Is the MacBook Pro 16 with Apple’s new M1 chip worth all the hype?
Let’s find out in this review!
My configuration has Apple’s M1 Pro 10 core CPU with 16 core GPU cores and 16 gigs of
unified memory.
There’s also a 16” screen and 500 gig SSD, but most of the components can be changed
when ordering through the Apple store.
The MacBook Pro 16 is available with either space grey or silver finish, and I’ve got
space grey here.
The aluminum build feels amazingly solid, and the metal corners and edges don’t feel
sharp.
The laptop alone weighs about 2.15kg or 4.7lb, then 2.5kg or 5.5lb with the included 140
watt charger, not too heavy and definitely portable.
It’s fairly small for a 16” machine, smaller than a number of 15 inch gaming laptops I
typically test while also being on the thinner side.
This is in part due to the thin 6.5mm screen bezels on the sides and top.
The 16.2” Liquid Retina XDR Display is just Apple’s marketing for a HDR Mini LED screen
with 10,000 local dimming zones.
It’s a 14:9 panel with a random resolution and I measured excellent color gamut, it looks
quite nice.
Screen brightness was above 500 nits at maximum, however my tools are only capable of measuring
SDR content.
Tim at Hardware Unboxed measured Apple’s claimed 1600 peak brightness with HDR content.
I’ll link to his detailed MacBook screen test video in the description.
The screen has a 120Hz refresh rate with ProMotion enabled, however I measured it with a relatively
slow 23ms average grey-to-grey response time.
Now while this clearly isn’t a gaming laptop, I did still notice some blurriness at times
like when scrolling around on a web page.
The average result isn’t a whole lot different to other laptops though, obviously not quite
as fast as gaming laptops available for similar money, but alternatives like Dell’s XPS
17 down the bottom of this graph were a fair bit slower than the MacBook.
The screen has a glossy finish, and although I usually don’t like that due to reflections
showing up, it wasn’t really something I found myself noticing.
There’s no backlight bleed when displaying pure black, it’s just off, however you can
see some bloom or halo effect around the mouse cursor, but honestly during actual normal
use I never noticed this at all.
There’s a 1080p camera above the screen in the middle, but there’s no FaceID despite
the notch.
I’d say the camera looks above average, but what I thought was even better was the
microphones, they just sound great compared to any other laptop, and this is what it sounds
like while I’m typing on the keyboard.
Personally I didn’t have any problem with the Notch, but I’ve used a Pixel 3 XL for
years.
Your mouse cursor just goes behind it as if it was still screen space.
There are ways to make the whole top a black bar instead should you prefer, but the way
I see it it's just extra screen space for menu options.
Typing on the keyboard felt nice, the keys have a clicky tactile feel despite not pressing
down too far.
All keys and secondary functions are lit up with white backlighting, and brightness is
adjusted with a slider through software.
There’s an ambient light sensor which can be used to automatically adjust keyboard and
screen brightness, or you can disable that if you prefer.
There’s no room for a numpad and no touch bar at the top like previous generations,
instead the physical function keys are back.
The top right key is the power button and also the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, which
I found to work very fast and accurately.
There are front facing speakers on either side of the keyboard with a total of 6 speakers
all up.
My first thought when I accidentally started playing some random music video on YouTube
was “holy shit”.
They sound amazing compared to any other laptop I’ve ever tested, easily the best.
The touchpad is massive and mostly worked well.
I can see what all the hype is about, but honestly I don’t think it’s for me.
I just like something with a deeper feeling click, and I had random problems like not
being able to drag and drop files properly without disabling force click and haptic feedback,
but this just could be one of those things I’m too Windows user to be doing properly.
On the left from the back we’ve got the magsafe 3 port for charging, two Type-C Thunderbolt
4 ports and a 3.5mm audio combo jack which Apple says can support high-impedance headphones.
On the right there’s an SD card slot, a third Type-C Thunderbolt 4 port and HDMI 2.0
output.
Normally this wouldn't be that big of a deal, but Apple has been missing this sort of I/O
for years.
All three Type-C ports can also be used to charge the laptop, granted the 140 watt magsafe
charger isn’t exactly large.
For the most part magsafe works well, it connects with magnets and comes out if someone trips
over the cable without taking the laptop with it, but depending on the angle the cable is
pulled and amount of force applied the laptop can definitely still move quite a lot.
The light on the tip is orange if the laptop battery is charging, or green when fully charged.
All three Type-C ports also offer DisplayPort output.
The M1 Pro version I’ve got can run up to two external 6K 60Hz screens, while an upgrade
to M1 Max allows for this plus a third 4K screen.
The front has an indent in the center so you can easily get your finger in to open the
lid.
There’s almost no flex to the lid as it’s solid metal and the hinges felt solid too,
only extremely minor screen wobble when walking with the laptop.
The main chassis itself is also rock solid, one of the best built I’ve ever used.
It’s a bit easier to slide it around on a flat surface as the feet aren’t as grippy
as some other laptops, but this wasn’t actually an issue during normal use.
Getting inside requires removing 8 P5 screws.
