(jazz music)
- Is that a Mac in your pants
or are you just happy to see me?
We've got a total of seven MacBooks here
and some are bigger than the others,
but does a bigger laptop always mean more performance?
Apple's M1 Pro and M1 Max SOCs
have already started their stuff for us
in the 14 inch form factor.
Now it's time to see the 16 inch.
You'd be surprised
how much difference two inches can make.
Just like our sponsor, iFixit.
Still haven't bought something for the DIY
or a fixer in your life?
iFixit has a toolkit to help you tackle any job
and you can still get free shipping
and other great discounts for the holiday season.
Learn more at the end of the video.
(upbeat music)
From the outside, the 16 inch MacBook Pro
is perhaps disappointingly,
an enlarged version of the 14 inch.
There's no proportional in beginning of IO,
which is a bummer if you were hoping to be able
to ditch the type C hubs
and type C to A adapters that you have.
Even worse, we tried those type C to HDMI 2.1 adapters,
4K 60 with HDR is the best you're going to get out
of these for the time being.
So you're effectively limited to HDMI 2.0 on all ports,
even on the 16 inch models.
It's kinda lame,
but it's been suggested that
it's an internal bandwidth limitation.
From here, though it's all positive or neutral.
Starting with the notch.
Where, because it's no larger
than the smaller models, the 16 inch display
actually makes it practically disappear
when you're focused on content.
There's also far less opportunity
for egregiously large menus,
like the DaVinci Resolves
to be cut off, thanks to the larger menu bar.
which makes this an appealing choice for
the Mac using professional.
Finally, the keyboard is no larger,
which is something Apple has always done
as a matter of preference.
But we gain by keeping that smaller keyboard form factor
is a much larger track pad and bigger speakers.
Which do in fact, sound a bit better.
(upbeat music)
There is a little more and tighter base,
which is saying something considering
how good the 14 inch already sounds.
The obvious reason to buy the 16 inch Mac book of course
is the larger version of the Pro display XDR.
It's got the same pixel density
and brightness as the smaller model
and looking at them side by side,
it looks like apple match the panels extremely well
in other areas like color and brightness too.
That should make anyone looking
into the 14 inch models breathe a sigh of relief,
considering in the past smaller models,
haven't always been given the same pedigree.
(upbeat music)
When it comes to the vastness of the screen.
The 16 inch reminds me of how it felt to sit
in front of a 17 inch MacBook
back when they still existed.
I don't have one of those to show you right now,
but here's my old 15.4 inch for comparison.
The shrunken bezels really do help make it feel
that much bigger.
And I don't miss my desktop monitor
nearly as much as I did with this.
Just like I don't miss my old jacket after getting
the new Swacket from lttstore.com
flexible and thick, like I one day hope to be.
But there's one more major difference
between the new 14 and 16 inch models
that we need to talk about.
If you pop the hood, wow,
they look shockingly similar don't they.
Almost like they took the 14 inch
and just resize it in Photoshop.
And that means the cooler
is proportionately much larger
and it sits inside all that extra thermal mass
offered by the bigger chassis.
This might just be the killer feature for the 16 inch.
Assuming of course we hit thermal bottlenecks
on our 14 inch testing.
As usual, let's start with Cinebench
where it's obvious we haven't
been thermally constrained up until now.
M1 Pro and M1 Max
in both form factors share
the same CPU cores after all.
And we get further confirmation with GeekBench
and same deal with Blender 2
where we've got some minor variation,
but not much else.
The CPU cores on their own
are simply not enough to saturate the 14 inch cooler.
So if your workloads are only tasked to the CPU,
you may not see a performance advantage
with the 16 inch over the 14.
It's when we move on to the GPU testing,
that things get interesting.
Final Cut Pro sees the M1 Max picking up
an extra simultaneous ProRes stream or two
over the 14 inch variance,
before dropping any frames,
which hints that the extra GPU horsepower
is in fact being utilized here.
DaVinci Resolves render time gives us a shocker.
The high end 16 inch M1 Max wraps up
over a minute faster than the 14
and the low end M1 Max is even faster
than the high end 14.
So the Max GPU cores her in fact enough
to saturate the 14 inch chassis.
Strangely the 16 inch M1 Pro has the opposite result.
It runs slower than the 14 inch,
not just in the export,
but in the timeline, losing a frame per second.
What appears to be happening here is that
because Apple is only spinning up the fans
once the chassis itself reaches a certain temperature,
by the time the larger machine has heated up enough
to activate the fans,
the SOC temperature is already
so high that it has to throttle it's performance.
