We’ve had Apple’s brand new Mac Pro in our office for just over a month, and it’s
clear that it’s a beast of a machine in terms of the overall package that you get…
Great performance, completely silent operation, genius engineering, and a very solid and premium
design.
It’s so good that we’ve realized that the Mac Pro is complete overkill for our workflow,
and that’s the $15,000 model, nowhere near the fully-specced out $53,000 model.
So we got to thinking, what if we compared it to the 2-month old 16” MacBook Pro to
see how much more performance we’re actually getting with the Mac Pro over the MacBook,
which is definitely no slouch.
There’s also one very good feature the new 16” MacBook Pro gets that you literally
cannot get on the Mac Pro, at least not yet, and we’ll talk about that in a minute.
Before we get into performance numbers including various benchmarks like Blender, video editing
in Final Cut Pro, and photo editing in Lightroom, I want to first point out the benefits of
buying each of these Macs.
Let’s start off with why somebody would buy the 16” MacBook Pro.
The biggest reason is portability. Unlike the Mac Pro, you can take the MacBook Pro
anywhere, open it up and get some work done. If the battery starts running low, plug it
in and you’re good to go.
Just like the Mac Pro, you get some Thunderbolt 3 ports which can be used to plug in some
of the fastest accessories and drives available, as well as external monitors like the new
Pro Display XDR.
But even without that, you’re getting a really great 16” display that features 500
nits of brightness and excellent color accuracy for photo and video editing work. Not only
that, but the bezels have finally been slimmed down to look a lot better than before.
You also get a very solid design with the best trackpad you can get on any laptop, as
well as the new magic keyboard that puts the old butterfly keyboard to shame. Add new and
improved speakers and microphones and you get a really solid portable computer.
This is great for basically anyone from a basic user with some extra cash to spare,
to a huge range of entrepreneurs and small business owners who need this MacBook Pro
to do their work and make money.
Now the Mac Pro, on the other hand, is a different beast.
It’s more of a commercial grade computer, that definitely doesn’t give you the best
bang for the buck, but instead gives you top-notch reliability for computing tasks and performance
that you simply can’t get on any other Mac.
While you do pay at least $6,000 for the base model, everything from the RAM, graphics,
storage and even the processor is upgradeable. In fact, we saved over $2000 by upgrading
the RAM ourselves instead of buying it from Apple, and that’s just 192GB instead of
the maximum 1.5TB of RAM.
If you’re interested in upgrading it yourself, check out our do it yourself RAM upgrade guide
at the end of this video.
The ability to upgrade these components makes it a much better deal. In fact, there are
still people using 2010 Mac Pros because they’ve been able to upgrade it over the years, and
that’s why people are willing to pay so much cash for the Mac Pro.
You also get the flexibility of choosing your own display based on the type of work you
need it for, like high-end photo or video editing.
The Mac Pro is very useful for successful small business owners who want the extra tax
write off and great performance, as well as larger businesses and studios who spend more
money on labor than computer hardware.
So with that, let’s get into performance.
Here are the specs and price of both of these Macs, so we can see that the Mac Pro gets
an advantage in basically every area except for the 1TB SSD, but it also gets the Afterburner
card, which greatly helps with ProRes video editing, as you’ll see in a moment.
Starting off with processor performance using Geekbench 5, the Mac Pro’s processor is
about 76% faster in terms of raw multi-core performance, which is a pretty decent jump
in performance seeing as it’s only got four more cores.
Now running Cinebench R20, which is a more realistic test, the Mac Pro is scoring around
66% faster than the MacBook Pro, which can turbo boost up to a higher 5.0GHz instead
of 4.4 on the Mac Pro.
On the other hand, the Mac Pro was completely silent during this test, unlike the MacBook
which started spinning up its fans, and as expected, the Mac Pro is the clear winner
by far.
Now moving onto graphics performance with Geekbench 5’s Metal test, the Mac Pro totally
obliterates the MacBook Pro with close to 3 and a half times the performance.
