For the past year, we’ve looked at Apple’s base 13” MacBook Pro as a pretty bad value
compared to Apple’s newly updated MacBook Air and the more expensive $1800 Touch Bar
Pro, since it packed a pretty slow dual-core processor and was lacking a few features,
but with Apple’s new $1300 base MacBook Pro, we’ve completely changed our mind,
and we’re now calling it the best value MacBook ever.
Let’s discuss everything that’s great and not-so-great about the new base model
MacBook Pro.
For starters, Apple was able to equip it with the Touch Bar at the base price, something
you previously had to pay at least $1800 to get.
Now of course, not everybody likes it, but what really matters is the hardware that comes
with it, like Touch ID authentication, which makes it really convenient to login and install
new apps without having to reenter your password.
But the major deal is Apple’s T2 chip, which takes care of a bunch of system controllers
and makes it more secure.
And on top of that, it brings hardware HEVC video transcoding, and many people believe
that HEVC is going to be the future mainstream codec, so having the T2 chip makes this MacBook
Pro much more future-proof.
Design wise, almost everything else about the new base MacBook Pro basically matches
the more expensive MacBook Pros, like the very color accurate and bright display with
True Tone technology, the class-leading force touch trackpad, and the all-aluminum lightweight
and incredibly thin design.
Along with that, we also have the latest version of Apple’s butterfly keyboard, similar to
the 3rd gen in 2018 but with updated materials.
This alone was a big reason why some people would spend more for the 2018 $1800 model
or go with a MacBook Air instead.
The previous Base macbook Pro had a keyboard design back from 2016, which was the most
prone to failure.
We’re not sure if this latest design will solve all the problems just yet, but if any
issues arise, Apple will fix them for free.
What really makes this years’ base MacBook Pro standout is the new quad-core processor,
and from the first glance on Apple’s website, it seems like it’s quite a bit slower than
the $1800 MacBook Pro’s 2.4GHz processor, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
We made a full video comparing both models and we found that under load, the base MacBook
Pro ran only 300 MHz slower than the $1800 model, nowhere near the 1Ghz, or 1000MHz difference
we see on the spec sheet.
We ran a ton of benchmarks, video editing tests and even some photo editing, and found
that the $1800 MacBook Pro is only around 5-9% faster than the $1300 model, so for performance
alone, it definitely wasn’t worth the upgrade.
If you’re looking to do video editing on a budget, we were able to play back full resolution
4K H.264 and H.265 Files without any dropped frames in both Premiere Pro and Final Cut,
and even adding color correction and a Lut would be perfectly fine using Final Cut, while
Premiere would require you to drop down to half resolution, which is still very usable.
But that’s not the case for editing in Davinci Resolve, which likes to have more video memory
like on the 15” with dedicated graphics.
Overall, we’re impressed how this MacBook performs, but keep in mind that final exports
will require some patience compared to 15” MacBook Pros.
About 2-3 times longer than your project length in Final Cut Pro, or up to 10 times longer
in Premiere, so personally we’d stick with final cut.
For most people that do simple 4K editing from time to time this new MacBook Pro will
do a surprisingly good job, absolutely smoking the previous model thanks to the quad core
CPU and updated graphics.
The same thing goes for Photo editing, but here the performance difference between the
13” and 15” models are even lower since graphics are hardly used.
Importing 50 42MP RAW images into Lightroom classic was very quick, and exporting edited
Jpegs was also impressive.
We did notice a small delay in some tasks that we don’t get on our 13” MacBook with
16GB of RAM, which makes sense since the 8GB are maxed out while editing photos.
Upgrading to 16GB of RAM will not only smooth out your editing experience but speed up exporting
as well.
If you’re doing 12-24 MP images in small batches, 8GB will perform well enough, but
if you are working with higher resolution files or doing things like HDR, Panoramas,
or working with hundreds of images, we would highly recommend spending $200 more and upgrading
to 16GB.
We also decided to include some programming tests, but unfortunately, us being video editors
with absolutely no xCode experience at all, we weren’t able to find and run a sample
xCode project that would be easy to replicate on future machines.
So if you guys know of a sample xCode project we could use, comment below, but from what
we’ve seen so far with this machine, you’re getting truly impressive processor performance
for the cash out of this 1.4GHz CPU.
