M1 Max MacBook Pro Review: Truly Next Level!

Alright, when these new Macbook Pros were announced, the first thing I thought was: huh? I'm wondering if we can take the iMac on the road because some of you may not know, but every time I went for the last two years to a tech event I planned. When making a video, I literally packed an iMac Pro to the max, put it in a huge Pelican case, and carried it around with me like countless times I've been seen rolling this huge box behind me through the airport and that's because it's been the machine. smaller one that I could take with me to one of those events that could render, edit and export a video that I wouldn't shoot overnight.

This Apple Silicon transition from Max has been pretty impressive and I think this is the first time I can. really saying something is actually

next

level

these laptops have been

next

level

so these are the new 2021 14 inch and 16 inch MacBook Pro and they are amazing for several reasons now at the end of the day they are just tools used to do a job and the fact is that everyone has something slightly different that they want to do for me, which is make these videos, so we'll get to that in a second, but man, they've taken a huge leap both inside and out . outside of these laptops so let's start with the outside so these laptops have a new top notch design it still looks like a MacBook Pro but I like almost all the changes they have made so the whole shape is a bit square and looks like those old aluminum laptops but more modernized and aesthetically you can see that they have made these laptops noticeably thicker and that is totally fine with me and it has a lot of benefits and it also stands up a little higher than the highest ones. feet, which apparently gives a little more room for the rear and side vents for better ventilation, although I've never heard the fans spinning audibly on these laptops, the Apple logo on the back is a little more big and now there is a little engraving on the bottom where they engraved on the MacBook Pro text which is quite nice but functional as you have probably noticed, yes there are ports, now there are real ports and this really shouldn't be a big problem, but this is one of the few things Apple has really walked on.

I'm back from the last few years of MacBook Pros that didn't have these ports, so while it seems a little silly to celebrate them, I'm happy they're back, so on the right side, that's a full-size HDMI port, welcome back then . you get one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports and a full-size, half-depth SD card slot. This is beautiful. I use an SD card for audio every time I make a video. I use them all the time and it's been a long time since I plugged them in. an SD card directly into a computer, so this is fun, then on the left side you have two more Thunderbolt 4 ports, a headphone jack and the Magsafe magnetic charging port is back, so okay, a couple of Thoughts on this port selection, first of all, Magsafe has made its return, but it's different.

I've never used a Magsafe machine full time in the past, but this is a newer, thinner, and actually stronger Magsafe. It has a lot more lateral force than it takes to get it out of the machine, so in the second there is. At any angle it opens a lot easier but it still seems pretty secure to me, definitely safer than if the USBC was plugged in directly and then you got this huge charging brick, so this is the 96 watt power adapter that comes with the 14-inch MacBook. Pro, which is already an upgrade from the base model's 60 7-watt and then there's this huge 140-watt rectangular charging brick for the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but it's pretty cool that the brick is separate from the braided USBC cable with magsafe at the other end, but I'm not sure why the space gray laptop doesn't also come with a space gray Magsafe connector which would have been a nice touch. 140 watts, although that's a lot of power, so you can fast charge these laptops via Magsafe if you want, it charges about half in half an hour, which is pretty convenient, but even if you don't want to, you can unplug it and just plug it in via USB C if you are a charger for all types of person like me.

There will still be around 96 watts so it's not as fast but it's still pretty good now with the headphone jack and you may have noticed during Apple's presentation that they mentioned that the headphone jack this time would support high-end headphones. impedance, what does that mean? If you have to ask. It probably doesn't apply to you, but there's a whole ecosystem of headphones out there that require much higher levels of power to get real volume. They are known as high impedance headphones. I have a couple of pairs here in the studio. So a normal pair of wired headphones, think your Beats or ath m50 might have an impedance of 20 to 50 ohms.

High impedance headphones can exceed 100 ohms, so they won't actually sound much, they will be very low level. volume if you plug them into almost anything with a headphone jack, so people who use these headphones will have to carry an external Thunderbolt DAC, just a little thing to plug in, so if these headphone jacks have enough power in theory, it's one less dongle. you have to get it right, so for my audio files, the preamps here are awesome and are definitely putting out more power, but this is not an amazing super clean DAC or anything crazy with these Bear Dynamic dt770 Pro for example which are The 250 ohm MacBook Pro M1 headphones at absolutely maximum volume of 100 sounded comfortable and these new Macbook Pros hit the same level at about 65 volume, so there was one improvement: they don't sound any better than the dedicated amp you'd have to bring , but on a Pinch, if you've only brought a pair of headphones you can plug them in directly and that's pretty cool, which just saves you a dongle and to be honest that's the thing about all these ports as the port HDMI really just is.

