Apple is moving full steam ahead with their transition away from Intel and onto their own custom chips: M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max. How is the transition going, and are any of these Apple Silicon Macs a good fit for your law firm?
Let’s just get this out of the way right up front: YES, the M1 Macs are a fantastic option for your law firm – with a couple of tiny caveats. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Advantages of M1 Macs
Apple moving to their own in-house chips has brought some shocking advantages. Not only are these computers blazing fast, they are also incredibly power efficient. For laptops, that means longer lasting battery life. Way longer. Like 12 or more hours of actual heavy usage. For desktops, this means lower power costs.
The MacBook Air is an insane value right now. It has unheard of battery life, it’s incredibly fast, and it doesn’t even have a fan. You’ll appreciate that if you’re in a meeting room or on a conference call. The machine is literally dead silent.
Just how fast is the M1 MacBook Air? We’ve been using it as a main development and design machine for over a year, and it feels even faster than our iMac Pros. The only time they are slower is with high-end graphics processes. But as long as you’re not editing 4K video or rendering the next Pixar animated movie, you won’t notice or care.
Can the M1 chip do everything you need for your law firm? Absolutely. It doesn’t even break a sweat with heavy email and web browsing, editing large documents, or running billing and accounting software.
What About Compatibility?
Many people are concerned about compatibility with their existing apps. They needn’t worry. M1 Macs come with a built-in “compatibility mode” called Rosetta. It lets you run Intel applications that haven’t been optimized for M1 chips yet.
Not only do all of your Intel apps work fine with Rosetta, they are often even faster than running them on actual Intel Macs. The bottom line is everything will just work, and you won’t even notice Rosetta. Things will just feel much faster.
What About Those Caveats?
M1 Macs no longer support Boot Camp – so if you’re booting into Windows for any reason, that will no longer work. You can still run Windows using other methods, such as Parallels.
You’ll also want to check with your printer and scanner manufacturer to ensure they support M1 Macs. They absolutely should — you might have more of an issue making sure they support macOS Monterey.
And finally, if you rely on any other highly specialized and possibly out-of-date hardware or software, make sure to check with them for any compatibility concerns as well.
TimeNet Law is fully compatible with macOS Monterey and all M1 Macs.
Which M1 Should I Get?
We do not recommend the 13″ M1 MacBook Pro. It offers essentially no advantages over the 13″ MacBook Air, and the Air is cheaper, has a better keyboard configuration (with actual function keys instead of the TouchBar, which is now no longer an option in new Apple laptops), and is lighter and easier to transport.
We also do not recommend the new M1 Pro or M1 Max MacBook Pros, unless having a 14″ or 16″ screen is absolutely critical for you, or you can’t live without a built-in HDMI and/or SD Card slot. If so, then get the base M1 Pro, not the Max. The main difference there is graphics performance, so you likely won’t need it. The base M1 Pro is more than enough for all of your day-to-day tasks.
On any M1 or M1 Pro Mac, we highly recommend 32GB of RAM minimum. You may be dealing with a lot of documents and websites at once, and having the extra RAM will really make a difference. It will also help future-proof your computer, so that it remains highly usable for many years to come.
The only other thing to consider is hard drive space. 1 or 2 TB should be a great option, but you can double-check what you’re using now on your current Mac, and make sure to give yourself some extra room on top of that.
The Bottom Line
Apple’s new M1 chips are insanely great, and there’s never been a better time to switch to a Mac, or upgrade your existing Mac. The transition really is seamless. We have been incredibly impressed with performance, heat & fan noise (there’s basically none), Rosetta’s compatibility mode, and the overall quality of these new M1 Macs.
If you’re on the fence, now is the time to jump. They really are that good.
Invoice Themes
Invoice Architect