This is the Mac Pros biggest advantage because you just can’t get this much graphics power
on any other Mac.
Now before we test photo editing in Lightroom Classic, let’s get into video editing with
Final Cut Pro.
The Mac Pro finished the graphics-heavy BruceX test in half the time, 6 seconds versus 12
seconds, which honestly still isn’t bad.
Before one of the recent Final Cut Pro updates, the 16” MacBook Pro used to take a full
20 seconds to finish this test, and the 15” MacBook Pro with the best Vega 20 graphics
took 32 seconds, so the recent updates are greatly benefiting the 16” MacBook.
Now testing 4K stabilization, the Mac Pro was almost twice as fast, but 7 seconds isn’t
too bad for a 20 second clip on the MacBook Pro.
Moving onto exporting a 5 minute h.264 4K clip, which is the format that most youtubers
use, we start to see some different results. The MacBook Pro only takes around 50 seconds
longer than the Mac Pro, which is surprising compared to the rest of the results we were
getting.
This is because the MacBook Pro’s processor has integrated graphics, so it can take advantage
of Intel’s quick sync technology, which greatly speeds up export times for h.264 video.
The Mac Pro is relying purely on raw processing performance, so it’s still really impressive.
Now running the same test but using an 8bit h.265 clip, or HEVC, the MacBook Pro actually
finishes the export 1 second quicker than the Mac Pro!
This is definitely a shocker, and there’s one very important reason for it.
The 16” MacBook Pro features AMD’s brand new Navi-based 7nm graphics technology, which
includes new HEVC hardware encoding that you can’t get on the Mac Pro, at least not yet.
The Mac Pro is soon getting a W5700X graphics option which does have the new Navi technology,
so subscribe right now if you don’t want to miss out on our testing.
But for now, the MacBook Pro finishes this test one second faster for that reason!
Now moving onto a 10bit HEVC export, the Mac Pro finishes over twice as fast as the MacBook
Pro, and that’s because even though the Navi graphics support 10bit HEVC encoding,
it’s actually not enabled yet.
We’re still waiting on Apple to update macOS to support it, and then the MacBook Pro will
actually be quite a bit faster than this Mac Pro for this test.
Now onto the last three tests, which are much heavier tasks, like exporting a 5min 60fps
C200 RAW clip, the MacBook Pro takes over twice as long.
And interestingly, the Mac Pro won’t get any faster because the current Vega encoders
run at a maximum of 60fps, so it literally can’t get faster than 5 minutes, even if
you get the better graphics options.
However, the MacBook Pro is able to play it back at 56FPS, so it’s almost perfectly
smooth, which isn’t too bad of an editing experience if you’re willing to wait longer
for the export.
Now for our 4.5K Red raw export test, the MacBook pro yet again, took over twice as
long to export.
And finally, our 8K Red RAW to UHD export test actually didn’t take that much longer
on the MacBook Pro, but of course, it is over 2 minutes faster on the Mac Pro, and some
people need it to be as fast as possible to save as much time as possible.
With video editing out of the way, let’s finish off with Exporting 500 RAW photos with
effects in Lightroom Classic. In this test, the MacBook Pro took around 2 and a half times
longer, which can be a huge deal for those who edit a ton of photos all the time.
Now all of these tests focused on exporting times, but in reality, the editing smoothness
matters more, and the MacBook Pro can handle most of these tasks very well because of the
new Final Cut updates and Navi graphics
So if you’re okay with waiting longer for exports, the MacBook Pro is definitely the
better choice because it’s obviously much more affordable and it’s also portable,
unlike the Mac Pro.
Now if you absolutely need to save the most amount of time, and you’re okay with paying
more for it, there’s no other option than the Mac Pro.
Overall, we’re really impressed with this year’s 16” MacBook Pro and we’d honestly
say almost everyone should just buy the MacBook Pro, and most people will actually be completely
fine with the base $2400 16” model which is actually $200 off on Amazon right now.
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And if you’re still wondering why the heck anyone would pay $15,000 for a Mac Pro, check
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videos like this one. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you in the next video!