I wouldn't get too excited. Have the last gen Intel MBP 16". There is a known issue where after waking the speakers pop loudly and regularly making it unusable for audio. Before that the MBP 15" which had so many parts replaced I thought it was just bad luck. Apples product quality is not what is used to be, far from it in my experience.
I found the MBP 16 Intel version to be the worst macbook they have made. Great screen, but everything else wasn't worth the money.
They also introduced a crazy bug which when you plug in a USBC charging cable you can twig the temperature sensor on the macbook sending the whole CPU to 100% and it was a software issue not a hardware issue. Still not fixed.
I intend to get the nex M1X for the simple reason that it will be better integrated with the mac's and OS. I don't love Apple, but I consider them to make the best laptop so i'll be excited to see what they release on monday.
Quality and flexibility increase tremendously with external devices --- camera, speakers, and/or microphone.
Given the privacy advantages, I'd prefer systems without onbard video or audio capture.
(I'm aware advanced methods can be used to capture some audio signal via, e.g., speakers or device vibrations. I'm looking at risk minimisation / mitigation, not elimination.)
I’m gonna add good webcam and sound to the mix. These are essential for remote work.
I would argue this is almost impossible with a laptop. Even if the webcam could manage to capture a decent resolution, it would almost always be placed at an awkward position relative to your face compared to an external webcam.
External microphones are so far superior to internal ones that once you start noticing it’s all you hear when people talk via their echoey noise-suppressed-via-magic internal microphones.
I get it; I’m nitpicking. But my point I guess is that even good laptops have a lot worse remote conference setups than most people think.
Webcam is rumored to be 1080p. At the price point of a Macbook Pro it should be a 4K webcam. We'll see, maybe the rumors are wrong.
We know how long it takes Apple to upgrade their webcams so we might be stuck with 1080p until 2030.
Didn't film and TV make-up departments infamously have to do more/differently when higher definition cameras started to be used? I'm not sure I want a high resolution webcam...
If the rumours are true, the new M1X MacBook Pros being announced this Monday look perfect:
- high performance + battery life
- exceptional build quality
- great screen, sound, and webcam
- decent port selection