In 200 plus laptops, Apple is the only company I’ve seen use these pentalobe screws, but
the iFixit kit I use, link in the description, had the right bit.
The 4 screws at the back are longer than the front, so keep track when reassembling.
Nothing in here is easily user upgradeable, despite how nice it looks, so you’ll need
to buy with the future usage in mind as you can’t just add more RAM later for example.
Of course this also means things are much harder to repair.
I’ve actually got this new graph where I attempt to give points to the amount of upgradeability
that’s possible, and it’s no surprise that the MacBook Pro 16 is right at the bottom
of the list.
I give a point if the laptop is easy to open, and while the bottom panel wasn’t too hard
to get off, I went with half a point due to the uncommon screw type.
It’s not clear who makes the Wi-Fi chip, but I recorded the slowest speed out of any
laptop tested so far.
Definitely usable, just not as fast as others I’ve used.
There are also speakers underneath towards the front on the left and right sides.
There’s space cut out presumably to allow sound to escape, but at times I found this
area to feel a little sharp depending on how I hold the laptop.
The MacBook Pro 16 is powered by a 100Wh battery, the biggest you can get in a laptop, and combined
with the power efficient M1 chip it lasted for almost 20 hours in my usual YouTube playback
test with the screen at half brightness and low power mode enabled.
This is an excellent result, and the longest I’ve ever recorded out of any laptop by
quite a large margin.
Optimized battery charging is enabled by default which slows down charge speed above 80% to
help improve battery longevity.
Let’s check out thermals next.
There aren’t any air intake vents underneath like most other laptops, I’m guessing the
side speaker holes double as intake, then warm air gets exhausted out of the vents below
the screen.
There aren’t any performance modes built in with the M1 Pro model that I’ve got,
but if you upgrade to the M1 Max chip you do get the option of enabling high power mode
for increased performance.
There’s no way of controlling fan speed by default, however I’ve installed TG Pro
which gives you some basic options, including the option to max out the fans for a cooler
but louder system.
At idle both the CPU and GPU were sitting in the low 30s while the laptop was completely
silent, we’ll have a listen to fan noise shortly.
If we run a combined CPU plus GPU stress test to represent a worst case, we’re now looking
at around 90 degrees Celsius on the CPU and low 80s for the GPU.
If I manually set the fans to max speed using TG Pro then we’re able to lower the temperatures
quite a bit.
This definitely isn’t required, as performance was the same in my testing both on auto fan
speed and with max, so I guess it just depends on how paranoid you are about higher temps.
CPU performance was quite good considering the thinner size of the machine.
The 10 core 10 thread M1 Pro was sitting between a number of 8 core 16 thread options from
both Intel and AMD, though these are now considered last generation.
For now I’ve just got one result from Intel’s new 12th gen up the top which is outperforming
everything by a fair margin both in terms of single and multi core performance.
Make sure you're subscribed for some upcoming comparisons between the M1 chip against AMD's
new Ryzen 6000 and it tells new 12th gen processors.
Where the MacBook absolutely destroys is when running the same test on battery power.
With the same selection of laptops as the last graph, it now moves up to third place,
only just slightly behind that far thicker and louder MSI GE76 in terms of multi-core
score.
This is an incredibly impressive result because the performance is essentially the same whether
it’s running on battery power or wall power, so both amazing battery run time and performance
on battery.
When just sitting there idle the palm rest and keyboard area were barely getting to the
mid 20 degrees Celsius, cooler than the usual 30 from other gaming laptops I normally test.
With the worst case CPU plus GPU stress test running, the palm rest was still comfortable,
only a little warm.
The middle of the keyboard was definitely warm now, but not hot to the touch.
With the fans maxed out we’re seeing a big change, around 10 degrees Celsius lower right
in the middle.
This was a big improvement, but higher fans means a louder system, let’s have a listen.
This is another seriously impressive result.
Even with a full on stress test, at stock without any custom software to modify the
fan speed the fans were barely audible.
I noticed this throughout all of my testing too, whether I was running Cinebench for half
an hour or my Adobe Premiere benchmarks, I could hardly even hear it.
It was quieter in these real world tasks than the worst case stress test we just listened
to, and even that wasn’t too bad.
As for manually setting the fan to maximum, personally I wouldn’t bother.
Honestly I’d just leave it on auto fan speed as it works great while being relatively quiet.
Alright I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how amazing the new M1 chips are for content
creators, so let’s find out how true that is.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark, and the MacBook would have taken
out first place if I didn’t just get Intel’s new 12th gen in for testing.
MSI’s larger GE76 with Intel’s top end 14 core 20 thread i9-12900HK CPU and Nvidia
RTX 3080 Ti graphics was doing the best, but it’s worth noting it also runs way louder.
Given the size and quietness of the MacBook, this is an extremely impressive result.
I normally also test Adobe Photoshop, but unfortunately right now the Puget Systems
benchmark only works with the x86 version, and given there is an M1 native version of
Photoshop available for this laptop it doesn’t really make sense to test the one that no
one really has a reason to use.
Likewise, unfortunately the Puget systems DaVinci Resolve benchmark doesn’t currently
work on M1, but I’ll probably end up making my own Resolve benchmark when I compare the
M1 Pro against both Intel 12th gen and AMD Ryzen 6000 processors in future comparison
videos.
