Hello (New) World! — Living With and Developing On Apple Silicon M1

Two days after Apple started selling the new Apple Silicon M1 Macs in their stores, I threw my nearly two-year-old 2019 MacBook Air and its charger into my backpack and marched to my nearest premium reseller* to embark on an exciting and only moderately expensive journey into the slightly unknown.

After a slightly awkward dialog at the shop where I had to clear up whether I was looking for “training” or “trade-in” (masks have a huge detrimental effect on accessibility, but not many talk about it), out I walked five minutes later with a brand new MacBook Pro 13" with Apple Silicon M1 under the hood. For brevity I’ll keep referring to it as Pro M1 (and yes, I know this article won’t age well).

Trade-ins can be awesome!

I think the first important point I have to make in hopping on the M1 bandwagon, is that I might have not done it, have I not had the option to trade in an existing device. In Ireland — to my knowledge — trade-in options that offered more than just the usual Apple peanuts recycle value, have not existed before, so I was excited just by the mere fact of experiencing handing over something old for something new.

I was very curious to find out what gets inspected on the old device, how quick the process was and how the…