HDMI 2.0, not 2.1. I don't know why and it's a bit annoying that such an expensive computer doesn't have the latest high-end part, but HDMI 2.0 still has 4K 60, so it's great for any TV with a projector. It's nice to have one less dongle. the SD card slot is xdxc, it only has two UHS speeds so it's not compatible with the newer, faster S3, but UHS 2 is still 300 megabytes per second which is pretty good in a pinch, a dongle less, making it an expensive computer you could easily have. It had the high-end ports, it's definitely a knock on them, but like I said, it's like a convenient thing in a pinch and you know what it could do, since we're talking about ports, you know, it would have been cool to have Ethernet on the power brick is reminiscent of what they did with the iMac M1, where they have a gigabit Ethernet built into the brick.

I think MacBook Pro users would probably want Ethernet without a dongle on the laptop like they did here, but they didn't, but anyway. There's something funny about the fact that they go back to the last four years of MacBook Pros and, In fact, they add ports. It's not something they do all the time, so I give the thumbs up to talking about going back even though there's no Touch Bar, so there's a new keyboard on these MacBook Pros and they're all buttons, they're all real physical keys, so which replaced the Touch Bar with a full row of full-height physical function keys across the top.

It's really a shame that the Touch Bar never reached its full potential and I'll miss it twice. I thought it was useful with the audio fade-in shortcuts within Final Cut Pro or fast forwarding on Instagram videos on the desktop, but these buttons really are better and the entire keyboard is an improvement over previous years, plus it's backlit. the keys feel good and travel decently like their keyboards from five years ago the Touch ID button in the corner It works super fast and reliable and it's subtle but the whole keyboard is placed in this black anodized rectangle and I love it, it's a nice touch The black keys will definitely still show fingerprints and a little skin oil more than the lighter keyboards out there on other machines, but I'm willing to accept that the speakers are absolutely incredible, especially on the 16-inch, which are still The best, largest and most complete speakers I have.

I've ever listened on a laptop on the larger one and the studio microphones have now improved too, but that brings us to the front of this laptop, so let's talk about the front so these new screens are on paper and in life They're actually pretty amazing. 10-bit panels, they are mini LED HDR 16 by 10, almost 4K High refresh rate displays. I mean it's just all the boxes ticked and then there's the notch at the top so the screens are amazing, it's basically a Mini Pro xdr screen but with even higher pixel density and higher refresh rate. I mean, it doesn't look all that different from previous MacBook Pros most of the time you use it, but it hits that 1600 nits peak brightness while watching HDR content, which is incredible, and all the bezels are slimmer.

The changes were long overdue and under the menu bar I'm also happy that it's still the highest aspect ratio of 16 by 10 and then the promo is interesting so we know this is the adaptive refresh rate, which doesn't always max out here at 120 hertz, even when you fly through the UI, you know the Macs were already pretty smooth at 60, but I can tell that this isn't going at 120 hertz all the time, so, like scrolling in Safari, for example, apparently Safari still needs an update to support the highest level of this adaptation. frame rate, but there are a couple of areas where you really notice a higher refresh rate.

I'm talking about moving the mouse a lot, moving a lot of larger animations, like sliding between spaces, and other big, fluid things like the genie animation to minimize those things. Stunning motion around a final cut timeline which is also very smooth, that's where you notice the higher frame rate and see the extra smoothness, so this is not the first mini LED display, this is not the first HDR laptop, definitely not the first with higher resolution. frustrating screen on a laptop, but just combining all these things, the 10-bit screen, the thinner bezels, it's a great screen, so let's talk about the top-notch design.

There are just a few things here in the notch, it's the new 1080p webcam which looks perfectly decent now thanks for catching up with Apple and there's a little ambient light sensor and a little LED light and that's it, there's no way that the notch has to be so large for that hardware. I mean, I'll hope the iFix got knocked down, but there was no way you needed that much space, so it's a strange choice and it's very easy to complain about this when you're not using the laptop, but there are two things: one, I think Apple is finding this to be the case.