So make sure that you’re subscribed for all that content.
Now that kind of leads me into software support.
For the most part, most of the applications I tested do have native M1 versions now, but
that wasn’t the case for everything.
Honestly it wasn’t really a problem because any older x86 applications just ran pretty
much automagically through the Rosetta 2 emulation layer.
You just open them like a normal program and it works as expected.
Now although all of the applications that I personally used during testing worked perfectly
fine on this laptop, that conversion with Rosetta 2 does use system resources - it’s
not for free.
So basically don’t expect optimal performance from applications that haven’t yet been
updated to support M1.
Now obviously this thing isn’t designed with gaming in mind, but apparently it’s
got a half decent GPU in it, so let’s see what it can do in some games.
I measured 48 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at max settings 1080p with the game’s built
in benchmark, so the same as a GTX 1650 Ti gaming laptop from a couple of years ago,
and slightly behind the even older GTX 1060.
There was some graphical artifacting during the test too which was a little distracting,
but I’d say it’s still certainly capable of some gaming, while of course the higher
tier and more expensive M1 Max should do even better given it has double the GPU core count.
Unfortunately most games just don’t have native M1 support because as mentioned this
isn’t exactly a gaming laptop so not exactly a big priority for developers I imagine.
But yeah this does also mean that most games will also be slowed down by the Rosetta 2
emulation layer.
While some games will at least run, don’t expect amazing performance.
This isn’t a gaming laptop, that’s what traditional gaming laptops are for.
The 512 gig SSD offers impressive read and write speeds, similar to the best PCIe Gen
4 options I’ve seen in Windows laptops.
The SD card speed was decent, not as fast as others as I’ve seen 200 megabytes a second
plus with other laptops.
The card sticks out quite a bit when inserted into the machine, so don’t do what I do
and accidentally bump it.
There’s no bootcamp possible with the new M1 models, so no option of running another
operating system like Windows or Linux natively.
As for using MacOS itself, well, I’ve been a Windows user for over 20 years now and I
had to Google search how to do a lot of basic tasks, way more than I’d like to admit.
Even after weeks of using the device I don’t feel like I ever fully got used to the software.
Maybe if I used it for more time or perhaps if I dropped Windows rather than trying to
use both at the same time, but yeah a few weeks of use and MacOS just isn’t for me
personally over Windows.
Now as you’ve probably been expecting, the MacBook Pro 16 definitely doesn’t come cheap.
Right now on Apple’s website we’re looking at $2500 USD for the base configuration that
I’ve got here.
You can upgrade the M1 chip for more GPU power in $200 increments, while the memory pricing
is approaching scam tier compared to how much memory costs for a regular laptop.
You can only go up to 64 gigs with the M1 Max chip, and you’ve also got the option
of storage upgrades.
Again don’t forget there’s no upgrading later, you’ve got to select your future
needs when buying, though you could at least add more space later with an external Thunderbolt
SSD.
Alright let’s summarize by considering both the good and the bad to help you decide if
you should spend all your hard earned cash on Apple’s new MacBook Pro 16.
Build quality of this thing is excellent, it’s easily one of the most solid, nice
feeling laptops I’ve ever used, despite it being relatively thin considering the high
levels of performance on offer.
The big screen looks great and this generation they’ve finally brought back popular I/O
like the SD card slot and HDMI port.
I don’t really understand why the notch is there, sure if they had Face ID to let
you log in I’d get it, but they don’t.
Battery life is on another planet, and performance when actually running unplugged is basically
the same as being connected, very impressive.
Although the Rosetta 2 emulation layer worked fantastically well, it still feels like we’re
in a bit of a transitional period while a number of applications aren’t yet updated
for native M1 support, so apps that are yet to be updated may not perform as well as they
otherwise could.
The M1 chip is clearly powerful, but it depends on the workload.
Sure it’s got GPU power, but I wouldn’t be looking at a MacBook for gaming for instance,
as again performance is lost from emulation, not to mention the slow screen response time.
That’s fine though as the MacBook isn’t made with gaming in mind, but if you want
to do a little on the side, then hey it might be possible depending on the specific game.
Where the MacBook really shines is in content creator workloads.
The screen looks great with high color gamut and gets bright, plus M1 native apps like
Adobe Premiere perform extremely well, so it’s no surprise to hear that so many content
creators have moved over to M1 hardware.
As is typically the case with Apple, all of this comes at a high cost.
If time is money and you’re a creative professional who is cool with MacOS and ideally your apps
have native M1 support, then I can definitely see the MacBook Pro 16 being worth its weight
in gold.
For most other people, honestly there are other options out there that may be cheaper
that’ll get the job done while also having more user upgradeability and reparability
options.
I’ll be comparing the M1 Pro chip in this laptop against AMD Ryzen 6000 and Intel 12th
gen processors in future videos, so make sure you’re subscribed for all of that upcoming
content, but for now I’ve already done some testing with Intel’s most powerful 12th
gen i9-12900HK processor in this video over here.
So I’ll see you in that one next!