apple has a problem see these the new M1
MacBook Pro and MacBook Air are outstanding their performance almost
lives up to Apple's extraordinary claims their look and feel is reassuringly
Apple grade their battery life is simply put exemplary and the transition from
x86 to ARM so far at least has gone
shockingly smoothly minus you might say those don't really sound like problems
and they're not for you do you got to pay attention I said apple has a problem
cuz it's going to be really hard to one up what they've done
here when Apple unveiled their first Army equipped MacBooks we were surprised
by the port selection to say the least just two USB type C's might be nothing
new for the MacBook Air but there's no high-end option available for the pro
which until now had options for four now this appears to be due to the M1 so's
limited IO capabilities which also explains why you're limited to a single
external display unless you turn to display link adapters that may not be a
deal breaker for these classes of machines but it's worth mentioning
regardless what's interesting though is that while we did determine in our Mac
Mini review that you cannot expand that device using an external graphics card
we followed up our testing with a 10 gig network card and found that when we ran
that in our Razer corx the Thunderbolt
like external PCI Express functionality was working just fine so it's definitely
down to just a GPU compatibility thing
the magic keyboard style switches remain far superior to the fatally flawed
butterfly switches that were found on all but the most recent Intel MacBooks
since 2016 and both the air and the pro are an absolute Delight to typon and
offer quick biometric authentication through the touch ID sensor in the power
button the only difference in the keyboard is the touch bar love it or
hate it you're not getting one if you buy an M1 air and you are definitely
getting one if you Pony up the extra $300 for the pro and that difference in
price it's a pretty tough pill to swallow when you consider how close
these machines appear on paper other than the touch bar but the keyword is of
course close there are some differences
aside from its lack of active the Baseline MacBook Air only has seven GPU
cores with the upgraded 8 core version like ours costing an extra 50 bucks if
you factor in the cost of the bigger SSD that it also includes that kind of makes
it a sure why not upgrade if you've got any desire for 512 gigs or more storage
but if not you're just going to have to swallow it anyway if you need the extra
GPU power that you can otherwise only get with the pro and this inflexibility
in configurations is one of the prices that we pay for the tight integration of
Apple's M1 so same goes for memory it
starts at 8 gigs and only goes up to 16 gigs for either of these machines
presumably because adding more dram packages to the current M1 would
increase cost or power consumption by too much for this class of product they
do have a history of worrying about such things after all and besides if the
performance we saw in our M1 Mac Mini review is anything to go by that
trade-off is one that has paid great dividends
but that's on the desktop what we haven't seen yet for ourselves is how it
performs against competing mobile products like Intel's tiger Lake and
AMD's Renoir apus Dell and HP are going
to be representing the PC competition and oh yeah we also threw a 15in HP Omen
gaming laptop in there in case the M1 it gets too fast to compare to anything in
its weight class spoiler alert by the way it does in cinebench R23 the only
laptop in this lineup capable of beating either MacBook is a much thicker gaming
machine and even it doesn't win the single-threaded performance Crown even
more impressively after a 10-minute run the MacBook proos performance remained
Rock Solid while the HP Omen with its much beefier cooling working noticeably
harder dropped over a 100 points unlike
its bigger cousin the MacBook Air did throttle but it still managed to stay
well clear of anything else in its weight class
handbrake again shows our M1 Max outperforming their x86 counterparts by
nearly double in software en coding seriously guys it's not even close the
2020 Intel MacBook Air took three times
as long and as for Hardware encoding again we see the M1 encoding blocks
doing their job and then some beating out both Intel and amds encoder engines
by 50 to 100% and this was surprising
even beating out nank in h26 5 for
Giggles we ran geekbench since that's what all the cool kids are running and
if it's to be believed the only CPU with any hope of matching the m1's
multi-threaded performance is a ryzen 78
core it is a good thing we put the omen in there the GPU meanwhile soundly
destroys both the AMD and Intel competition although it should be noted
that this isn't a useful real world test
unlike the rigorous real world testing we do on our products at LTT Store.com
this C pillow contains 40% alpaca WF for maximum comfort and we have a big one
moving on to non-native tests using Rosetta Adobe Creative Cloud presented a
challenge not only did After Effects fail to run on either of our Intel Maxs
it and Premier Pro also failed to run on our HP Envy due to its mere 8 gigs of
