hey guys i'm vadim with maxtec and as you probably know there's some drama
going on with the m2 macbook pro so i think it's time to turn off the
teleprompter no script straight from my heart explain the entire situation so
you can get a better understanding of what's going on as well as make some
changes on my end so with that said let me get into this explanation there is
recently been a lot of people saying that i am way too negative about the m2
macbook pro specifically on twitter and now that i look back with everything
that happened i do think that i was pointing out a lot of the flaws and the
findings that we were finding in our testing when we were testing all the
different models and variations of the m2 macbook pro so yes i think i have
been a little bit negative so i'm gonna try to change that in the future to try
to show more of the positive things because there are positive things about
the m2 macbook pro yes the m2 chip is faster especially for the graphics
performance it is a really big difference and some of the tests we ran
45 faster and i did not talk about that that much because i was focusing on some
of the other issues that we were finding with the m2 macbook pro and i actually
got one tweet claiming that there was a laptop company that's probably paying me
a big check to talk down on apple and to talk down on the m2 macbook pro which is
obviously not true because for many years people have been calling me an
apple fanboy an apple chill and they've claimed that apple is paying me money to
talk good about apple's macbooks and overall products and that's been
happening ever since we started working for apple insider many years ago
covering all of these apple products and especially when apple made the
announcement of the transition to apple silicon
i was probably the biggest fan of apple silicon i was telling people this is
going to be a revolution that is going to end up killing x86 and everybody who
just laughed at me said it's not true there's no way these new a14x or m1 max
are going to be that good but then they came out and they ended up being amazing
so many people bought the m1 laptops and we were recommending the m1 macbook air
to basically everybody and then we had the hype and the rumors for the m1x
which turned out to be m1 pro and m1 max and i was saying that those are going to
be the best laptops ever made and so many people called me an apple fanboy
they said i have no idea what i'm talking about and then the 14 and 16
inch macbook pros came out and people were blown away apple really did a great
job with those laptops they made sure every part of it was a nice upgrade and
still to this day there are people that are saying on twitter that yes this is
the best laptop ever made but now we have the m2 macbook pro so let me start
the story of everything that happened from the beginning when we first got the
m2 macbook pro in we decided to do a benchmarks video and within that video
we actually tested the ssd and we noticed that it was pretty slow compared
to the previous m1 macbook pro model and we pointed out that this could actually
lead to slower virtual memory swap performance now we didn't actually test
that until the next day when we came in we tested it out and we saw oh man look
at that it is actually leading to worse performance so we did a test where we
compared it to the m1 macbook pro and we noticed that if you have 10 chrome tabs
open just 10 chrome tabs which is pretty common i would say we noticed that we
were getting worse performance than the previous m1 macbook pro and the reason
that was happening was because these new m2 macbook pro specifically the base
model which i would argue is very popular because that's mostly what apple
stores on their actual shelves in the apple store as well as what's popular on
amazon as you can see it was ranked number 20 compared to the 512 gig model
which is ranked about 60 or 70 so the base model is more popular but on that
base model it would only come with a single nand chip instead of using up
both of these spots compared to the previous one macbook pro and the m1
macbook air which would use both of those spots which would end up giving
you double the actual storage channels going to the storage controller which
would speed up the ssd and of course if you're putting on a load of ram the
system has to rely on the ssd performance to use as virtual memory
swap and that basically caused the m2 to be slower than the m1 and multiple tests
like exporting some basic photos just 50 photos while also having 10 chrome tabs
open or doing the same thing having 10 chrome tabs and exporting a common 4k
video you would actually get a downgrade with the m2 machine which i think is
inexcusable and i don't think it's right to be shipping a machine like this to
somebody who thinks they're getting an awesome upgrade according to apple's
marketing but really in reality they're experiencing worse performance than the
previous m1 macbook pro so we ended up getting a lot of requests in our
comments asking for us to buy another 512 gig storage model that still has the
same 8 gigs of ram to just test the ssd differences alone so we ended up doing
that in inner comparisons we noticed that with no background apps open no
chrome tabs no other apps nothing the 512 gig model was 15
faster than the base model that is a huge difference for just upgrading the
storage and let me say we have never seen that before on any macbook of the
past especially the intel macbooks we've never seen a 15 jump just by upgrading
the ssd and then we ended up opening up some chrome tabs and even safari tabs
and yes the base model got even slower taking a lot longer than the 5 12 gig
model and then we ended up also testing the 512 gig storage and 16 gig ram model
of the m2 macbook pro and that was even faster than the 512 gig 8 gig ram model
so it's pretty clear that if you want to make the most out of the m2 chip and
take apple's marketing to the fullest and get the best performance you want to
upgrade both the storage and the ram which unfortunately brings you up to
seventeen hundred dollars which is only a hundred dollars away from the 14 inch
macbook pro on amazon the sale price of eighteen hundred dollars now in the past
