MacBook Pro 14-Inch: 1 Year Later Review

Worth it or is it Trash?

4 min readJan 11

The MacBook Pro is by far one of the best laptops on the market right now. They have a great design, super portable, and amazing power. For those looking for a laptop with some serious power, the MacBook Pro line tend to be very sought after.

Apple released the 14-Inch and 16-Inch MacBook Pro’s just last year, and the biggest selling point of the laptops were the M1 Pro chip and the M1 Max. These chips are insanely powerful, and claim to have desktop performance, but in a laptop.

About a year ago, I picked up the Base Model 14-Inch MacBook Pro which included the M1 Pro chip along with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM.

So far, this Macbook has been one of the best purchases that I have made in a long time. And here’s why.

Why the MacBook Pro? Why not the MacBook Air?

Although the MacBook Air with M1 (The MacBook Air M2 was not out at the time) is an extremely capable laptop, and I believe that it is the perfect laptop out there for most people, however, I didn’t want to risk it. I am a Photographer, and a creator, which means that I spend a lot of time working on my laptop, using many Adobe Creative Cloud apps. I wanted to ensure that I could do multiple, high performing tasks on my laptop, and not have to think twice, or wait a long time for my computer to respond. I wanted something that would fit into my workflow, and ideally, make it faster so that I am able to get my work done faster.

And I made the right choice.

The M1 Pro chip in the MacBook Pro has been able to keep up with me so far. In fact, I am not sure I have even pushed it to its limits all that often. The only time that I have ever heard the fans on this machine turn on was when I was importing thousands of photos into Lightroom at the same time, but it was still able to get the job done, not lose a ton of battery, and I was able to get to work. So owning for the laptop for a year, and only hearing the fan once? I consider that a huge win.