memory and we suspect that photoshop performance probably suffered as well
still though we were able to at least observe that even running in Rosetta
remember this is no non-native code the M1 MacBooks both manag to smoke the
competition and the same holds true for blender where the M1 MacBook Air manages
to Triple the speed of its predecessor and run 8 to 9 minutes faster than its
x86 competitors the only potential
response to M1 at least in class is in luxmark where the XPS 13's XE Graphics
core puts up better numbers across the board while the others languished at
about half of the performance or even less on that subject I mean we can't
talk about Graphics cores without talking about gaming so of course we ran
the tomb Raiders to see what we could get and found that our MacBooks managed
double or better the frame rates recorded by either the AMD or Intel UHD
integrated Graphics in our competing products the one exception aside from
the dedicated gaming laptop is the XE equipped XPS 13 which put up an
admirable fight at least by comparison
but still couldn't really close the gap thanks to a recent update to another
great Mac system monitor TG Pro we can glean a little more information about
m1's throttling Behavior compared to our Mac Mini review by default our MacBook
Pro at full synthetic load breaches 90°
and does throttle with the fan ramping up to about 3500 RPM or roughly half
speed now that's still very quiet and
there are two important notes Here one
as we've seen that throttling clearly really didn't have a measurable impact
on performance and two these core sensors that we're reading are buried
inside the multi-layered soc so unlike previous generations these readings act
more like hotspot sensors which from our experience can report 10 to 15° higher
than the rest of the chip so with that in mind then we don't foresee any
serious reliability problems but manually setting the fan to maximum
using TG Pro can improve core thermals to between 80 and 85 Degrees which
should keep Max performance locked and provide peace of mind to enthusiasts who
just like low temperatures even if it's at the expense of having a laptop fan
that they can actually hear it's really refreshing to see apple take a more
conservative approach to thermals maybe because now it's their own silicon that
they're messing with the MacBook Air takes a different approach altogether
though again allowing the cor to reach as high as the mid 90° or so but then
after it reaches an average temperature roughly 70° it throttles to maintain
that at least for a while then it dials
everything back and targets a CPU temperature of 60° this is why the air
gets such great burst performance while also maintaining comfortable surface
temperature of course it comes at the cost of sustained performance now since
we can't just ramp up the fans on the air to see if that changes things maybe
we'll need to take another crack at fixing Apple's thermal design get
subscribes by the way so you don't miss that one the webcam on both new MacBooks
is shockingly the same old 720p Affair
that they've been using since 2011 but In fairness at least it's got a
new trick now that MacBooks run the same Hardware as Apple's mobile devices but
on roids they can use the same image processing tricks that were previously
iPhone or iPad exclusive so in practice
the image is still pretty soft I mean 720p is 720p but it's significantly less
noisy with dramatically more naturall looking lighting no more blue computer
face the experience using iOS apps is also significantly better on the
MacBooks compared to the Mac Mini particularly where gestures are needed
though it's still not perfect you might intuitively think that you'll start
touching and swiping from where the cursor is visually located on the screen
instead though the touchpad surface is mapped to the window area now this isn't
necessarily the wrong approach but it'll
definitely rub some people the wrong way having an actual touchscreen would
really make the experience come together in a way that makes sense unless of
course more apps come through with updates for Mouse compatibility really
though please apple add a touchcreen to the MacBook just make my dreams come
true speaking of Dreams in order to test Apple's Pie in the Sky battery life
claims we set each of our 13-in laptops to roughly match the Dell XPS 13's
brightness at two steps up from minimum turned on the optimized video streaming
feature in energy preferences on our Max fired up a 100h hour timer on YouTube
and set them all off at once using some coordination and a handy dandy power
delivery unit to cut the power the Intel MacBook Pro was the first to go Keeling
over it just over a respectable 11 hours followed by the dxps 13 just after the
12-h hour mark then fell the Intel MacBook Air and the hpmv X 360 not long
after surprisingly the M1 equipped MacBook Air in second place only lasted
a little longer longer than those at just under 13 hours still great but well
shy of the promised 15 to 18 hours as
for the M1 MacBook Pro it just kind of
kept going and going and going until
finally it broke the 20h hour mark and
decided that was enough Flex for one day
