how much faster is the fanless m2 macbook air compared to my 15 000 mac
pro in real world tasks well today i think your guys minds will be blown it's
been about a year and a half since apple silicon came out and there have been a
lot of optimizations finally for these new systems so not only you're going to
look at a few benchmarks just to show you guys benchmarks versus reality but
all of those real world tasks and tests now this thing came out just over two
years ago and had a crazy price tag here's the full spec sheet side by side
and it was a killer machine when it came out there was no other mac that even
touched it for video editing which is why we got one but now nobody wants to
buy it i've had it listed everywhere multiple times people don't want it
because they rather buy an apple silicon machine and i don't blame them the one
that i use for this comparison is the one that we recommend most it has the a
core gpu not the 10 core and 16 gigs of ram with ssds that are full speed the
512 model so we're looking at 1600 compared to almost 15 000 if you buy the
ram from apple now i saved a little bit because i bought it myself and this
thing also has the afterburner card which we are going to talk about it's
going to be interesting now i want to give you guys a few benchmarks just to
show you guys the raw performance and then what happens with apple silicon and
optimization so in cinebench our 10 minute stress test gave us about 8 000
on the macbook air compared to over 14 000. that's 76 higher score for the mac
pro in terms of raw performance now if you guys didn't see my laptop cooler
video you have to it was amazing not only did we test out a maxi fan but also
a laptop cooler and with that we actually got 8 300 consistently without
any more throttling uh compared to about 7 300 if you leave it fanless so the mac
pro's 12 core cpu is 76 more powerful but it does require
9.6 times more power at the peak that gives us 73 centibench score per watt
compared to 400 on the macbook air and with the macbook air once it starts
throttling down its efficiency actually goes up a lot i did another video about
low power mode and how fast and cool it runs another great one to watch i'll
link it at the end now as far as geekbench the single core score is 73
higher on the macbook air while the multi-core score is 44 higher on the mac
pro so less of a difference for those quick snappy tasks even in multi-core as
far as graphics the mac pro is about four times more powerful in metal
compute tasks that is a massive difference uh and that's compared to the
eight core the ten core we don't recommend we tested it out it does
throttle quite a bit and it can't slow down when you need that extra
performance so the mac pro is a lot more powerful but what happens for your daily
simple tasks well first off in speedometer 2.0 the m2air scores two and
a half times more points and it is way faster for day-to-day browsing when i'm
on my mac pro i notice how everything is slower it is crazy now not only that we
were compressing files decompressing and for xcode the m2 air was 20
faster at compressing the application all those tiny files now when we
decompress that it is actually 45 faster and that's with both using the
same mac os another thing we do all the time is denoising our audio recordings
for our youtube videos the mac pro took 45 seconds compared to just 26 on the m2
macbook air so that's 42 faster and get this that is using
rosetta because this app is still written for intel cpus that is crazy so
pretty much every day-to-day simple task is much snappier with this fanless
laptop but what about tougher tasks because that's what the mac pro is for
well as far as pure graphics gaming performance which we don't really game
on it but this thing's really capable and it was what it came out the mac pro
scored 2.25 times more frames per second than the m2 macbook air which of course
is fanless and we have the bend graphics now to do that the mac pro took over 22
times more wattage and power for the graphics to achieve the fps which means
that the m2 macbook air is way more efficient of course it gets over 8
frames per second per watt compared to less than one now of course this thing
is plugged in it's meant to suck a lot of power for things like blender where
you really need those high performance graphics and that's exactly what it did
it was over three times faster in our classroom scene and with that zn
processor being super stable it destroys in logic pro it can handle a ton of
tracks and with that we also have a ton of ram capability in here we have
192. you can go up to a terabyte and a half with higher processors compared to
up to 24 gigabytes on the m2 macbook air so it is definitely a killer for doing
really high-end stuff now as far as coding this was very interesting not
only does it sip power but it was actually faster than this mac pro at our
standard project that you could test out for yourself as well this is where apple
silicon software optimization really kicks in because there's no way that the
m2 air should be faster in processing code but if a application's optimized it
is insanely quick and moving along into photo editing with
photoshop the m2 also has the neural engine that can speed stuff up i
processed nine images for hdr and the mt macbook air was 34
faster now some people do more images or they have bigger differences or i know
people that do this all day for real estate photography and it's crazy that
this laptop can replace and beat out a high-end intel mac desktop that is
insane now check out this next one running a 10 image panorama where
photoshop does all the processing for you the m2 air was more than twice as
fast it was insanely quick and it's just mind-blowing looking at the raw
performance versus actual real world tasks that people do now when i saw
