Grade: A+ (average score: 4.6, median score 5, last year: 4.7)
We live in the era of Apple silicon. Last year’s average score, 4.7, was hard to top—and so a little backsliding due to familiarity might not be too surprising. The average slid by a half a point, but it’s still an A+ grade that’s among the highest we’ve seen in the history of this survey.
Tom Bridge said, “The 2021 MacBook Pro [is] the most important product Apple has released since the 2012 MacBook Pro sported the first Retina display on an Apple laptop. Apple has redeemed some poor choices, and built a product that’s suited for the Pro moniker. Great work, Apple.”
John Siracusa said, “Every new Mac Apple introduced in 2021 was a hit. The new MacBook Pros have rescued that product line after years of decline and dysfunction. The multi-colored 24-inch iMac is a breath of fresh air after nearly two decades of white and gray models. Though the transition is not yet complete, all the new and existing Apple silicon Macs are great: quiet, cool, reasonably priced, and fast, fast, fast.”
Shahid Kamal Ahmad said, “Apple’s volte-face on the extreme minimalism of the Ive era not only brought back ports, but exceeded my expectations on every metric. The MacBook Pro is now comfortably the greatest computing device I’ve owned in 40 years and second place isn’t even close. There is not a single weakness. It’s a flawless device and I’m still in awe every time I lift the lid on this portal into a future that other manufacturers are not even awake to, and even as they sleep, could never have had the imagination to even dream of.”
Dan Moren said, “I was super excited for the potential of Apple silicon with the M1’s release, but the M1 Pro and M1 Max have showed us that Apple can scale that performance way up. I’m not sure there’s ever been a better time to be a Mac user.”
Michael E. Cohen said, “I made the transition from a spinning platter Intel iMac to an M1 iMac and I have to say that it was among the least problematic such transitions I’ve ever experienced in my nearly four decades on the Mac platform.”
Brian Mattucci said, “The M1 Pro and M1 Max chips are truly impressive, and I look forward to hopefully seeing them in a top-end Mac Mini this year. The one disappointment is that Macs still lack Face ID.”
Alex Cox said, “For the first time in years I find myself reaching for my MacBook Pro instead of my iPad or iPhone even to do small tasks. Everything about the new MacBook Pro is efficient, from the chips to the placement of the headphone port. I’m finally back to working with my Mac instead of just at my Mac.”
Myke Hurley said, “In the 10 years that I have been covering Apple, this is the most excited I have ever been for the Mac. With the introduction of the iMac and the new MacBook Pro, Apple has truly entered a new era for Mac hardware. I could not be more excited about the future of this platform.”
Gabe Weatherhead said, “It feels like a lot of Apple’s previous obsessions with thinness and battery life are finally paying off with the new MacBook Pro. While it’s still heavy, it’s thin and the battery life is mind-boggling.”
Zac Hall said, “The new MacBook Pro is fantastic, and the starting price makes my M1 MacBook Air seem like a steal!”
Glenn Fleishman said, “God, it’s great for the Mac to be ascendent. The ‘1’ part of the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max make it really clear more numbers are to follow. It’s exciting to have that kind of performance boost to look forward to.”
Rob Griffiths said, “The new Apple silicon 14-inch and 16-inch MBPs are excellent machines, with only one notchable, er, noticeable flaw. The performance of the new CPUs is simply astonishing.”
Marco Arment said, “Apple silicon Macs continue to blow away everything else on the market, including their relatively recent Intel predecessors. The hardware is so incredibly good this year, and the architecture transition has been so smooth, that I’ll temporarily forgive the minor macOS quality and design issues that perpetually remain.”
Jean MacDonald said, “The new MacBook Pro is fantastic. I love the display, the sound, the build, and the speed. The notch doesn’t bother me a bit; I think I became inured after the iPhone.”
Dr. Drang said, “I spent the 3–4 years before 2021 teaching myself how to work on the iPad. It was a struggle, but I did it because I wasn’t sure Apple would ever make a good laptop again. In February, I got my M1 MacBook Air, and it was like coming home again.”
Josh Centers said, “Apple acts interested in the Mac again. The new MacBook Pro is what professionals have been begging for.”
James Thomson said, “The MacBook Pros feel like a first glimpse of what Apple can do at the high end, as well as listening to what people actually want, and I look forward to seeing more in the year to come. Monterey doesn’t fix many of the interface annoyances with Big Sur, but is at least stable. Shortcuts on the Mac should have shipped as a beta. Saying all that, still one of the best years for the Mac in recent memory.”
John Moltz said, “When Apple announced the M1 Pro it was already a banner year for the Mac. Then a few minutes later it announced the M1 Max. That checked the final box.”
Carolina Milanesi said, “I mean, if 2021 was not a great year for the Mac I am not sure when it was! While the app ecosystem has not come alive as much as I had hoped for, the M1 has really opened up a new opportunity for the Mac, especially in enterprise.”
John Gruber said, “Both the new iMacs and MacBook Pros are fantastic machines: useful, beautiful, and fun. (The iMacs are especially fun because of their colors.) MacOS feels like it’s in very good shape, both in and of itself, and as a peer to iOS for cross-platform features like iCloud integration, widgets, and now even Shortcuts. The Mac version of Shortcuts is a bit rough, which is putting it mildly, but it does work, and even in its rough 1.0 state, Shortcuts for Mac is useful.”
Charles Arthur said, “Finally, with the MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and Max, the answer to everyone’s prayers. The Air, the iMac, the Pro all got what they so richly needed, and that’s more than 80% of all Mac sales right there.”
