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- Yo guys, Jonathan here.
Welcome to part two of the MacBook Pro i9 throttling fiasco.
Big shoutout to everyone who watched
part one all the way through,
if you missed that, I'll link it up here and down below.
And I want to preface this video by saying the title,
everybody is wrong about the 2018 MacBook Pro
was more of a blanket statement to those
who kind of were blindly following headlines and hype
and straight out saying that the i9 was slower than the i7,
the i9 six-core was inherently slower
than last year's quad-core i7.
And honestly, my only point with that was to showcase
how the laptop actually performed
in as many real world situations as I possibly could.
I wanna give a quick shoutout to PhillyD,
someone I watch, someone I look up to.
He does a great job of reporting the news
but also knowing when to step back
and take accountability so in that spirit
I could totally say I was wrong if I came off
like I was blindly supporting Apple
because that is not the case.
I thought I was clear, if I wasn't I still to this day
think the i9 is not properly cool,
I don't think the laptop is reaching its full potential.
I've told Apple that I just wanted to showcase it
like how every one of you out there uses it.
Forget benchmarks, forget trying to stress a CPU.
I wanted to show it off
like if you use this machine everyday.
So last video was more of a showcase
of the highest spec six-core i9 configuration
against the lowest spec baseline six-core i7 configuration.
This video is tackling how it stacks up
against last year's highest spec quad-core i7
because I've seen so many statements
saying the i9 was inherently slower.
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Again, just to be 100% clear,
I don't think the i9 is running to its maximum potential.
Mr. iPhonedo did a great video showcasing
how he squeezed extra performance out of the i9
by ramping up the fans.
So if you guys wanna check that out,
I'll drop a link down below.
Again, my job here was to kind of showcase and document
how this performs out of the box for the everyday person.
I've seen the crazy Reddit thread
from someone way smarter than me
talking about how to optimally tune
or hack these MacBook Pros and better performance
so if that's something you wanna see,
definitely drop a comment down below
and I will definitely look into it.
Quickly before I jump in for testing,
both MacBook Pros were plugged into power at all times
and then all files and projects
were run off an external OWC ThunderBlade v4 SSD
for those curious about speed
or wondering if it was gonna bottleneck things.
That's actually just about as fast
as the internal SSDs in these MacBook Pros
nearly three gigabytes a second.
And the main reason is for those large video files
it's impossible to store everything on these MacBook Pros
especially when you're dealing with base models.
So first up is Adobe Lightroom Classic CC
and the first task was to import 50
100 megapixel Hasselblad RAW photos
with a one by one build preview.
Contrary to thoughts out there,
the i9 was roughly 28% faster or had a 28% improvement,
however you wanna word it.
But nonetheless the i7 was definitely not faster.
Next from there, I took those 50 RAW photos
and then exported them to JPEG in Lightroom Classic CC
and again the i9 MacBook Pro was about 27% faster.
Next from there I'm gonna hop over to Handbrake
which is super demanding on the CPU.
I did two tests for this,
one was transcoding a two-hour movie into h.264
and then a more demanding test transcoding
that two-hour movie into h.265.
For the h.264 transcode the i9 was roughly 17% faster
than the quad-core i7 and as we jump over
to the h.265 transcode, you can see
one this took a hell of a lot longer,
it's a lot more demanding,
but the difference was actually smaller here.
The i9 was faster this time though,
it was only about 12% which makes total sense,
it's a longer, more demanding process,
so that heat kind of really builds up
and I think if the i9 was better cooled on this MacBook Pro,
we would see a bigger difference in performance.
Where I saw a massive difference though
and this is more so to do with the advantage
of Coffee Lake and HEVC encoding
was using Compressor transcoding a 4K h.264 file.
22 minutes into 4K HEVC in the i9 MacBook Pro
was 54% faster than last year's quad-core i7
which is a giant jump.
From that, moving on to Adobe Premiere CC
and again my purpose with this
is to make this as wide and varied as possible
using as many cameras and codecs as I possibly could.
So first up with that ARRI Alexa Mini 4K Prores test,
the i9 MacBook Pro was about 10% faster
than last year's i7.
From there moving on to 5K red RAW footage
and then dropping this into a 4K timeline
exported into h.264, the i9 MacBook Pro
was about 13% faster.
Next is Sony A7III 4K footage at a 100 megabits per second,
I dropped this into a 1080p timeline
and I exported that into a 1080p h.264 file
and again the i9 MacBook Pro is about 9% faster.
Where I didn't see a huge difference though
was using Canon C200 RAW light footage
inside Adobe Premiere, the i9 MacBook Pro
was only about 3% faster which really isn't much at all.
Again, this is a clear example
of where the i9 is not performing to its max potential
so for now, if you use the Canon C200,
if you use Adobe Premiere, it's not the biggest upgrade.
I also kinda wanna interject
and talk about Premiere Pro versus Final Cut.
It's not that I'm crapping all over Premiere Pro,
it's just imagine that you did something everyday, everyday,
you watched your friend try to do the exact same task
but the way they were doing it
was slower and less efficient,
why wouldn't you tell them your way?
That's all I'm trying to do
but the good news is Adobe actually reached out
because of that video so it means they're watching,
they care and I'm hoping that because of videos like these,
Apple listens, Adobe listens, and the end result
is better performance for everyone everywhere.
From there, speaking of Final Cut Pro 10,
jumping over to that testing, this is a showcase
of how I wanna show you guys numbers
no matter what they are.
With the ARRI 4K Prores footage,
the i9 MacBook Pro was actually
about 13% slower than the i7.
From there, moving on to 5K red RAW footage
I am actually transcoding this into 4K 422 Prores
and the i9 MacBook Pro was actually 24% faster,
so in this case, it definitely had an advantage.
Next from there, again is Sony A7III 4K footage
dropped into a 1080p timeline then exported
into a 1080p h.264 file, the i9 MacBook Pro was 12% faster.
Moving on to Canon C200 RAW light footage
in this case in Final Cut Pro 10,
the i9 MacBook Pro export was 10% faster
but if we hop over to DaVinci Resolve,
in this case the quad-core i7 from last year
was actually about 9% faster.
So yeah, in certain cases the i7 from last year
does outperform the i9 but in most situations,
in most the testing, the i9 is faster all the way around
even with its problems.
So kind of take this information for what it's worth.
Use that towards your buying decision.
You might think to yourself, hey, I have last year's model,
I don't need to upgrade, that's cool.
Maybe you want to buy that one,
those are actually $400 off on B&H right now
or maybe the difference in performance
with the six-core is enough for you.
Honestly in my opinion right now,
the mid-tier six-core MacBook Pro
is probably where your best bang for your buck is.
Aside from that, hopefully you found this video helpful.
Again, my job is to showcase these things
in the realest possible way.
Hopefully you appreciate that, if you did, drop a like,
definitely subscribe for more MacBook Pro coverage.
Still have the 13-inch model to cover.
Thank you guys again, this is Jonathan.
If you missed part one, it's also down below
and I will catch you guys later.
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