It’s been about 6 months since Apple released their new MacBook Pros,
and I’ve not only been putting them through a lot of testing here in the office,
but also at home because I finally upgraded from my old 2018 Intel 15” model to the new
16” M1 Max MacBook Pro, and I definitely have some thoughts after 6 months, to say the least.
And now that we’ve finally released our 1-month review of Apple’s new Mac Studio, I can now
give you guys my thoughts on which machine is the better buy, the MacBook or the Studio..
But first, I wanted to share my at-home experience
with my new 16” MacBook Pro, so let’s jump right into that.
First of all, one of the biggest advantages I noticed going from my old 15” intel model
was the increase in battery life, since I’m
now finally able to use it for multiple sessions without having to plug it in.
And my absolute favorite new feature is the new display because it has multiple advantages over
previous MacBook displays. Like the fact that it comes with
the super-slim bezels because that’s something I notice every time I use it, and after 6 months,
the notch has literally had zero negative impact on my experience. I barely even notice it anymore.
But the main game-changer for everyday use has been the 120hz ProMotion display because now that
it’s been 6 months, Chrome and Safari now properly support 120hz browsing, and everything just feels
so smooth and responsive because of it, perfectly matching my 120hz experience on my iPhone.
And not even looking at ProMotion, the web browsing itself is super snappy compared to
old Intel Macs because of the M1 Max chip having really high single-core performance,
so there are no stutters or issues whatsoever, especially thanks to
the super-fast 32GB of unified memory and the equally fast built-in SSDs.
I also basically never hear the fans on this new MacBook Pro which is an awesome change compared
to my old Intel MacBook Pro which would sometimes spin up the fans while even just browsing the web.
Now another one of my favorite features on the new MacBook Pro
is the absolutely incredible speaker system that has no graduated from laptop speaker level
to sounding like an actual set of dedicated desktop speakers.
Now in terms of performance, I honestly think I went a bit overkill by going with the 32-core
M1 Max chip because I don’t think I’ve gotten even close to maxing it out in my workloads.
For example, I often use my MacBook Pro to create thumbnails at home
when we’re falling a bit behind at the office, and it has absolutely zero issues in Photoshop,
and I also did a bit of video editing, and I haven’t ever felt like my mind
is working faster than the MacBook Pro, so the performance is great!
Now the reason I got the 32-core M1 Max model was first of all for future-proofing and second
of all because I wanted to make sure I had the absolute most graphics performance for gaming
to try and take advantage of the 120hz display, but now that I’m a father of two,
I don’t really play that often anymore.. So I honestly think I would’ve been completely fine
with the base M1 Pro chip because it’s enough to handle everything I’m currently doing on it.
So my experience after 6 months has been absolutely amazing, and it’s the happiest
I’ve ever been with a single Mac product, except for one issue: the mini-LED display.
Yes, the new display can reach up to 1600 nits of brightness while viewing or editing HDR content,
which is awesoe, but when you’re using it normally like when you’re browsing the web,
it’s limited to just the standard 500 nits.
But with the new Vivid app for Mac, you can get the brightness up to 1000 nits
all the time which is super useful for outdoor use or any bright environment,
and no, they’re not sponsoring this video.
Now my main issue with the mini-LED display is blooming, where you can
see a glow behind bright objects on the display, especially in the dark.
Now while you’re looking directly at the display, you can’t really notice it,
but the blooming problem became annoying to me when I watched the movie Dune with
my wife while on the couch, and I was looking at the display from the side..
And that’s where the blooming problems became really apparent.
But other than that, the mini-LED display has been great,
so overall, my 6-month experience with my new 16” MacBook Pro has been awesome, but now let’s
switch over to a more high-performance oriented outlook and compare it to the new Mac Studio
which can now be packed with the M1 Ultra chip, being the main advantage over the MacBook Pro.
First of all, the base price of the Mac Studio for only $1,999
is very impressive because it comes with the M1 Max chip,
which is exactly how much it costs for the cheapest M1 Pro chip in the 14” MacBook Pro.
But to make the comparison as fair as possible between the Mac Studio and the more expensive
16” MacBook Pro, we configured both of them with exactly the same specs,
and the MacBook Pro ends up being $1,100 more expensive than the Mac Studio.
However, you do have to factor in the fact that you’ll still need to buy a mouse, a keyboard,
and a display for the Mac Studio which could get expensive very quickly if you decide to go
for Apple’s own Magic accessories and new Studio Display which together come out to around $1900.