Benjamin Mayo said, “The new MacBook Pro is so good it makes it easy to forget the mistakes of yesteryear. macOS Monterey was almost a disaster, but the Safari saga was thankfully resolved before the OS shipped.”
Christina Warren said, “Talk about a turnaround! The new 24-inch iMac brings back a sense of fun the Mac hasn’t had for well over a decade. But the real stars of the year were the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, which went back to re-embracing what made Apple laptops great: fantastic keyboards, great screens, MagSafe, usable ports. The software situation for Apple silicon has evolved really well over its first year, but virtualization (as well as Docker or any other containerized environment) is still a bit of a shitshow.”
Rich Mogull said, “This entire transition is one of Apple’s greatest triumphs. I assumed I would have to build a clean M1 Mac, but I easily transferred over all my software and settings from an entirely different architecture without any issues. And let’s be honest, this didn’t always work even between a new and old Intel Mac.”
Most of the criticism that could be found in this category tended to be around the edges of the product line, such as with the lack of an affordable Apple-designed external display, the products yet to have transitions to Apple silicon, and issues with macOS.
Casey Liss said, “I really wish there was a monitor story for non-iMacs in 2021. It’s really despicable that there are no good options for external retina monitors right now. As I write this, the choice is: do you want to be broke, or have an external that is mediocre on its best day? That’s a lose-lose.”
Paul Kafasis said, “Tremendous new Macs—my co-founder Quentin’s post sums up my thinking. But this isn’t a perfect score because of slow updates to the higher-end iMac, and no standalone display for normal people.”
Adam Engst said, “The big hole in Apple’s Mac lineup is an affordable high-resolution display to give the laptops something to connect to and to let iMac users expand to a second large screen.”
Jeff Carlson said, “The Apple silicon transition has been grand, and I say that typing on a new M1 Max MacBook Pro. And then I launch the Music app, and let out a big defeated sigh as it beachballs, stops playing tracks in the middle of a song, and generally disappoints.”
Rich Siegel said, “Many of the ill-conceived UI and visual design decisions that were introduced in Big Sur are still in Monterey, although fortunately things haven’t really gotten much worse. Shortcuts seems like it has potential and the software architecture for application support on macOS appears to be a distinct improvement over its predecessors, although there are still some aspects of the whole Shortcuts experience that make me feel as though it might have been released just a little too soon. Increasing security lockdowns means we have to spend more time explaining to users why things often behave strangely or don’t work at all, and there are bugs that Apple hasn’t fixed yet (or made worse) that have made life harder for the developers of products that I rely on.”
Nick Heer said, “Shortcuts launched in an outright broken state on all platforms, the first versions of Safari 15 were a case study in how not to redesign a critical application, and Monterey’s updater somehow bricked a bunch of T2 Macs. There were memory leaks with Macs running on Apple’s chips, and on all Macs when using accessibility settings with the mouse pointer. Perhaps it is for the best that Universal Control, one of Monterey’s flagship features, was pushed back.”
Stephen Hackett said, “I can’t shake the feeling that — once again — Apple’s software is letting its hardware down. macOS Monterey has been the smoothest-running version of the operating system in several years, but parts of macOS continue to feel outdated, if not outright forgotten by teams who have moved on to other projects. Shortcuts coming to the Mac has been so much fun—however, its buggy rollout highlights the unusual situation the Mac finds itself in. AppKit is clearly not the future, but what is the future? SwiftUI is still rough, and Mac Catalyst seems like it’s just a bridge for iOS developers and not the future of Mac development. I hope Apple sheds some light on its thoughts about this in 2022.”
David Sparks said, “We’re a year into the Apple silicon transition, and I’m still giddy. I’ve been satisfied with Monterey and had no significant problems in terms of OS stability. But that is table stakes. The Mac software stack feels like it is going through a painful technology change, as SwiftUI seems to be the new thing, but is not quite ready to be the new thing. Also, there are still too many native apps on the Mac (Calendar, Contacts, and Mail) that need the Apple Notes treatment.”
Federico Viticci said, “The greatest compliment I can pay to Apple’s renewed approach to the Mac is that, for the first time in a decade, they got an iPad user like myself interested in the Mac again. This isn’t to say I plan on switching from the iPad Pro as my primary computer; however, the speed, battery life, incredible performance, and fantastic display of the new MacBook Pro is helping me rediscover the Mac in a way I didn’t think possible a few years ago. Compared to when I left the Mac years ago, the platform I found is one where there’s greater parity of features and apps with iOS and iPadOS, which allows me to seamlessly switch between working on the iPad and Mac without feeling like I have to learn a new idiom or reset my expectations every time. The most important app that I can now access on the Mac is, unsurprisingly, Shortcuts. I’m thrilled by the arrival of Shortcuts on macOS and Apple’s commitment to it as the future of automation, but the first version of the app is also a symptom of larger problems underlying macOS: software quality of apps and limitations of SwiftUI. I understand the desire to ‘start fresh’ with a new Shortcuts app for Mac by also rewriting the whole thing in SwiftUI, but that technical decision resulted in a plethora of bugs that continue to affect the app on all platforms for new and existing users – including those who had no issues whatsoever with Shortcuts in iOS 14. It’s almost as if launching Shortcuts on the Mac made the app worse than before for everyone else. I hope this story of ‘dogfooding‘ serves as a wake-up call at Apple about the longstanding problems and limits of SwiftUI.”
Guilherme Rambo said, “I think there’s still a lot of work to be done on Mac software. I’ve had numerous issues with macOS Monterey, especially related to Bluetooth, which keeps breaking with every major OS update. Not to mention the awful state of the Shortcuts app, which has been improving with the new point releases, but is still far from what I would call production-quality.”