M1 Pro MacBook Pro – Enough to Ditch Windows??
When I checked out Apple’s M1 Mac Mini at the start of the year, I was incredibly impressed with the performance, and more so the performance per watt – that thing was drawing under 30W FROM THE WALL under full load! Most desktop systems can’t even idle that low, so seeing that much performance with that little power is exceptional. The catch to the standard M1 was it’s rather low power design, with 4 low power efficiency cores, and 4 high power performance cores, it wasn’t exactly a complete powerhouse – but now we have this, the M1 Pro, and it’s frankly insane.
Apple launched five versions of the new M1, an 8C (6P+2E) CPU with a 14 core GPU, a 10C (8P+2E) with a 14 core GPU, 10C with a 16 core GPU, 10C MAX with a 24C CPU and a 10C MAX with a 32 core GPU. Complicated, I know, and what’s worse is that 8C and 10C with 14 core GPU options are only available on the 14” Macbook Pro, not this 16”, and… if you buy the M1 Max, you have a minimum of 32GB of RAM, and can spec up to 64GB, but if you get the M1 Pro you start at 16GB and top out at 32GB. Yeah, there’s a lot of options to pick from there. Of course Apple isn’t alone in having a myriad of options, speccing a new Dell XPS 15 greets you with the same wall of parts, but Apple is normally very reserved in their options list.
What I have here then is the 16” 10 Core CPU, 16 Core GPU with 16GB of Unified Memory – meaning both the CPU and GPU make use of it, just like most mobile chips with integrated graphics – and this is also the 1TB SSD model. It’ll set you back a cool £2,600, but of course you do also get a rather shiny new display, a 3456×2234 120Hz MiniLED backlit monster with up to 1600 nits of peak brightness when using it with HDR content, and a nice sleek new body too.
Sticking with the performance though, compared to literally any other Windows machine I’ve tested, it’s easily one of, if not the fastest I’ve had my hands on. Seriously. In Cinebench R23, it’s single core performance is right up there, tying with Intel’s most recent 11th gen mobile chips, and beating anything AMD has, at least right now. That’s already impressive, but the multi-core is the real standout. It’s right at the top of the field, only just behind the 11900H which holds a 13% lead, and a couple of the 5th gen Ryzen 8 core chips, most of which are within 2 or 3%, except for the max-power version of the 5900X in the Zephyrus Duo which runs at around 15% faster.
Now, that performance is decent, but you might be a little surprised why I’m so impressed – I mean a “10 core” CPU is getting outperformed by 8 core chips from both Intel and AMD, what’s so special? That would be the power draw. Now unfortunately I don’t have CPU package power figures here, we could only measure total system power, whereas all my standard machines have package power listed, but the point remains, this entire machine, display, GPU, RAM, keyboard backlight, fans, EVERYTHING, PEAKED at around 53W under full load. 53 WATTS! That’s lower than almost anything else I’ve tested, and that’s the TOTAL SYSTEM POWER! We figure the display is probably using around 6-8W at medium brightness, and the rest of the system could easily be 5-10W, and since Apple listed the CPU power as 30W in their launch day graphs, it’s safe to say that’s about right here, and is by far the best performance per watt chip I’ve used.
Carrying on to Blender, this was rather interesting. In the BMW render, it sits as one of the fastest chips out there, beating almost anything team red or blue can throw at it, all with between half and a quarter of the power. But, in the Gooseberry scene, the one that takes almost 20 minutes on these laptops, that’s actually a fair way down the list. Now to make it clear it still offers exceptional performance and still at between half and a quarter of the power draw, but it does slip by comparison. I’m not entirely sure why. It does run fairly hot, peaking at 90°c, but that’s clearly by choice as the fans refuse to spin up for anything under 85°c or so, and do their best to barely turn on when they do, so if it isn’t that I’m not sure what else would do that.