these photoshop results i was like man that is incredible what about for
lightroom there's a lot of people that use it for processing batches of images
and i started testing it out and then my mind was blown because the mac pro was
flying for example exporting our 50 42 megapixel edited images to jpeg the mac
pro took 1 minute and 11 seconds previously which was way faster than all
the other intel macs even the imac pros this thing because of its six channel
memory just flew way beyond the raw performance now in
2022 the m2 air took one minute and 10 seconds
meaning that it's just insanely faster than everything else out there but get
this the apple silk and max were not the only ones that people are optimizing it
for adobe enabled gpu rendering for images i think they redid the engine and
now this mac pro with this beefy graphics card did it in 32 seconds so
more than twice as fast and that just shows that for some people having these
high-end graphics it's still going to make a big difference especially if
you're doing this all day for your main job or your business now
apple really focused on the media engines in the m2 chip and they
surprised us with prores decoding and encoding so this thing is actually quite
capable for video editing and go ahead and take a look what happens stabilizing
a one minute 4k clip which we stabilized all the time was more than twice as fast
as this mac pro and that blows my mind what the optimizations have done now
exporting a five minute hevc project with effects was also slightly faster
where the mac pro used to be by far the quickest now what's crazier is if we use
davinci resolve which recently was updated for this m2 chip that actually
goes down to a minute and 32 seconds beating out the macro by a lot now the
mac pro is fully optimized they can't get any faster but final cut can get
faster with future updates now one thing that really got to me about the mac pro
once i got it was that newer footage like 10 bit 422 would not play smoothly
it would just be super choppy because the system can't handle it now apple
addressed that with their apple silicon chips which were the first that can play
back smoothly even on a base m1 macbook air now the m2 builds upon it apple
talked about 8k video and we started to shoot ak video for our top angle that
way we can zoom in and show you guys all of the details that are very clear and
it's been great other than the mac pro not being able to play back these 8k
hevc clips and it's just super choppy but get this the m2 macbook air plays
them back perfectly now on the mac pro you have to
transcode this footage into another format that's easier to play and to do
30 minutes of transcoding it takes 49 minutes that is a long time to wait to
be able to edit these files whereas the m2 it takes 18 minutes to do the same
exact tasks but of course you don't even have to do that because it plays back
perfectly now as i mentioned we were shocked that apple added the prores
decoders and encoders into a base chip they had that with the pro models and
that was fantastic but now we have it here so how fast is it with the mac pro
you have the two thousand dollar after burner card to do this same thing
whereas here we have a whole laptop with battery display everything else for
sixteen hundred so taking our five minute prores raw graded project our
macbook air plays it back perfectly and it rendered it out in a minute and 51
seconds now the mac pro takes two minutes and 45 seconds without the after
burner card and if you spend that two grand it goes down to a minute and 45
seconds just slightly faster than the m2 macbook air now as i mentioned
we have the 8 core here now we also have the 10 core which we tested and for most
things it's not really worth it but for pro res it actually speeds it up to a
minute and 40 seconds uh meaning it is faster than the mac pro with that after
burner uh because we are gpu limited in this instance so that is just so crazy
that for a fanless laptop you could play this footage better and easier than on
the mac pro it is incredible now there has to be some areas where the mac pro
is better and there are for example in davinci resolve if you're denoising
footage this takes all of the raw graphics power to do in our macbook air
can play this back at only three frames per second out of 24 whereas the mac pro
it could do it in 18 seconds so still not perfect so you might want to render
and it'll be way faster render on the mac pro but a huge difference because of
that raw graphics power now the same thing goes if you are working with ak
crazy footage the mac pros over three times faster at doing this compared to
the macbook air and here of course it starts thermal throttling a lot now i
mentioned that uh cooling fan that we had with the thermal pads when we use
that on this machine it went down from 26 minutes almost 27 down to 19 minutes
and 40 seconds it was actually faster than our m2 macbook pro which really
blew our mind so that does make a really good improvement now overall yes the mac
pro still has its place you have the pci cards you could do dual graphics cards
you could get a lot of ram but at this point for the vast majority
people the apple silicon laptops and the mac mini and the mac studio they make so
much sense that unless you need one of the small a few small niche features of
the mac pro it is just slower in most cases and for what most people do so
there you guys go if you guys want to buy one of these from me please reach
out if you do need the pci slots or something else i'd be glad to sell it to
you for a good deal and please check out that
cooling video where we added a fan and we tested out the laptop cooler on the
m2 macbook air it is amazing click above to subscribe this been max and i'll see
you in the next video you