One part of its design language is now a recognizable laptop silhouette because of the notch, however, we think that is what it is, but it also turns out that it's okay to put a notch right here, on the part of the screen that actually You don't notice much when you're using the laptop, the mouse is placed underneath for those wondering and the software seems to basically treat the screen as if there was no Notch, as if you take a screenshot or make a screen recording. I keep drawing the screen there with all its pixels and every time you go full screen with anything the whole menu bar turns black and it looks like the bezel on top basically gets a little thicker and is a black very deep with the mini LED in the notch. it literally never cuts any content, basically think of it as cutting off the extra screen that you didn't actually have before and they just shoved the menu bar up there on that extra screen.

You know there are some weird quirks when you have an app with enough menu bar items running those things just below the notch and things clearly need to be fixed with a software update maybe making them scrollable or like adding an expand button or something, so at this point it's like people are making you know, custom apps to totally darken the top of the screen to hide the notch, which I mean, if you hate it that much, surely you have that option , but I promise you when you start using the laptop and you're in full screen apps and things and it never cuts out anything like if you're paying attention to what's on the screen it disappears even more than onthe smallest screen of the phones, but that said, if the next version of this laptop still has a notch it is large and does not add face ID.

I'll wear socks and sandals for a day like Linus, like they have to be planning on putting him there eventually. It almost feels pointless to talk about how it feels just hanging around in Mac OS Monterey because of course it's fine since I got the improved notification management, it has the rounded corners on the top, it has the quick mouse in the bottom corner to Access Sticky Notes, we get all those cool features, but we're here to achieve the performance we want. to find out if it's really as good as those graphics that Apple suggested in the Apple event spoiler alert, they're both really that good, so I've got a couple of different specs here, this is the 14-inch M1 Pro.

I also have a I've been testing a 16-inch max, so I'll get to the differences between the M1 Max and the M1 Pro and all that in a second, but I know that yeah, they're very, very good, so when it comes to benchmark testing performance, I feel like everyone is more or less looking for the perfect benchmark that confirms to them what will work best for their own workflow. Like I said, these are tools and from what I've seen, it seems like benchmark output exists for pretty much every use. The case so far for these, as far as synthetic benchmarks go, it got the highest single-score geekbench CPU score I've ever seen on any Mac and lined it up with multiple cores.

Right around the 18-core iMac at max, I also ran it on Cinebench and again it got very impressive single core scores and here's how multicore compares, but when I say these laptops are next level, I say it because these real world performance and the real world capabilities of these laptops are dramatically better than what any business has, so obviously we know the highest memory bandwidth, we know the highest number of GPU cores and I love the 10 15 25 improvements. which are across the board with all that stuff, vertical integration worked well, but there are parts of this chip that Apple has built with specific purposes in mind and for those purposes it's the next level, so these laptop chips have a multimedia engine and there is a prores accelerator. as part of that the M1 Max has two video pros, you can see where we are going with this, working with pros with these laptops is dramatically better.

I think one example was like encoding a video with compressor is 10 times faster than it was with Intel MacBook Pros, that's next level, so like I said, these laptops are why I was excited about them. I also work with video, so let's see how it works with Final Cut Pro, so as I mentioned, I edited the last video. Full Airpods through the 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro

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in several places, both in the studio and at home, plugged in and on battery, and it handled it incredibly well, surprisingly well, note that these are images without 8k code red render, it's a mix of low and medium compression shots from the V Raptor and I can bend the color and raw data and move around the entire timeline and split everything pretty quickly and smoothly, like in the desktop of the Mac Pro, so the playback was in high quality instead of high performance, so I get a great resolution and really only drop a couple of frames here and there, like on the Mac Pro.

One of my ways to measure if a machine is choking or having problems is how long the delay is between pressing the play button and the space bar on non-rendered images and when it actually starts playing and this delay, as you can see, is like less of a quarter of a second, it's the best I've ever seen. in Final Cut, so the only thing that caused me concern was that a couple of times the audio waveform p

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s took longer to load when I was pinching and zooming on parts of the timeline and I suspect that's Related to Ram, of course, the M1 Max only has 64 gigs. of RAM compared to the Mac Pro I edited on has 768 gigs of RAM so it makes sense that I would see a difference there, but when the editing was done and it was time to export it of course just for fun I copied the project to multiple computers and just did the same export on all of them to see how it went, so the 14-inch MacBook Pro M1 Pro exported everything in 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

It's pretty good, the 28-core Mac Pro 50,000 did the same thing. in five minutes and 42 seconds and then the M1 Max Mac Pro or MacBook Pro did it in four minutes and six seconds, so the MacBook Pro handily beat the Mac Pro in project export and it's not even like exporting Times Really Matter so much at this level four minutes five minutes whatever but the fact that it already outperformed the Mac Pro is ridiculous and I also did it while not plugged in which doesn't lose any battery performance and the battery dropped two percent from 96 to 94 while exporting.

