make no mistake the 2019 macbook pro has
the same design as the 2016. we've got the same slim aluminum beauty by chassis
the same 2880 by 1800 retin display the
same massive force touch track pad the same love it or hate it touch bar and
those same four thunderbolt 3 ports that gave us the nickname dongle book pro
this on the other hand is my macbook pro
i bought it back in 2011 and it's been my daily driver ever since
it's obsolete now but i haven't really had a reason to upgrade because most of
the improvements to date have come at some cost expandability thermal performance speed
even the keyboard's reliability this generation looks no different
but let me tell you looks can be deceiving
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what's different about the 2019 macbook pro then
well we'll get into the one engineering change that actually surprised even me
and actually matters but first the change nobody is surprised about and
didn't matter the keyboard this is apple's third
design iteration on their low profile butterfly switches in an attempt to keep
dust and debris from breaking the stupid thing but even apple admits it's not
trustworthy because the 2019 macbook pro was actually listed in the keyboard
service program the day it dropped that's when you know it's bad to me the
keys themselves feel a little bit more spongy and this isn't a bad thing
because it makes the travel feel a bit more pleasant and deeper than it
otherwise might it's a very subtle effect though and it might just be my
mind playing tricks on me all i know is i've never been a fan of the feel of the
butterfly switches and i found typing on this one a touch more pleasant overall
but now it's time to dig a little deeper because while our macbook pro 2019 may
not be equipped with the best factory gpu option as it's better for a number
of reasons to use an egpu it is equipped with the highest end cpu
apple offers the eight core 16 thread
core i9 9980 hk which has a claimed
boost of up to 5 gigahertz and a base clock barely lower than its 6 core
predecessor actually before i move on i just want to talk for a second about
these boost clocks because they're not boost clocks as we know them they're
actually what intel calls thermal velocity boost
tldr what these numbers represent are boost clocks on top of boost clocks
only achievable under extremely strict thermal and power criteria only while
normal boost is active and only on a single core
so when you're doing actual work you'll probably never see the advertised
numbers to be clear apple isn't to blame for intel's marketing spin and they aren't
the only ones who are advertising their computers this way but i'd really rather laptops be rated
based on the frequencies they can actually hit rather than what's on
intel's arc website but i digress coming back to the macbook i was skeptical
about its performance because it has more faster cores than the 2018 model
but it has the same tdp and that model was famous for thermal throttling to the
point where we even expressed concern over its longevity and long-term data
integrity due to its reliance on the t2 security chip which is still present
here so i wanted to test it against the 2018 but i also wanted to see how it
would compare to a similarly spec pc as many have claimed the same chip in a
different form factor would perform better and in fact we've shown that a
macbook can attain higher performance by placing it in our chiller box
unfortunately there are no pcs with this exact chip right now but i did find the
rog strix scar 3 rocking the quote 4.8
gigahertz core i9 9980h
while that's supposedly a touch slower the scar has a much better cooler so it
should boost for longer and throttle later if at all compared to the macbook
but here's what surprised me thermals actually looked better than 2018
that's a good 6 degrees cooler than last year's model
and supposedly we're looking at cpus with the same tdp here
clearly they're just throttling right nope check this out under a full prime95
small fft workload the 2019 model is sitting pretty at 2.6 gigahertz nowhere
near its all-core boost of 4.2 but still higher than its base clock and faster
than both the 2018 macbook pro and the scar 3 can maintain
even with its limiters off
what okay did they change the cooler or
something no
so i reached out to apple to find out how they did it but as usual they took
one look at the email and sent it straight to the trash but i have my own
theory one i think they've upgraded the thermal
interface material between the cooler and the chips and two i think they pulled off some
pretty heavy undervolting in mac os and sure enough when i fire up the same
workload under windows in boot camp we get much higher temperatures overall and
we end up thermal throttling well below base clock after only about a minute
so at least one part of my theory is confirmed but you don't buy a lambo for
commuting and you don't buy a mac to run windows on it
so i guess i can give them a pass here just bear in mind as we move on that
bootcamp performance will be a lot lower than mac os due to the underbolting
alone speaking of things you don't buy a mac for gaming at 1440x900 our macbook
pros radeon pro 560x doesn't fare too
well but we get decent results in cs go compared to the same gpu on our 2018
model so that's something more importantly though when we move on
to productivity holy crap is that cinebench score a 900
point gain over 2018 from four extra threads that's nearly a thirty percent
uplift and right on with the better cool scar geekbench has a straight up
murdering the scar in mac os with the obvious exception of the gpu but it's
also worth noting the extra oomph the 2019 model's gpu gains over last year
even though it's the same gpu hinting at that better tim blender meanwhile sees a
35 to 40 improvement in performance with the 2019 even beating the scar and
shaving a whole six minutes off the classroom test over the 2018 macbook pro
v-ray gives us a slightly more modest but still respectable improvement
overall right in line with the scar 3 and finally luxmark gives us more of
that delicious gpu performance uplift we've been seeing so much of content
creators will be happy to know that adobe premiere also gets an improvement
over the 2018 and final cut pro 10 gets
a bump too saving nearly a minute in render time over 2018. finally for you
devs out there our mozilla firefox compile test
the 2019 is dominating here too saving nearly nine minutes over the 2018 model
and whether it's because of the tool chain or the more aggressive clocks in mac os nearly as much over the scar 3.
now to be clear there would be a significant performance uplift with a
better cooler but a macbook is a complete package that doesn't change
very often and i really can't overstate how impressive these results are given
the thermal performance of the previous generation i'd personally prefer a lower
thermal target with some headroom built in to let it turbo up a little bit more
but we're far from sustaining 100 degrees like last gen did we've said
before that apple has some good engineers over there and i think they've
earned their pay this time around as for whether or not it's going to replace my
2011 well let's just say
it's a strong contender and you know what else is a strong contender the massdrop control keyboard
features a solid cnc aluminum frame a built-in switch plate rgb lighting qmk
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cherry mx kaiwa or halo switches a floating key design dual usb type-c
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drop.com we're going to have that linked in the video description
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