As someone who does creative work every single day i was super excited when apple first announced the
mac studio i thought for sure that it would be the big replacement for my macbook pro and
that i would not have to deal with dongles and loud fan noises and burning my legs
i thought it would replace it but after using the mac studio the base model for about six days now i
don't know if i'm quite as impressed as i thought it would be so i've been using the 14-inch macbook
pro with the m1 max chip for the past several months and it's been a beast it's been everything
i could have asked for and then some i mean it really rips through video editing photo editing
anything i throw its way it handles it as it should for almost four thousand dollars
but now that we have a machine with much better thermal optimization and that same powerful m1 max
chip how could the max studio not outperform the macbook pro and that's exactly where i
was surprised too so i started this comparison off with a standard disk speed benchmark test so you
can see the scores here from the macbook pro where a 5700 on the right and about a 5400 on the read
that was about the best i saw for that now for the mac studio it was about a 4700 right so a thousand
under the macbook pro but a 5500 on the read so slightly higher on the read speeds so the macbook
pro performed better with the benchmark test but i wanted to see how this kind of translated into
real world usage so i transferred a 125 gigabyte file from my external ssd to the desktop on each
and you can see here the macbook pro completed that in 2 minutes and 48 seconds whereas the mac
studio took 3 minutes and 11 seconds to transfer that same file so this was also pretty surprising
to me because i did not expect to see a 20 plus second difference between these two now keep in
mind the macbook pro does have double the ram of the mac studio but still i was pretty surprised by
this result now as i mentioned a minute ago one of the big advantages that the mac studio has
is that it has better thermal optimization which means you're going to be able to run
tasks harder and for longer and those fans in the macbook pro are pretty loud i mean you could hear
it from across the room whereas the mac studio has a fan a continuous fan that's just always
running but you cannot hear it unless you just have a silent office like if you don't
have anything else going on in the in the room you know you're gonna be able to hear the fans
but if you have anything going on or if you're talking you can't really hear it over yourself
talking or over music or over videos playing and things like that it's just very faint and in the
background which i love also i was not able to get those fans to kick up no matter what i
did all the benchmarks i ran everything i could not get the fans to kick up on this mac studio
so yeah that's what the fan noise sounds like but i did also run a few more benchmarks that i wanted
to talk about as well so i did run a geekbench 5 test and you can see here on the macbook pro
i scored a 1782 on the single core and a 12 341 on the multi-core whereas the max studio got a 1714
on the single core and a 12 401 on the multi-core and then i also ran a cinebench test and you can
see here the macbook pro on the multi-core got a 12 309 and a 15 34 on the single core whereas
the max studio got a 12 360 on the multi-core and a 1489 on the single core so in both tests
the macbook pro won and the single core and the studio one and the multi-core but once again
how does that translate to real life how is it going to actually affect the tasks that you do
on a day-to-day basis and that's why i wanted to test out the video editing and exporting since
that's going to be the number one task that i do on these computers that is extremely important
for me so i want to test out the video editing and exporting and final cut pro alright so we
just finished up exporting the video here on the macbook pro and you can probably hear those fans
kicking in the background they're really kicking right now we're rendering in the background and
that's what's causing those fans to really kick up you may even be able to hear it over
my voice in this video but yeah so we finished up exporting it took about 19 minutes and 45 seconds
so running through the timeline was pretty smooth when i switched it over it was on and
better performance at first and i switched it over to better quality it was a little bit lacking it
didn't show the still images right here on every clip right away so we'll see if the mac studio
can do better than that but that's a pretty fast time 19 minutes 45 seconds for a 25 minute video
that has a lot of different blurs and titles and different things like that going on all right so
we're over on the mac studio and as you can see it took 21 minutes flat to export that same video and
it is very quiet i mean there are no fan noises whatsoever it did finish up rendering but even
when it was rendering after the export there was no fan noise it was just that same continuous fan
very quiet whereas the macbook pro i could still hear the fans running from across the office but
everything was fine here i mean there's really nothing i could say much different from the
macbook pro i did think that the previews for the images came up faster when i switched from better
performance to better quality it was quicker to go through on the actual timeline here on
the mac studio but it was slightly slower in the exporting all right so now let's test out some raw
photo editing here so i'm going to pull this file into photoshop and as you can see here i'm just
going to do an auto at first i'm going to adjust some of the brightness and the highlights and
things like that then i'm going to go over here and add a brush in so i'm going to go to this
try on my own we're going to go to brush we're going to not show overlay and we're going to
change some things up here we're going to change like the contrast the highlights
we're going to drop the shadows a little bit the whites we're going to do all that and see
if there's any lag at all when we put this brush up right here because i always have trouble
editing raw photos on the macbook pro so i want to see if there's a difference in these two so
i'm just going to go over here let's raise that exposure up a little bit so we can see it better
so i'm not seeing any lag so far like i get on the macbook pro let's see if that changes as i move on
so no it's popping up right away everywhere i put this brush so pretty impressive on
the mac studio right here even though we have the same chip i'm not seeing as much lag as i do with
the macbook pro alright so we're switching over to the macbook pro here we have the same file we're
going to pull that in to photoshop and see if there's any difference if there's any type of lag
when i do those brushes we're going to try to do the same thing so we're just going to go to auto
we're going to adjust this a little bit right here going to add some noise reduction
and now we're going to go ahead and add in some brush layers so we're going to go ahead and do
brush turn off the overlay adjust this a little bit we're just going to do what i normally do
for my videos and see if there's any type of lag so yeah you can see here there's some lag
with my mouse right here you can see it's very laggy and sometimes i can't even press
