For those of you waiting to purchase the latest Macbook Pro, Macbook Air or Mac Mini with the new M1 processor, you can finally pre-order them via the Apple Store. You can also order these units from the local Apple Premium reseller such as Machines or Mac City but you are limited to the base model or the models with a larger SSD (512Gb). If you want to get a unit with 16Gb of system memory (also known as RAM previously), you would need to order those units from Apple.
All of the benchmarks have shown these machines are incredibly capable but expect to have some early teething issue especially when you have applications that run with kernel extensions. If the software owner hasn’t re-compiled the app again to run in the new operating system and architecture, you might encounter some failures.
One good news is that if you are an Adobe Lightroom user, Adobe has updated their Lightroom app to run on these new M1 SOC (System on a Chip) and Photoshop is slated to be available next year.
I can’t wait to get my hands on these machines to test it out, we should be getting a couple of the Macbook Pros with the M1 SOC, hopefully in early January so that we can start testing it.
From a corporate environment, there will definitely be a lot of testing required especially if you have very tight enterprise controls and have to access internal Windows setup which doesn’t use Kerberos authentication methods. Still, if you are considering an MDM, Apple always recommends JAMF.