And we think it’s gonna perform much better than it’s Windows rivals and completely
blow the 2019 MacBook Air out of the water.
We’ll be getting our hands on that soon and doing a full comparison, so make sure
to subscribe now for that!
And now let’s talk about the downsides.
When we first got this laptop, we decided to take off the bottom cover and compare the
internals to the $1800 MacBook Pro, and we found a few interesting details.
First off, we’re only getting a single fan in the base model compared to two on the more
expensive Pro, but seeing as we got such impressive performance results, with CPU temps that were
only slightly hotter than the $1800 model, that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
We also noticed that the speakers look way, way different, and when we tested them, we
noticed a huge improvement on the more expensive 13” Pro.
Just listen for yourself.
And then we tested the SSD storage speed, and found that the 128GB SSD was quite a bit
slower than the 256gig on the $1800 model, and not only that, but if you pay the extra
$200 to get the 256GB SSD, it’s actually still slower than the 256gig on the $1800
Pro.
So there are a couple of downsides already, but the biggest difference is that the $1300
model only gets two Thunderbolt 3 ports, while the more expensive one gets four of them.
So we can see that while the new base MacBook Pro offers incredible value for performance,
there are a few things that you have to sacrifice, but let’s take a look at all of these things
from my own personal opinion and past experiences.
As far as performance goes, I think this machine is the way to go if you don’t do professional
work every day or if you’re doing entry-level basic stuff, like editing youtube videos.
Or if you’re doing your work every single day or if your business depends on it, like
editing wedding videos, then I would honestly recommend just jumping to the 15” model
with dedicated graphics.
If you’re doing a lot of photo editing or programming, I think just getting 16GB of
RAM on this model will be a great choice for almost everyone.
And for the single fan, we didn’t really notice higher temps at all.
One difference we noticed between this and the dual-fan model was that the single fan
would keep blowing at max fan speed during longer tasks like exporting, while the dual-fan
would eventually slow down a bit after the temps came down, but as far as performance
itself, the single fan is completely fine.
Now for the speakers, I personally like to watch youtube videos, shows and movies on
my MacBook, so that’s actually the most important thing for myself, personally.
Now if you prefer to use headphones and you like to watch youtube videos on your phone
and shows on your TV, then the speaker difference won’t really matter much to you.
And in reality, the $1300 models speakers are still better than practically any Windows
laptop out there.
As for the SSD speed difference, even the slower speeds of the 128GB are nearly as fast
as a lot of the premium laptops out there, like Dell’s XPS, so it’ll be fine for
most people, so you should really just worry about the storage amount itself unless you
know you need faster speeds.
And finally, I think the factory 8GB of RAM will be okay for a lot of people, but I personally
love to keep a lot of Chrome tabs open, so if you’re like me, you’ll be much better
off with 16GB, and especially if you’re doing productivity tasks more than once or
twice a week.
For the ports, I’ve found that I don’t really use them that often, but even then,
it’s really convenient to be able to swap the charger to the other side, so it’s a
lot more convenient, and I also like to charge my phone using a USB-C to Lightning cable,
so that’s already maxing out two ports.
So if I needed to transfer some files, I’d need to unplug one of them if I only had two
ports.
So if you’re planning on actively using the Thunderbolt 3 ports like for connecting
an external display or working off of an external SSD, you probably would be better off going
for the $1800 model with four ports.
Now you could make it work with a Thunderbolt 3 hub off Amazon, but it’s not as convenient
to carry that around.
But if you’re a simple person who only needs those ports for charging and occasionally
connecting an external drive for some quick file transfers, then you should honestly just
be fine with 2 ports.
One last question we want to address that some of you may be asking is if its worth
buying a discounted 2018 4-port model instead of a lower end 2019 config.
The 2018 versions perform almost as good as the 2019’s in terms of CPU, but they do
have keyboards that have an older design.
Personally, if you were going to buy a $1500 256GB 2019 MacBook Pro and can score an older
4 thunderbolt model for up to $100 more we would make the jump since you also get better
speakers and faster SSD’s, but only if you can get 16GB of RAM on the 2018 model.
All in all, if you want to get access to macOS and not have to worry about performance issues
in the future, I think the 2019 base MacBook Pro for $1300 is the best value MacBook in
years, and I think almost everyone will be happy with it.
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