macbook pro
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The M1 Macs are the new software engineer status symbol

Don't have one yet? Time to complain to your manager.

Macbook Pro M1

The new MacBook Pros with Apple chips are the hottest perk at major tech companies.

Photo: Apple

You know you don't work for a top-tier tech company if it hasn't tossed every engineer's laptop in favor of a massive order of the brand-new M1 MacBook Pros.

We're only partially kidding. Shopify, Twitter and Uber are just the latest tech companies to publicly announce that they would be providing the new M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM to their engineers because of the tremendous processing power available on the fully loaded Apple silicon laptops. The newest Pro laptop has so much power that it basically doubles the capability of any other existing laptop — leaving Intel-powered computers totally in the dust — and has all the features and functions Apple users have been begging for for years, including the return of useful ports and the end of the touch bar.

Twitter staff software engineer John Szumski said the new laptops were increasing both top-line performance and improving issues with thermal throttling on Intel laptops. Uber software engineer Mahyar McDonald said that all current engineers and new hires were being upgraded to the new laptops.

"That was a really fun thing to announce. We put in a huge order for Apple Silicon. We are toolmakers here at Shopify. We celebrate and appreciate others who make brilliant tools," Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke wrote Monday morning. Shopify engineers had asked for the new laptops and received news they would be getting them soon after.

Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

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