We don't see this on M1 Max,
because they spin up the fans much sooner.
Cinema4D Redshift is your best bet for 3D modeling
and rendering on Apple Silicon right now,
thanks to its support for Apple's metal API.
But unfortunately it doesn't seem to hit the SOC
quite as hard as the previous test.
And so we see less difference between the two sizes.
It seems like Redshift simply needs more optimization.
If it were fully utilizing the GPU,
it should be saturating the cooler
and throttling on the 14 inch,
like we saw with Resolve.
GeekBench is more of the same
with a mild increase in open CL,
but roughly run to run variants in metal.
Again, if we're fully utilizing the GPU,
we should see some throttling with this fan profile,
even though this is a short benchmark.
Whoa, hey, Future Anthony here,
capital F capital A.
Remember how I said cinema4D was your best bet
for 3D rendering.
Turns out I lied.
The Blender 3.1 Alpha just got updated
with metal rendering support
on Apple Silicon in Monterey.
I couldn't let this video go up
without testing that out, could I?
The M1 is completely destroyed by the M1 Pro
and M1 Max, which we might expect
from doubling the number of GPU cores, twice,
but there's an anomaly,
The 1016 M1 Pro consistently runs a little slower
than the eight and 14 core model.
This is probably down to the Alpha status
of the new renderer,
so take with salt as needed.
Overall, this is a great showing
until we introduced the Zephyrus M16.
In the BMW render its CUDA result is 16 seconds faster.
While the optics render runs twice, again as fast,
that laptop costs less than $2,000.
But with Blender,
we have one more trick up our sleeves, Gooseberry.
This test requires 12 gigabytes of Ram to run
and this is where Apple Silicon shines.
Thanks to its unified memory layout.
The Zephyrus in both CUDA and optics modes
is faster than the M1 Pro models,
but only just M1 Max transit easily
with over a six minute lead
on the 32 core models.
Finally, we found something Apple's GPU
is seriously good at
without needing any extra hardware like the decoding
and encoding blocks.
We'll take these numbers with some salt though.
The implementation is very early
and the devs say that performance optimizations
are forthcoming.
Okay, back to the video.
We get a better look at this
when we look at gaming
where the 16 inch M1 Max managed
a higher frame rate than the Zephyrus M16 RTX 3060.
A first for Apple Silicon, in all of our testing.
That's a good 15 FPS higher
than the 14 inch model can handle to.
Suggesting that once again,
the Max GPU is more than capable
of overwhelming the 14's cooler,
although the Pro is well within the capabilities
of its cooler and sees no improvement
between the two sizes.
CS Go does see a small but measurable improvement
on the higher end M1 Max as well,
suggesting that the little bit of extra horsepower
coupled with the little bit
of extra thermal headroom,
lets it squeeze that little bit of extra speed out
of an otherwise Rosetta bottleneck title.
As messy as all this is Mac gaming
isn't as crazy as you might think.
So get subscribed because we've got a video
on why coming soon.
But what if we sidestepped Rosetta
and used an Apple Silicon native app.
The Dolphin emulator running
Super Mario Sunshine fits the bill,
but we're still not hitting the cooler that hard,
which suggests that there's another bottleneck
probably in the translation from
the older open GL API,
to Apple's metal API.
We'd expect it to hit both the CPU and GPU hard
because we're running the ambulator
without a frame rate cap,
but they're not.
So we see little difference
between the sizes again.
Which brings us to the overarching theme
of this testing, thermals.
We fired up Redshift and Blenders simultaneously
for this one and while Redshift
isn't fully utilizing the GPU,
it should be more than enough
to bring it up the temperature.
Sure enough, even our low end M1 Pro 14 choked here.
Maintaining the high nineties on the CPU core
isn't peaking at 100 degrees throughout the run.
Apple as always, seems to favor throttling instead
of ramping the fans up.
Even at that 100 degree mark,
the fan speed was merely 50% .
Fun fact, all of the M1 Pro models choked hard enough
to outright crash the Redshift render every time.
And in one case it froze the machine entirely
with a black screen.
Given the thermal results
I don't think that it's overheating necessarily.
Perhaps there's a memory bandwidth issue
causing contention on the lower end chips,
or maybe there's a power delivery issue.
None of the M1 Max models exhibited this behavior
so make of that what you will.
The top end 14 inch M1 Max model CPU cores
were routinely allowed to hit 100 degrees
while the Redshift rendering performance suffered greatly.
The fans are a little more aggressive than M1 Pro
at around 75% at peak,
but that's a small comfort
when you're still leaving performance on the table.