In Premiere Pro, using the latest version of Puget Bench, the M1 Pro sits itself firmly on top of everything else. Literally everything. Even the Xeon-W, RTX Quadro based Asus ProArt StudioBook Pro that I can only assume costs somewhere between £5,000 and £10,000, even that is bested handily. Even the 11900H can’t quite keep up. And this is Premiere – if you work in Final Cut instead, it’s obvious this has no competition. Interestingly though, in After Effects, possibly thanks to a lack of system memory, the Puget Bench score is rather low at 663 points, where most other machines are getting at least 800, and the higher end is pushing more like 1200 points. I’d expect the 32GB model to offer a much better, possibly chart topping, performance here.
When it comes to gaming, sadly our options were rather limited. We tried everything, including GTA V both through Steam and the Heroic launcher, tried CSGO, and a bunch more titles with no real success. We did get two games running though, Rocket League (through Steam, meaning no online access, thanks Epic…) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Rocket League, even on the highest quality settings, played flawlessly at 1080p. We had to hook up a 16:9 display to get it to run at 1080p rather than the rather funky native 16:10 resolution instead, but it was perfectly playable, easily over 60FPS, and with absolutely no fan noise which is incredible.
As for Tomb Raider, I had to buy that copy to run this test which means I don’t have any other existing results to compare to here, so I’ve fired it up on this Asus ZenBook Pro Duo with an i9-10980HK and RTX 3070. On “Highest” settings, at 1080p, the Macbook managed 47 FPS average, where the Zenbook hits 78 FPS average. What’s interesting for me is looking at the little table the benchmark shows that the Macbook’s CPU is much more capable for gaming than the 10980HK – the “CPU Render” average result for the i9 is 116FPS, but on the M1 Pro it’s 143 FPS. The bottleneck is even nicely laid out, showing it’s exclusively the GPU on the M1, but 85% CPU on the i9 run. Looking at the GPU column, the M1 reports an average of just 50 FPS where the RTX 3070 Laptop nets 116 FPS. Of course, this is missing a vital piece of context which is that not only is this not the most powerful GPU variant, in fact only half the total cores in the M1 Max 32 GPU core variant, but it’s also an integrated GPU that’s drawing, according to Apple, just under 60W, versus the 3070 which has a 90W base TDP that can rise to 110W with dynamic boost. That’s incredible.
Rather obviously, this isn’t a gaming machine, but honestly I’d say it has the raw horsepower for it. If the OS supported more titles, I could see this being a fairly capable machine. Again I’d probably go with the 32GB model as the GPU shares that memory, but still not bad! What impressed me more than anything though was the distinct lack of fan noise. Most gaming machines, even that ZenBook, start sounding like jets taking off the second you fire up a game but this? Sure the fans turned on… but not to a point that I’d notice over any level of background noise. While that in and of itself is impressive, the implications of that are more important. If you use this for development, or content creation, almost all other machines on the market are going to be some level of nuisance in the office – but this isn’t.
Of course, that sort of content creation workflow is really the target market for these machines. I mean, they stuck a 1600 nit 250+ PPI display on the thing that covers 100% of the DCI-P3 spectrum with ease. And yes, we verified that, and the 500 nit SDR brightness (when you disable True Tone and Adaptive Brightness), and just.. Just look at it playing HDR content… It’s absolutely stunning. I still think an OLED has the edge in sheer beauty, and for HDR content especially while this does have a 1600 nit “XDR” mode, since it uses a MiniLED backlight with as Apple says “thousands” of local dimming zones, rather than each pixel being able to independently control light output, it’s not absolutely perfect but it’s easily one of the absolute best panels on a laptop full stop.
Well, I say that, but there is one catch, which is the response time. Now sadly I haven’t ported my new response time tool to MacOS just yet, so I can’t use that, but I’ll be honest and say I really don’t need to. My 1000FPS camera illustrates the issue perfectly fine. This is the UFO test. Here’s what it’s meant to look like – in fact here is what it looks like on a 4K 60Hz OLED laptop display – and now here is what it looks like on the Macbook Pro. Beyond the rather interesting pattern, if you take the centre pixel, that takes around 30ms to go from black to fully white.
