that way on Intel and itâs still that way now on AS. 
Checking in with all the other kids in the candy store 
Today my order (M1P/16GB/1TB) placed 10/19 went from âProcessingâ to âPreparing to shipâ. A little jealous of others who ordered the same day and already have shipping notices, but patience is a virtue, right?
1 Like
And another nice find. The internal SSD is pushing 5.6 GB/s. Yep, bytes, not bits. Thatâs more than a factor two over last yearâs Intel MBP. 
So many updates! My order should be arriving today, though I donât see any status updates.
The new posts that struck me most in this thread were these:
(1) The bit about the large charging brick vs the small one. I stuck with the default M1 Pro small one after confirming that the wattage was already greater than the one I have for my late 2013 13-inch MBP. Plus I leave it plugged in all the time and basically only unplug it (or even turn it off) when I go on travel.
(2) The bit about BackBlaze. So what is best to do before my new M1 Pro arrives today?! I also have to change their caching volume location because there was no room for it on my current 512 GB SSD, but there surely will be on my new 2 TB SSD.
Youâll be perfectly fine with the small charger. These new MBPs have much better battery life than the models they replaced so fast charging (for which youâd need the higher wattage charger) is really not something many people will find themselves required to exploit. Plus, slower charging (if you have the time, i.e. over night) is better for your battery anyway.
Hmm⌠For some reason I thought it was going to arrive today (November 6) but itâs showing delivery on November 7. It left Shanghai on November 3rd. Whatâs it doing? Taking the scenic route?
The way BackBlaze works is it creates a name of your backup on their servers (i.e. âMBP Backupâ). When you migrate from that computer to a new one, the new one is targeting the same backup set (âMBP Backupâ). Since the new laptop has new files, BB sees that it doesnât match âMBP Backupâ and âfreezesâ that backup set, which is a pain. Now both computers arenât backing up (theyâre âfrozenâ).
In my case, I am still keeping the old computer around (repurposing), so I want it to continue to back up with BB. If I was selling or getting rid of the old computer, then it wouldnât matter so much. But I didnât want it to have to start a new backup of the old computer from scratch and have to re-upload everything.
So the solution in my case is that I should have uninstalled BB on the old computer so that the new one wouldnât have it installed. Then I could reinstall on both computers, setting the new one up as a new backup set and have the old use use the old backup set.
But again, this only applies if youâre still wanting the old computer to use an existing BackBlaze backup set. If not, then you just migrate BB over to the new machine and use the âinherit backupâ button to tell it to use the old backup (i.e. âMBP Backupâ). Itâll just compare files and upload only the new/changed ones.
In my case I didnât do it right and munged (more or less) my backup sets so BackBlaze is starting over backing up both computers from scratch. Itâll probably take it a few weeks to catch up.
2 Likes
Same here, went from processing to preparing to ship. Ordered a 14" Max 24gpu on the day they were announced. Still giving Nov 16-23 as eta but Iâm hoping it might sneak in a bit earlier.
1 Like
If you backup both computers itâs more expensive, right? Iâm actually not sure what I will be doing with my old computer yet (it wonât run Monterey). But itâs in fine shape though. Maybe have it around for emergencies? It sounds like perhaps inherit backup might work well for me. Iâll have to tell it about the new scratch volume location, and where my Photos library now is of course. Thanks.