with the m1 macbook pro we didn't have those issues the base models ran
perfectly fine because they had two nand chips for the ssd so the virtual ram
swap worked great and we could actually recommend the base models of the m1 air
and the m1 macbook pro with no issues but with these m2 macbook pros the base
models with only one nand chip they do have a massive flaw and i do not think
that apple should have gave it just a single chip i think they should have
eaten the loss and just give it the two nan chips that the m2 chip needs to
thrive and basically show off that performance gain that they marketed so
what we ended up doing in yesterday's video was compare the base m2 macbook
pro for 1300 to the m1 macbook air which right now
you can buy for only 900 on sale brand new or even renewed on amazon for around
800 so you could potentially save as much as 500
going with the m1 macbook air and the findings we found were crazy because
in a lot of the regular apps the common apps that we tested the m1 macbook air
wasn't that much slower than the m2 macbook pro with nothing else open no
multitasking at all but when we started to load just five chrome tabs in the
background the m2 macbook pro was slower in every
single test not only that we ended up opening
another app in the background which is pretty common i'd say to have five tabs
and an extra app running in the background that's nothing crazy that's
nothing extreme this is common use we ended up showing some huge
differences in the performance but we also
ended up going to the web browser during an export which is pretty normal because
if you're exporting video or you're exporting photos you're not going to sit
there staring at it for a couple minutes you're gonna go browse the web just like
normal people do and we noticed that yes the m2 macbook pro was less responsive
when switching tabs than the m1 macbook air so basically if you're doing any
kind of multitasking at all the m1 macbook air was faster and i think that
is inexcusable from apple to do that ssd setup with only one nand chip and i
think it's a huge problem but now i want to talk about the other issue which i
don't think is a big deal but it ended up blowing up like crazy and that is the
whole thing with the thermal throttling well we ended up testing the m2 macbook
pro to the 14-inch m1 pro macbook pro and we decided to run some video editing
tests but we didn't want to run a bunch of them so we did one easy test which
was the hebc test and we decided to do a hard test one that we've done for years
we've done it with the 14 and 16 inch macbook pros we've done it with the mac
pro we did it with the mac studio this is actually a real world test that we've
done in the past so we wanted to test it on the m2 macbook pro and we discovered
some crazy results where we got up to 108 degrees celsius and the fan was
maxed out at 7 200 rpm so it basically couldn't keep itself cool and it had to
thermal throttle severely from an average package power of almost 30 watts
down to 7 watts instantly because that's the only way it could cool itself down
and the reason this happened with that test is because it fully maxes out the
gpu and almost fully maxes out the cpu as well so it's not relying on the
encoders and that's what makes it extreme because if you're just running a
100 cpu workload you're not going to experience that thermal throttling if
you're just running a 100 gpu workload for graphics you're not going to
experience it and the average consumer is not going to experience it as well so
when i made my twitter thread about the severe thermal throttling it ended up
blowing up and a lot of people ended up sharing it and not even reading the full
thing just reading the headline and going everywhere commenting that the m2
macbook pro has crazy overheating problems no matter what you do or in
regular tasks which is not true i was showing off that one test where we saw
the thermal throttling and i made a big deal about it because the m1 macbook pro
there was no thermal throttling in that same test we ran it and it was able to
stay at 100 gpu non-stop no throttling at all and the 14 inch also had no
thermal throttling it didn't even have to max out the fans to cool it down so
unfortunately that tweet ended up blowing up and people didn't read the
context they didn't read lower down when i said that this is an extreme test that
a lot of people won't really be doing on the everyday so most people will not run
into this overheating problem but my main point of that twitter thread was
that what is this going to mean for the m2
macbook air that does not have any fan cooling at all it's completely fanless
what's this going to mean is it going to thermal throttle under other workloads
that are more realistic and more common that was my point but unfortunately
everything went out of hand i ended up replying and arguing which i think i
shouldn't have done so i want to say i'm going to try to be less negative and try
to be more peaceful on twitter with all you guys that's the change that i'm
going to try to make in the future so with that said i really wish that there
was less attention on the thermal throttling thing because i feel like
everybody's talking about that because it's easier to refute that thermal
throttling claim compared to the actual issue the big issue with the m2 macbook
pro which is the single nand ship which is actually causing regular common
workloads to be slower than the m1 macbook air which i think should not
happen under any circumstance whatsoever no matter if it's five chrome tabs 10
multiple apps this should not be happening at all and that is what i wish
apple would address and respond to and i really hope the m2 macbook air does not
have that same issue so there you guys go that was my explanation of the m2
macbook pro drama straight from the heart no teleprompter and if you have
any thoughts or questions on this let me know down in the comment section below
and if you want to subscribe go ahead and do that right there because we are
going to be testing the m2 macbook air in depth like we always do actually
running the real world tests instead of just sharing our opinion and i think you
guys value that so thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next video