on the menu items up top and also i can't open up anything else as you can see there you'll hear my
clicks in the background because i'm using an actual mouse on this computer right now but you
can see definitely some lag there on the macbook pro i did not have that at all with the mac studio
and since there's such a big difference in the photo editing whereas there's not really
a difference in anything else i'm starting to think that it's something to do with maybe some
cache files or something to do with you know adobe i'm not sure but i cleared out everything
before testing this i cleared all the cache files i cleared everything and it still lags here on the
macbook pro for some reason and then finally in terms of web browsing both performed about the
same they both bogged down a little bit and slowed up a little bit when i loaded up a ton of youtube
videos on about 30 different tabs that's when i started to notice a little bit of a slowdown of
course the fans kicked on on the macbook pro but they did not on the mac studio so the mac studio
still performed a little bit better in terms of the lag because it didn't have you know any
kind of throttling going on but there's really hardly any difference at all when it comes to
day-to-day tasks the main difference is going to be in those hardcore tasks like the 8k you know
rendering aka video exporting 3d rendering and things like that that's where the mac studio is
really going to shine so hopefully that gives you some insight as to the performance of these two
machines but the reality is that's only half of the equation the other half is the design
and the convenience because the reality is if you work in a studio or if you buy these machines for
your employees the design and the convenience are going to play a massive role in the machine
you decide to use and buy and the mac studio has already made my life much easier in just one week
and i say this because number one we have an sd card slot on the front of the machine which is
extra convenient and such a big deal for creatives who pop their sd card in and out of there
multiple times a day i no longer have to do any arm gymnastics to stick the sd card into the side
of the macbook and avoid hitting my hand on the usbc to usba dongle so that's nice and speaking of
dongles we don't have to use the dongle on the mac studio because we have two usb a ports in the back
so of course if you use more than two usb a ports you might need a dongle but for me i only needed
two and i don't have to have the dongle and now i don't have to reach my arm all the way around
to stick my sd card into the slot which again both of those huge wins a huge difference in
convenience especially when you're doing it every single day oh and we also have those
two usbc ports on the front of the mac studio as well which are very convenient if you wanted
to plug in your phone real quick to charge or if you need to charge up your mouse or keyboard
you could just do that right there very easily so yeah it's really just the small things that
make a big difference especially when you're using a machine like this for 12 plus hours a day like i
am and like pretty much the main demographic for this machine is which is people who use this in
a studio environment which are probably working long days so these things are going to make a big
difference to you but that leads me to the next thing which is pricing and which one i think is
better for you to buy so the base model max studio is two thousand dollars and it comes
with 32 gigabytes of ram and a 512 gigabyte ssd while the base model m1 max macbook pro is 3 100
and it comes with 32 gigabytes of ram as well but double the storage at one terabyte for that
ssd and i was also using the 64 gigabyte of ram version in this video that's one i have which
was an extra 400 but the point is the macbook pro is gonna be the one for you if you travel
often and you need a powerhouse machine with you on the go to edit videos render whatever you need
such a powerful device for if you travel often with it of course the macbook pro is going to be
the one for you you do also get the amazing liquid retina xdr display connected to the macbook at all
times so you don't need an external display like you do with a mac studio which is also a big plus
also the mouse and keyboard you don't get that with the mac studio either but you do with the
macbook but i will say that if you don't need a ton of power on the go if you don't need a super
mega workhorse on the go then the base model max studio is actually a really really good value
especially if you edit videos in 4k and you might eventually edit an 8k of course the mac studio is
going to be great because you're going to be able to push that machine for a lot longer without any
type of throttling now again for everyday tasks there's not really going to be a big difference
so if you're not into big 8k editing if you're not into 3d rendering and things like that the base
model mac studio is going to be perfectly fine for you of course the macbook pro even the m1 pro
macbook pro is going to be enough for you you don't even need the m1 max macbook pro if you
don't do a lot of very intensive things like video editing and you know 3d rendering and things like
that but we're only talking about the m1 max and the mac studio i think mac studio is a great value
especially if you are not planning to be mobile and on the go often and i cannot finish this
video without talking about the studio display because if you want to upgrade your display
along with your computer i would recommend the studio display it is much more impressive than i
originally wanted to admit and i've been using the lg ultrafine 5k for a while now but this one just
looks so much better and more premium with that aluminum finish compared to the plastic finish on
the ultra fine and it does also get 100 nits brighter than the lg ultra fine and the colors
and the saturation are also just better i mean plus i don't have to look at that lg branding
on the front it's just a cleaner more premium look and honestly for sixteen hundred dollars
i'm in the minority that just doesn't think this is a bad price for what you get i mean
it's an apple tax you know it's going to be expensive it looks expensive it looks amazing
it matches with the mac studio and matches with a very modern design the lg just looked outdated
i love this monitor i really do so all in all the mac studio is great and if i was not somebody who
needed to go overboard with every single computer purchase i make i would probably just stick with
the m1 max max studio the two thousand dollar base model is going to be more than enough for
ninety percent of people who are even looking at this i mean the 10 percent who are like me who
really want to have the best of the best and need to squeeze that extra 30 seconds out of
their export times then of course you're probably going to want to go for the m1 ultra and that is
the reason i'm going to be returning this for the m1 ultra but i think once i get that m1 ultra in
studio and start testing it it's probably going to make me say bye bye to my m1 max macbook pro
but that's for another video oh and before i return the m1 max max studio i'm also going
to be seeing if the m1 ultra mac studio is worth double the price if you want to see that make sure
to subscribe you might also find one of these two videos interesting right here as well take care