Now, I know what you are thinking. This isn’t a gaming machine, so who cares how fast the response time is? Well, beyond the fact that any amount of fast motion like scrolling around web pages will be a blurry mess, having such dreadful results actually affects the content creation experience. A 30 millisecond response time means that anything over 30 FPS footage is going to have ghosted frames on screen during playback. Luckily, I can’t say it was too distracting or noticeable during my (admittedly brief) testing, and the good news is it’s something Apple could fix in a software update by just adding a touch of overdrive to help the pixels respond a little faster especially since this is a ProMotion 120Hz display!
One thing content creators will rejoice seeing on this machine is the I/O – you get PORTS now! I know! It’s incredible that a trillion dollar company removing basic necessities for an entire generation of machines only to “give them back” can be seen as some generous gift and not a blatant cash grab and overzealous control over their adoring fanbase. I know I’m biased as hell here, but hey, we’ve had full USB A ports, Thunderbolt, HDMI and SD Card readers this whole time.
Anyway, you now get three Thunderbolt 4 ports which operate at 40Gbps through independent hubs – although I’m not sure how the bandwidth is divided between them. You get HDMI 2.0, meaning up to 4K60 rather than 4K120 from HDMI 2.1, SDXC (2.0, not the newest 3.0 like you’ll find on many new creator focused Windows machines), and a MagSafe 3 connector for the included 140W USB C power adapter. That power adapter by the way is only a 67W brick on the base model 14” spec, you have to pay extra for the 96W brick if you want fast charging. It’s also worth noting you can charge the machine via the USB C/Thunderbolt ports, but can only fast-charge through the MagSafe connector, which does terminate in a USB C plug that’s removable from the power brick.
MagSafe 3.0 is also really rather strong now – like, if you pull it straight outwards, perpendicular to the port, you will struggle to remove it. You need to sort of “snap” it off, twisting it up or down to get it free. While that motion will become muscle memory in no time, it is a bit of a shame that if you do trip over the charging cable it’s pretty likely the machine is going flying rather than the connector unclipping, like the previous generations of Macbook with MagSafe generally would. Still, it’s nice, and makes a very satisfying snap.
So, has any, or all of this, convinced me – a steadfast Windows user – it’s time to use a Macbook? As much as the owner of this machine would want the answer to be yet, I’m afraid it’s not for me. Really, I’m not the target market for this machine anyway, that’s more for creators and developers especially those on the go or working at an actual office rather than me making videos in my spare bedroom. Unfortunately, you’ll either have to be rather wealthy to afford one, or more likely have your company buy it for you as these are far from cheap. This 16”, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 10 core CPU, 16 core GPU model will set you back a cool £2,600, and if you want the full fat M1 Max Mac with 32GB of RAM and the same 1TB SSD you’ll be parting ways with £3,300!
Oh and if you want to upgrade your SSD, remember that both the RAM and SSD are both solder to the motherboard meaning whatever you buy now is what you have for the life of the machine, well that 2TB SSD costs a staggering £400 ON TOP OF THE £200 FOR THE 1TB DRIVE UPGRADE OVER THE BASE 512GB DRIVE!! If you want 4TB, that’ll be a full GRAND instead. RAM is also a pain, if you get the M1 Pro, going from 16GB to 32GB RAM is £400, then it’s “only” another £400 for the 64GB, assuming you are willing to part with another £200 to upgrade to the M1 Max instead, or £300 for the top tier version.
Just to put that all in comparison, Dell’s XPS 15, with 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, the i7 11800H, RTX 3050 Ti and the 3.5K OLED comes in at almost £300 less than the 16GB RAM model Macbook, and actually with the discounts that are live right now you can actually get the maxxed out i9 11900H, 64GB of RAM, 2TB SSD and the 3.5K OLED for almost £100 less than that same 16GB M1 Pro Macbook. That’s one hell of an Apple tax.
Of course, I know plenty of people will happily pay it, and fair play to you. If this works for you, if the frankly insane performance, user experience, ecosystem or status symbol appeal to you more than the price, response times and anti-consumer practices, then that’s perfectly fine. Unfortunately, that isn’t me so I’ll happily hand this back to its owner and go back to my Windows desktop.
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