The 16 inch models on the other hand,
while performed admirably.
The top end, SOC may have hit 100 degrees a lot,
but the fans barely hit 50%.
And the Redshift render only took about 10% longer
than when we were running it on its own.
Suggesting that it's only
being mildly throttled,
less so than the 14 inch M1 Max.
Interestingly, the GPU clusters weren't allowed
to hit the 90 degree mark
on any of our MacBooks in this test.
Which hints that Apple's thermal management
is aiming for somewhere around 90 degrees
as the upper limit for the SOC itself.
Taken together, this suggests that
with the fans cranked up,
the 16 inch would actually be totally capable
of handling combined load like this,
without batting an eye.
Sadly, this isn't the default behavior,
but you can force it to max speed using a third-party
program like TG Pro.
Surface temperatures were also significantly lower
on all of our 16 inch models.
Although the exhaust temperatures
were still in the 50's.
Crucially, the hotspot is well under 50 degrees
on the highest end 16 inch.
And the underside is just a hair
over 40 at its hottest,
which means that even if you're stressing the machine,
you're not going to be burning your pants off
if it's in your lap.
Apple's done a fantastic job managing skin temperature
on this generation of MacBooks.
And again, if there were a little more aggressive
with the fan,
they can have their cake and eat it too.
The noise isn't even that bad IMO.
at a $200 premium over a similarly equipped
14 inch MacBook Pro,
the 16 inch models represent a reasonable option
if you value screen real estate.
But as we've seen the thermal constraints
of the 14 inch chassis, rarely come into play
until you upgrade to the M1 Max.
So choosing which size you get
for an M1 Pro, mostly comes down to form factor,
not performance.
In fact, if you're okay trading storage
for screen size, the base model 16 inch
is the same price as the 14 for the same SOC.
However, I don't think I could recommend less
than one terabyte of storage
for a professional class machine.
Even over the course of our benchmarking
for these videos,
we ended up running out of storage.
Your mileage may of course vary.
Apples engineers are good at their jobs.
Since abandoning the pursuit
of ever thinner designs,
they pulled off a solid chassis
with good cooling and paired it
with next level battery life thanks to Apple Silicon.
(upbeat music)
While we're still in the transition phase
of the rollout, it's almost complete.
And there's reason to be optimistic about Apple Silicon.
Maybe not quite as optimistic as Apple is,
not yet anyway,
but optimistic nonetheless.
It's expensive for what you're getting
that much is clear.
Only in video editing, does Apple Silicon truly shine
the way Apple claims it does
and far cheaper PC notebooks currently outperforming
in other tasks like 3D modeling and gaming.
But the entire M1 Pro and Max lineup
has a unique combination of performance efficiency
and endurance rolled into a form factor
that's pleasing to use with fewer compromises
than we're used to.
You're also getting a display
that's unmatched in the PC world,
speakers that are legitimately
some of the best in the industry
and a tightly integrated ecosystem
that speaks to many.
It's really a combination that no one else
is in a position to match right now.
And let's be honest,
if any of that is a deal-maker for you
as it is for me,
then you're probably already eyeing one
of these new MacBooks.
And if anything, remotely resembling
the Apple logo makes you recoil in disgust,
you're probably looking
for reasons to hate it instead.
I'm simply not going to change your mind,
but regardless of what your feelings about them are,
Apple is moving in the right direction.
And this is a major step towards
what could be a brighter future for the industry.
After all, wherever Apple goes,
the PC surely follows.
Just like you're already at this segue
to our sponsor iFixit.
Thanks to iFixit for sponsoring today's video.
iFixit as the perfect gifts for the tech hobbyist
or professional in your life.
Their protect tool kit is a great general kit
to fix almost anything in your house.
I reach for one all the time.
It's got 64 bits and iFixit
most popular opening tools all rolled up
into one package,
including suction cups,
spongers, anti-static wrist straps,
and more all covered by iFixit lifetime warranty.
It's the gift that keeps on giving
because you can save time and money
by repairing your own electronics
using iFixit step-by-step guides.
iFixit also still has great holiday sales
for a limited time.
Check out their new toolkit bundles
and get 20% off all laptop batteries.
Plus you can get free shipping
on orders over $50 with code, foryou.
That is F-O-R-Y-O-U at checkout.
Give the gift of repair
this holiday season @iFixit.com/LTT.
Thanks for watching guys.
Go check out our initial review
of the 14 inch M1 Pro MacBooks
if you haven't already,
so you can get more context for today's 16 review.