is that a mac in your pants or are you just happy to see me we've got a total
of seven macbooks here and uh some are
bigger than the others but does a bigger laptop always mean
more performance apple's m1 pro and m1 max socs have
already strutted their stuff for us in the 14 inch form factor
now it's time to see the 16 inch
you'd be surprised how much difference two inches can make
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from the outside the 16-inch macbook pro is perhaps disappointingly an enlarged
version of the 14-inch there's no proportional in beginning of i o which
is a bummer if you were hoping to be able to ditch the type c hubs and type c
to a adapters that you have even worse we tried those type-c HDMI 2.1 adapters
4k 60 with HDR is the best you're going to get out of these for the time being
so you're effectively limited to HDMI 2.0 on all ports even on the 16-inch
models it's kind of lame but it's been suggested that it's an internal
bandwidth limitation from here though it's all positive or neutral starting
with the notch where because it's no larger than the smaller models the
16-inch display actually makes it practically disappear when you're focused on content there's also far less
opportunity for egregiously large menus like davinci resolves to be cut off
thanks to the larger menu bar which makes this an appealing choice for the
mac using professional finally the keyboard is no larger which is something
apple has always done as a matter of preference what we gain by keeping that
smaller keyboard form factor is a much larger trackpad and bigger speakers
which do in fact sound a bit better
there's a little more and tighter bass which is saying something considering
how good the 14 inch already sounds the obvious reason to buy the 16-inch
macbook of course is the larger version of the pro display xdr it's got the same
pixel density and brightness as the smaller model and looking at them side
by side it looks like apple matched the panels extremely well in other areas
like color and brightness too that should make anyone looking into the 14
inch models breathe a sigh of relief considering in the past smaller models
haven't always been given the same pedigree
when it comes to the vastness of the screen the 16 inch reminds me of how it
felt to sit in front of a 17 inch macbook back when they still existed
i don't have one of those to show you right now but here's my old 15.4 inch
for comparison the shrunken bezels really do help make it feel that much
bigger and i don't miss my desktop monitor nearly as much as i did with
this just like i don't miss my old jacket after getting the new swag it from
ltdstore.com flexible and thick
like i one day hope to be but there is one more major difference between the
new 14 and 16 inch models that we need to talk about
if you pop the hood wow they look shockingly similar don't they
almost like they took the 14 inch and just resized it in photoshop
and that means the cooler is proportionally much
larger and it sits inside all that extra thermal mass offered by the bigger
chassis this might just be the killer feature
for the 16-inch assuming of course we hit thermal bottlenecks on our 14-inch
testing as usual let's start with cinebench where it's obvious we haven't
been thermally constrained up until now m1 pro and m1 max in both form factors
share the same CPU cores after all and we get further confirmation with
geekbench and same deal with blender too where we've got some minor variation but
not much else the CPU cores on their own are simply not enough to saturate the
14-inch cooler so if your workloads are only taxing the CPU you may not see a
performance advantage with the 16-inch over the 14. it's when we move on to the
GPU testing that things get interesting final cut pro sees the m1 max picking up
an extra simultaneous prores stream or two over the 14 inch variants before
dropping any frames which hints that the extra GPU horsepower is in fact being
utilized here davinci resolve's render time gives us a
shocker the high-end 16-inch m1 max wraps up over a minute faster than the
14 and the low end m1 max is even faster
than the high end 14. so the max GPU cores are in fact enough to
saturate the 14 inch chassis strangely the 16 inch m1 pro has the opposite
result it runs slower than the 14-inch not just
in the export but in the timeline losing a frame per second
what appears to be happening here is that because apple's only spinning up
the fans once the chassis itself reaches a certain temperature
by the time the larger machine has heated up enough to activate the fans
the soc temperature is already so high that it has to throttle its performance
we don't see this on m1 max because they spin up the fans much sooner cinema 4d
redshift is your best bet for 3d modeling and rendering on apple silicon
right now thanks to its support for apple's metal API but unfortunately it
doesn't seem to hit the soc quite as hard as the previous test and so we see
less difference between the two sizes it seems like redshift simply needs more
optimization if it were fully utilized in the GPU it should be saturating the
cooler and throttling on the 14-inch like we saw with resolve geekbench is
more of the same with a mild increase in opencl but roughly run to run variants
in metal again if it were fully utilizing the GPU we should see some
throttling with this fan profile even though this is a short benchmark whoa
hey future Anthony here capital f capital a remember how i said cinema 4d
was your best bet for 3d rendering turns out i lied the blender 3.1 alpha just
got updated with metal rendering support on apple silicon in monterey i couldn't
let this video go up without testing that out could i
the m1 is completely destroyed by the m1 pro and m1 max which we might expect
from doubling the number of GPU cores twice
but there's an anomaly the 1016 m1 pro consistently runs a little slower than
the 8 and 14 core model this is probably down to the alpha
status of the new renderer so take with salt as needed overall this is a great
showing until we introduced the zephyrus m16
in the bmw render its cuda result is 16 seconds faster while the optics renderer
runs twice again as fast that laptop costs less than two thousand
dollars but with blender we have one
more trick up our sleeves gooseberry this test requires 12 gigabytes of RAM
to run and this is where apple silicon shines thanks to its unified memory
layout the zephyrus in both cuda and optics modes is faster than the m1 pro
models but only just m1 max trounces it easily with over a 6
minute lead on the 32 core models finally we found something apple's GPU
is seriously good at without needing any extra hardware like the