You may have heard that there are different performance profiles and this is true of the 16-inch MacBook Pro. It was interesting to play with these most of the time. I just left it on automatic because it worked without any problems and I could edit fine. but when I went to export just for fun, I turned on the 16-inch high power mode which, in theory, should allow the chips to run at full speed more often, spin the fans a little more, etc. I have never heard of fans yet, except for export. the time was even faster: three minutes and 49 seconds, Jesus, and also, the Suite plugin I use Motion VFX is constantly updating all of its stuff to support Apple Silicon, which is great right now, I honestly think it's a obvious. the travel iMac is now retired.

I can edit everything safely on a laptop, but Final Cut Pro is just one use case. There are many other things. If you look at The Verge's review, they did a lot of things with Adobe. You can check out their incredible findings with the The latest version of After Effects finally took advantage of multi-threaded GPU rendering and also demonstrated that it outperforms the mobile RTX 3080 when editing in Premiere. There are some glowing reviews from music producers and sound designers who love having a quiet computer that can also process. There are many more audio effects that you can take with you and Tyler Stallman made a great video reviewing the laptop for photographers where the M1 Max laptop imports and generates previews etc. twice as fast as a 2018 MacBook Pro and also opens All applications. at once and streams a bunch of prores videos all simultaneously side by side and you guessed it, it doesn't even blink, then there's also a great tweet from a Reddit engineer: the machine is halving the build times of its Android app and A little bit of math says that buying a set of them, a bunch of these laptops, would end up saving them a lot more money than they would spend.

Basically, these experiences, of course, depend on the apps you use as a professional and how optimized they are. All of Apple's apps are the first to be updated right away, so the Final Cut Pro that I use is great, but over time more will continue to be updated and you'll see those improvements, and I didn't even talk about them. battery life, but it does all these high-performance things and at the same time is incredibly efficient, so you already have fast charging if you want it, but I found that the 16-inch 100 watt-hour battery lasts a little longer than the 14-inch with 70 watt-hour battery and the M1 Pro will last a little longer than the M1 Max.

It turns out those GPU cores run a little hotter and draw more power, but ultimately if you want the longest possible battery life it would be the 16-inch M1 Pro, however they all get about the same battery life which I found in the MacBook Pro M1, that is, all day, the best in its class. You can still power it down in about four hours if you're sitting on the battery editing videos in high power mode all the time, then yes. so you can crush it but again fast charging comes in very handy so you know what the recommendation is if you're a professional working on your laptop and you're on an older version or you're reaching the limit of one of these and you're thinking what about Maybe you should try to check out one of these new Macbook Pros.

I feel very confident in saying that yes, you can pick one up and be very happy. I think the real choice is between M1 Pro and M1 Max and 14. inch and 16 inch, now I'm going with a 16 inch M1 Max just because I take advantage of the extra GPU cores and wish I could use the 14 inch to the max which you can max out with the exact same specs as a 16 inch with maybe just small thermal differences, they will perform more or less the same but I really like having the larger screen for video editing so I'm going to max out a large laptop so which for M1 Pro vs M1 Max M1 Max is the most powerful but it takes away from Nick's battery life a bit so I would upgrade only if you need those extra GPU cores and you will know if your apps support it and I won't even pretend to play on a Mac, although some people do and yes In theory the M1 Max would also handle it better but as I said from the beginning this is a tool and it turns out to be a really good tool at what it does and it's next level in a couple of specific things.

It has been designed and optimized so that there are many professionals like me who are very happy with these, there will also be many people who do not need this power at all, but who simply have a lot of money to spend and simply want to get a good laptop and it is a nice laptop so I don't blame you that's fine too but I'm happy to finally say that I'll be editing videos on a laptop which is awesome and yeah. I haven't been able to say anything really next level in a long time, but this is one of my favorite products of the year, to be honest, I can't wait until the Apple Silicon Mac Pro desktop arrives either.

Being wild either way, that It's all about the laptop review. Thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next peace.