- When the new Macbook Pro was released
there was a lot of humming and hawing
from the creative professional community.
One of the things was that it just didn't have enough power,
people were just kind of disappointed in the new Macbook.
Now, there is a bit of a conspiracy theory
that this then fed into, which is that Apple
is no longer going after the creative professionals
that helped them get their start,
they're aiming more for the middle, for the mainstream.
And when you think about that it kinda makes sense,
I mean their two most popular products,
the iPod and the iPhone were definitely not
for a niche market, they were for everyone.
So, the new Macbook kind of,
in some people's minds at least,
kinda fed fuel to that fire.
Now whether that theory is right or wrong, I have no idea.
But what I do know is that for the first time ever,
I saw my constituents, namely YouTubers
and other video editors, asking publicly on social media
a question that I never really thought
I'd ever see them ask.
What's the Windows equivalent to the new Macbook Pro?
Now I know that most of these people
actually probably ended up with Macbooks anyway,
but the fact that they asked that question publicly
was a very interesting sign to me.
And it got me wondering, just to test it out,
for the same money as the new Macbook Pro,
could I get a Windows equivalent
that I could use as a portable editing machine,
that actually would perform better
at that particular job of editing?
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Before we get started.
I am not doing a complete comparison of these laptops.
That's a whole 'nother thing.
I am simply doing a simple test on a simple task
that I do every day, and can replicate easily
across these laptops for some type of baseline comparison.
And that is to edit footage in Premiere
and then export it and see how long that export time is.
So now this is is not, obviously,
and end-all be-all test to say
this laptop is better than this one.
But I do think that there is something interesting to see
about the power differences when it comes to video editing
in this particular task.
The devices I ended up testing were the latest Surface Book
with Performance Base, the very top model that you can buy
from Microsoft, the latest Macbook Pro,
with the Touch Bar, 15 inch, 2.9 gigahertz,
460 Radeon Pro, like the very top model,
and then also just to throw in the mix,
I threw in a gaming laptop.
So I picked the Razer Blade 2016,
which is a pretty powerful gaming laptop
with an Nvidia 1060 graphics card inside.
I chose that one over a bunch of the other gaming laptops,
because there are a lot of gaming laptops,
because it is the most subtle looking gaming laptop.
It's one that I actually could see myself
as a video editor using, not just for a gaming purpose.
For more info on that though, you can actually
check out my review of the Razer Blade,
which I've linked below.
And now here are the exact specs.
We have the Macbook Pro with Touch Bar 15 inch,
2.9 gigahertz i7, 16 gigs of ram, and the Radeon Pro 460
with four gigs of memory GPU.
The price for that is about $3,099.
The Surface Book with Performance Base
has a 2.6 gigahertz i7, ram is 16 gigs,
and it has an Nvidia 965M, with two gigs of memory.
The price for that is about $2,800.
Finally, the Razer Blade 2016, with 2.6 gigahertz i7,
16 gigs of ram, an Nvidia GTX 1060
with six gigs of memory installed.
The price for that is $1,800 for the lowest model.
And what I mean by lowest model for that,
I mean like the lowest storage
and the lowest resolution screen.
They all contain that same i7 and that same graphics card.
So it doesn't really matter about the screen resolution
and the storage space for this test.
Now as for footage, it is what I shoot on this camera.
So it's a Blackmagic URSA Mini 4.6K.
So the footage is going out in ProRes 422,
it is 4.6K resolution, I'm putting it into Premiere,
I'm doing a little bit of color correcting on it,
just simple stuff, and then I'm exporting
using the 4K preset in YouTube
and the 1080p preset for YouTube.
Okay, now as for the results, when I exported out
at 4K on the Macbook Pro 15 inch, we got about 27 minutes,
it took to render that out.
In 1080, it took about 12.
The Surface Book, same footage, same everything,
4K was 22 minutes and 30 seconds, 1080p was 10 minutes.
And finally, the Razer did it in 11:30 for the 4K,
and five minutes for the 1080p.
Yeah, I was surprised too.
Well sort of.
So, Premiere is a very GPU intensive program.
So, to some extent this is kind of just a competition
between the graphics cards.
And if you look on paper, the Razer Blade
has that GTX 1060 and that's clearly the most powerful card,
the Surface Book has the next most powerful card,
the Macbook has the least powerful card.
So that's not really that unexpected.
But what did kind of surprise me a little bit
was that the Surface Book actually eked out the Macbook,
which, I mean technically again,
the GPUs should do that, but I didn't quite expect that
from the Microsoft laptop over the Apple one.
And there you go, a video
for anyone interested in such things.
Again, this is not to say that one laptop
is better than the other, there are a lot of other factors
that you should probably consider before buying a laptop
than just Premiere rendering time,
but I just thought it might be interesting
to some people out there.
I was kind of curious to see what would happen,
and hoping some other people are too.
Now though, if you use Final Cut instead of Premiere,
this whole thing goes out the window.
Yeah.
Gonna do a video on that next,
so if you want to check that out,
please subscribe and stay tuned for that.
Otherwise though, if you like this video,
please thumbs-up it or share it, it is greatly appreciated.
And if you want more videos like this,
check out my channel, the link's around here somewhere.
If you like what you see there, please subscribe.
And as always, thanks for watching.
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