I bought every single 14 inch
and 16 inch MacBook combination
and settled on a fully upgraded 16 inch MacBook Pro
as my new main computer.
I'm talking M1 Max chip, 10 core CPU,
32 core GPU and 64 gigabytes of RAM.
Basically the most powerful MacBook Apple has ever made.
And after doing a ton of real life workflow testing
and running multiple benchmarks,
last week I ended up returning it for a less powerful model.
So what's the reason, you may ask?
Well, it was just too powerful for my workflow
and I was actually wasting my hard earned dollars
on unnecessary upgrades.
Let me explain.
Also, big thanks to Hostinger for sponsoring this video,
more on that later.
Okay, so traditionally I've always tried
to max out the hardware
when buying performance oriented laptops.
So for example, the 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros,
or even a Windows gaming laptop,
like the Razor Blade lineup.
There's two main reasons for this, firstly future-proofing
and secondly, maximizing performance, for example.
Now, if you've got a really demanding 3D application
or 4K DaVinci Resolve render, easy,
just throw more GPU power or RAM at it, right?
Well, usually I would have said yes,
but now it's a little bit more complicated.
All right, so let's have a look at my current workflow
and compare a base model 14 inch M1 Pro MacBook
to a fully upgraded 16 inch M1 Max MacBook,
starting off with video editing.
Here's a 33 minute 4K multicam timeline on Final Cut Pro.
Now, if we look at render times,
you can see a significant difference between the two
with the fully upgraded 16 inch MacBook
massively outperforming the 14 inch M1 Pro based model.
This is of course an impressive difference.
But when I render a video,
I usually just walk away and go get a drink or something,
or do some light work in Photoshop
while I'm waiting for the render to finish.
I'm not just sitting there for 15 minutes
looking at the progress bar.
And if you think about it, rendering a video is like 1%
of the overall video editing process.
You're going to spend 99% of your time on the timeline,
cutting clips, color grading,
and actually editing the video.
So let's take a closer look at this part of my workflow.
On the left is a base model 14 inch M1 Pro MacBook.
And on the right is the fully upgraded,
16 inch M1 Max MacBook.
Now, I have embraced a smarter, not harder mindset
with my workflow and as such, have switched to recording
in ProRes wherever possible and not DNxHR or H.264
like I used to, when I predominantly used a Windows PC.
Now, this means I can take advantage
of the specific ProRes chips on the M1 Pro and Max.
And as you can see, I'm using multicam
with three streams of 4K video with color grading,
transitions and 3D charts playing back in real time.
Playback is really smooth, there's no dropped frames.
And I honestly couldn't tell a difference
between either model.
And this is the most important thing for me while editing,
being able to just edit the video well.
I don't want dropped frames, program crashes,
slow playback, et cetera.
And as you've just seen,
while actually editing this timeline,
I couldn't tell a major difference
between the two MacBook models
despite the 1900 US dollar price difference.
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on GPU, CPU or RAM upgrades.
They won't have any noticeable impact on performance.
And in my opinion,
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Now, I understand not everyone is a video editor
or web developer.
Some of you guys are coders,
artists or architects, for example.
So your workflows might be completely different to mine.
So let's take a look at Blender, for example.
Again, sure, you'll see a big difference in render times,
but actually creating the scene and playing it back,
often you won't notice the difference.
And this is why I encourage you to do your own research
into how specific upgrades might influence your workflow.
Everyone's workflow is different and as a result,
so is the specific device
and upgrades you should purchase.
So there's a couple of reasons
why I think the less powerful M1 Pro
and M1 Max configurations can still perform
at such an insanely high level.
And it's all to do with working smarter, not harder,
like I mentioned it before,
Apple isn't just throwing power hungry CPUs
or massive graphics cards into these laptops
and using brute force to achieve better results.
The new Intel Alder Lake CPUs.
So what are they doing?
Well, here's a few examples.
Using too much RAM and need to use swap memory.
Sure, macOS just swaps to the insanely fast internal SSD
with speeds of up to 7.4 gigabytes per second,
during an EV Blender render
or previewing an After Effects animation.
Okay, here's 200 gigabytes per second
of memory bandwidth available for that on the M1 Pro.
Now guys, quick sanity check.
Before I start sounding like too much of an Apple fanboy,
there's still a lot of scenarios
where equivalently priced Windows laptops
will destroy these new MacBooks,
for example, 3D rendering in a lot of programs,
such as Blender, and of course gaming, no surprises there.
But I think we've finally reached a point
where we're seeing companies like Apple design these
really optimized little sub-systems, if I can call it that.
For example, the ProRes accelerators or unified memory
that many people can really start to take advantage of.
We've seen this in the past, for example, NVIDIA's CUDA.
So it's great to see Apple bring a similar kind of mindset
into their MacBook lineup.
All right, so after all of my testing
and all of the benchmarking,
which laptop did I personally settle on?
Well, to be quite honest,
I could actually get away with just a base model,
14 inch M1 Pro if my budget was constrained,
but I'll be using this device as my main computer
and doing some fairly intense workflows,
plus as it's a business expense,
I can justify spending a fair amount on a new device.
So I opted for a 16 inch M1 Max with a 24 core GPU
and 32 gigabytes of RAM for 3,299 US dollars,
a saving of $600 compared to the fully upgraded version
that I just returned.
Now, I don't think I'll ever be able
to take advantage of the extra eight GPU cores
and certainly not the extra 32 gigabytes of RAM,
with the previous model of Mac.
I've also got a lot of videos
comparing the different upgrade options,
for example, eight core CPU versus 10 core CPU,
16 versus 32 gigs of RAM.
If you're interested in those videos,
make sure you check out the channel for them.
Now, with that extra 600 US dollars I have,
a great place to re-invest that
is going to be upgrading the internal SSD, I think,
but I'm still deciding on either the two terabyte
or four terabyte SSD.
Either one is going to make both my bank account
and myself cry, but at least I don't have
to carry an external SSD everywhere I go.
So I guess even with that, there is a silver lining.
Anyway, guys, hopefully you enjoyed this video.
Let me know down below if you have any questions,
but apart from that, I'll catch you in the next one.