But just to give the Mac Studio the benefit of the doubt, let’s give it a much less expensive display
like the 27” Asus ProArt 4K display that of course doesn’t match up in terms of the 120hz refresh
rate, but it’s a good option, and then we’ll add another $100 for a basic mouse and keyboard.
And now, with those changes, the MacBook Pro is now $500 more expensive than this
Mac Studio setup, $3100 instead of $2600, so let’s get into the performance comparison.
We tested various workflows and apps from all kinds of benchmarks like Cinebench R23,
graphics tests like GFXBench and a lot of real-world tests
like in Xcode, music production in Logic Pro, photo editing in Adobe Lightroom Classic
and various video editing tests and to our surprise, the MacBook Pro actually beat out
the Mac Studio in a bunch of different tests which didn’t make sense at all.
So it’s pretty clear that Apple isn’t allowing the M1 Max Mac Studio to perform even an
ounce better than the M1 Max MacBook Pro, which is extremely disappointing!
So with that said, paying $500 more for the MacBook Pro setup actually seems like the
better value because you can actually take it on the go, wherever you want to, which is
a MASSIVE value-add compared to the Mac Studio which absolutely must be connected to the wall.
Now of course, the biggest downside of the MacBook Pro is that you can’t
get the M1 Ultra chip which is currently only available in the Mac Studio,
and it’s now the main reason so many people are thinking about buying the Mac Studio.
So here are the specs of the machines we’re comparing, with the $4,000
Mac Studio with the binned 48-core GPU and 64GB of RAM, and by adding in the $600 accessories,
it is now $1100 more expensive than the 32-core GPU MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM.
The first point I want to make is that everyday performance for common things like web browsing
barely improves by 2% because basic tasks are based on single-core performance
which doesn’t really change much between the M1 Max and the Ultra.
Now multi-core performance is where the Ultra shines because you’re getting
91% more power for 31% more cash which is a great investment!
But translating that to real-world performance, the Xcode programming benchmark was only 22%
faster because the M1 Max was already incredibly fast
due to the unified memory, so it’s not really worth it for programmers.
But the real winner in terms of performance was exporting photos in Lightroom Classic,
where the Ultra was almost twice as fast, making the extra $1100 very worth it,
but in terms of actual editing smoothness, the M1 Max was already perfectly smooth for us.
Now we ended up creating a panorama using Lightroom and here, the Ultra was only 23%
faster so it wasn’t really worth it.
Now moving over to the graphics side, in terms of RAW GPU power in 3D Mark Wild Life Extreme,
the Ultra got around 45% more FPS which honestly isn’t too bad for spending $1100 more.
But going into some real-world stuff like the BMW Cycles render Blender, it was only 20%
faster which I honestly don’t think is worth the extra 31%
cash because you’re also sacrificing portability with the Mac studio.
But the absolute worst results that we found were in terms of video editing,
where exporting common H.264 and H.265 videos led to basically no gains at all because
apparently, the extra set of media engines in the Ultra cannot be utilized at all right now.
And in terms of playback smoothness, the 24-core M1 Max already ran 15 Stream of 4K
HEVC footage with extra effects without dropping frames.
We even stacked a huge amount of effects, color corrections, LUTs,
masks, and animated titles on a single stream of Canon R5 footage and it didn’t drop any frames,
showing that almost nobody will be able to get extra playback smoothness from the M1 Ultra.
So because of that, we decided to export 8K Red RAW which doesn’t support encoders and decoders,
and the M1 Ultra Mac Studio was only 14% faster, definitely not worth the extra $1100.
It was only when we exported a 5-minute 4K ProRes RAW video to ProRes that we finally
started seeing the encoders and decoders being used properly, giving us a 33% improvement.
And then in our final 8K Canon RAW to 4K HEVC torture test, the M1 Ultra was only 22% faster,
which is just so disappointing compared to our expectations.
If you’re wondering why the Ultra isn’t performing so well, it’s because the GPU
has a major hardware bottleneck that limits the top-end performance and slows everything down,
and unfortunately, this isn’t gonna change until apps get optimized
or until Apple releases the M2 Ultra with a fix for the hardware issue.
So with all of that said, I would honestly say that the M1 Ultra isn’t worth it for the
majority of people out there, and because of that, the M1 Max MacBook Pro just leveled up
in terms of how much value I think it has, and I’m so happy I made this purchase around 6 months ago,
especially since I’ve been enjoying so many of its other features.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed my 6-month review of the 16” MacBook Pro,
and if you did, click that circle above to subscribe for more videos like this one.
Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next video!