decoding and encoding blocks let's take these numbers with some salt though the
implementation is very early and the devs say that performance optimizations
are forthcoming okay back to the video we get a better look at this when we
look at gaming where the 16-inch m1 max managed a higher frame rate than the
zephyrus m16s rtx 3060 a first for apple
silicon in all of our testing that's a good 15 FPS higher than the 14
inch model can handle too suggesting that once again
the max GPU is more than capable of overwhelming the 14's cooler although
the pro is well within the capabilities of its cooler and sees no improvement
between the two sizes cs go does see a small but measurable improvement on the
higher end m1 max as well suggesting that the little bit of extra horsepower
coupled with the little bit of extra thermal headroom lets it squeeze that little bit of extra
speed out of an otherwise rosetta bottleneck title as messy as all this is
mac gaming isn't as crazy as you might think so get
subscribed because we've got a video on why coming soon but what if we
sidestepped rosetta and used an apple silicon native app
the dolphin emulator running super mario sunshine fits the bill but we're still
not hitting the cooler that hard which suggests that there's another bottleneck
probably in the translation from the older opengl API to apple's metal API
we'd expect it to hit both the CPU and GPU hard because we're running the
emulator without a frame rate cap but they're not so we see little difference
between the sizes again which brings us to the overarching theme of this testing
thermals we fired up redshift and blender simultaneously for this one and
while redshift isn't fully utilizing the GPU it should be more than enough to
bring it up to temperature sure enough even our low end m1 pro 14
choked here maintaining the high 90s on the CPU cores and peaking at 100 degrees
throughout the run apple as always seems
to favor throttling instead of ramping the fans up even at that 100 degree mark
the fan speed was merely fifty percent fun fact all of the m1 pro models choked
hard enough to outright crash the redshift render every time
and in one case it froze the machine entirely with a black screen
given the thermal results i don't think that it's overheating necessarily
perhaps there's a memory bandwidth issue causing contention on the lower end
chips or maybe there's a power delivery issue none of the m1 max models
exhibited this behavior so make of that what you will the top end
14 inch m1 max model CPU cores were routinely allowed to hit 100 degrees
while the redshift rendering performance suffered greatly the fans are a little
more aggressive than m1 pro at around 75 at peak but
that's a small comfort when you're still leaving performance on the table
the 16 inch models on the other hand all performed admirably the top end soc may
have hit 100 degrees a lot but the fans barely hit 50 percent and the redshift
render only took about 10 longer than when we were running it on its own
suggesting that it's only being mildly throttled less so than the 14 inch m1
max interestingly the GPU clusters weren't allowed to hit the 90 degree
mark on any of our macbooks in this test which hints that apple's thermal
management is aiming for somewhere around 90 degrees is the upper limit for
the soc itself taken together this suggests that with the fans cranked up
the 16 inch would actually be totally capable of handling a combined load like
this without batting an eye sadly this
isn't the default behavior but you can force it to max speed using a
third-party program like tg pro surface
temperatures were also significantly lower on all of our 16-inch models
although the exhaust temperatures were still in the 50s crucially the hot spot
is well under 50 degrees on the highest end 16 inch and the underside is just a
hair over 40 at its hottest which means that even if you're stressing the
machine you're not going to be burning your pants off if it's in your lap
apple's done a fantastic job managing skin temperature on this generation of
macbooks and again if they're a little more aggressive with the fan they can
have their cake and eat it too the noise isn't even that bad imo at a 200 premium
over a similarly equipped 14 inch macbook pro the 16 inch models represent
a reasonable option if you value screen real estate but as we've seen
the thermal constraints of the 14 inch chassis rarely come into play until you
upgrade to the m1 max so choosing which size you get for an m1 pro mostly comes
down to form factor not performance in fact if you're okay trading storage
for screen size the base model 16 inch is the same price as the 14 for the same
soc however i don't think i could recommend less than one terabyte of storage for a
professional class machine even over the course of our benchmarking
for these videos we ended up running out of storage
your mileage may of course vary apple's engineers are good at their jobs
since abandoning the pursuit of ever thinner designs
they pulled off a solid chassis with good cooling and paired it with next
level battery life thanks to apple silicon
while we're still in the transition phase of the rollout it's almost complete and there's reason to be
optimistic about apple silicon maybe not quite as optimistic as apple is not yet
anyway but optimistic nonetheless it's expensive for what you're getting that
much is clear only NVIDIA editing does apple silicon truly shine the way apple
claims it does and far cheaper pc notebooks currently outperform it in
other tasks like 3d modeling and gaming but the entire m1 pro and max lineup has
a unique combination of performance efficiency and endurance rolled into a
form factor that's pleasing to use with fewer compromises than we're used to
you're also getting a display that's unmatched in the pc world speakers that
are legitimately some of the best in the industry and a tightly integrated
ecosystem that speaks to many it's really a combination that no one
else is in a position to match right now and
let's be honest if any of that is a deal maker for you
as it is for me then you're probably already eyeing one
of these new macbooks and if anything remotely resembling the
apple logo makes you recoil and disgust
you're probably looking for reasons to hate it instead i'm simply not going to
change your mind but regardless of what your feelings about them are
apple is moving in the right direction and this is a major step towards what
could be a brighter future for the industry after all wherever apple goes the pc
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guys go check out our initial review of the 14-inch m1 pro macbooks if you
haven't already so you can get more context for today's 16-inch review