almost literally one day I mean we ran this test over a weekend because we knew
that this result was possible but we didn't really really think it would
manage it in the real world like guys this cannot be overstated we're looking
at ipad-like Endurance on a laptop running a full fat desktop operating
system you could in theory use this thing for days at a time without juicing
up depending on what you do with it that's what ended up throwing a wrench
into my original premise for this video because up until now the M1 MacBook Pro
had very little to show for itself over the MacBook Air for most people but
suddenly the difference is so much bigger than just well do you want a
touch bar and a brighter screen the M1 MacBook Pro despite being heavier and a
bit thicker might end up being the better Commuter laptop for many through
sheer force of its endurance alone but if you're worried about longevity it may
ironically be the lesser of the two the
fact that the MacBook Air doesn't have any fan whatsoever means that there's no
dust being sucked in and no air intake to clog this means that barring thermal
compound degradation the thermal profile of this device is going to remain pretty
much identical throughout its entire life the One internal moving part on any
modern laptop that is most likely to fail not only isn't necessary to spin up
in here it doesn't even exist to fail
there aren't even any heat pipes or vapor Chambers just a plain Jane flat
heat plate for thermal
mass in spite of these accomplishments it ironically feels though like these
Macs are more transitional than revolutionary don't get me wrong I'm not
complaining the transition from Power PC to Intel was a lot worse I mean compared
to the iBook that came before it the first Intel MacBook brought a new
chassis design with a new keyboard an integrated eyesight webcam and it
introduced the Meg safe connector just to name a few of the highlights but it
suffered from first generation syndrome big time thanks to the very first
revision using a 32-bit core Duo CPU
that was one of only a single generation of Macs to ever use 32-bit x86 by
contrast these M1 MacBooks don't seem to have a problem with their internals at
all but I expect that Apple will soon introduce new chassis designs with 14-in
displays that like the 16-in MacBook Pro will reduce buzle sizes without
significantly altering the footprint that we praised in our review of the
final Intel MacBook Air I'd also hope to see that 1080p FaceTime HD camera from
the iMac make an appearance at the same time for now the M1 equipped MacBooks
have more to differentiate them than I had originally suspected this level of
battery life in a machine as compact as the MacBook Pro 13 is absolutely a
GameChanger and that's not even considering its performance meanwhile
the MacBook Air has performance that Rivals the pro just without the
endurance both in terms of battery life and thermal design especially when you
in the lower price so you're really not sacrificing much by choosing one over
the other and it boils down to your use case at $9.99 the MacBook Air is a bit
more expensive than the hpnx 360 but for those who are willing to pay the Apple
tax well you're only sort of paying one cuz you're getting a much faster
computer with a higher resolution screen a more spacious Palm rest and a better
trackpad plus arguably Superior expansion thanks to USB 4 although the
HP does have an internal m.2 slot so you can kind of pick your poison there I can
see many people then choosing the MacBook Air for a daily driver laptop
for school or for everyday carry although if you do I would caution
against ordering one with 8 gigs of memory if you want to use it longer than
a couple of years remember you cannot upgrade it the MacBook Pro at $1299 at
first seems to compare less favorably compared to the Delux ps13 2 in one that
goes for $200 less but you got to remember that's for the base model XPS
with a core I three the core i7 option runs $100 more than the MacBook that's
on promo and while Intel's XE Graphics are in the ballpark of what Apple's
delivering the tiger Lake core i7 simply cannot compete against the M1 in any
meaningful way I mean never mind the core I3 now the XPS 13 does enjoy a
convertible form factor and a touchcreen but its expansion is no better than
Apples unless you count the micro SD reader and like the air versus the envy
Apple's display is higher resolution and as we've seen that fact for a change
doesn't negatively impact battery life it's nearly 8 hours longer in this case
I mean some laptops in this class don't even last for 8 hours let alone 8 hours
longer than the competition I guess what I'm saying is even if you were to go out
of your way to point out the flaws it's hard not to recommend either of the M1
MacBooks they really are just that good
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techtips we're going to have that linked below so thanks for watching guys if you
enjoyed this video go check out our review of the M1 Mac Mini for a look at
how M1 behaves on the desktop it really
is a different enough experience that it's worth watching two videos which is
why we made two different videos