Tech Review Video: Apple M1 Max MacBook Pro Review - Beast Mode

So not a whole lot of you know this, but behind the scenes of all of the windows, pc builds i'm actually a big apple, macbook user kind of as a secondary device for productivity. Note taking uh photo editing some video editing as well um, but yeah, particularly this one.

This has been my main device over the last year and a half. It is the 2020 16 inch macbook pro now.

When I initially bought this device uh, it was cool at all A nice little upgrade for myself. Uh shared a couple photos on instagram, but there was nothing really worth. I guess, making a video on or really talking about, still running, intel, cpus and radeon graphics, slightly.

Better than the previous generation, but yeah that's pretty much it. This, on the other hand, is completely different. This is the new m1 max 2021 16 inch macbook pro, and this is definitely worth talking about so m1 max that is The fastest apple m1 chip.

Currently, in production with a 10 core cpu and a 32 core gpu, this one is also configured with 32 gigabytes of unified memory, meaning it's shared both between the cpu and gpu, and this one has the base one terabyte of storage. So this review is a bit of an experience review. I guess are taking a look at the upgrade and how that affects the user experience, maybe whether you should upgrade or not as someone who has used the previous gen 16 Inch macbook pro for about a year and a half.

I want to talk primarily about the big hardware upgrades that we're getting here and what that means in terms of the huge gains in performance. Firstly, let's start with the exterior and right away. You can tell this thing is built for performance.

It is noticeably thicker than the previous generation which, to a lot of general, consumers might even be considered a downgrade or a step backwards. In many ways it actually Appears like an older apple device overall, a bit more chunky with smoother edges kind of like a 2015 macbook pro before apple decided to make them much thinner. But if you're using this device for the right reasons.

And you look a little bit closer, then the extra thickness and calling is definitely a welcome upgrade, and we will talk about this more once we get to the actual performance of the device, but man, these new m1 macbooks are just incredibly Quiet. Even the beefed up m1 max here, you really need to push both the cpu and the gpu to like full load to even get the fans even starting to ramp up. Here we are in blender, for example, and I mean we're live, rendering a scene as you can see, and the device is just completely silent, which is to me it's just mind-blowing, even this device here, which is the 2020 version uh.

Even you just boot up blender and you even just start rendering a Scene. The fans will start ramping up immediately. Now, of course, some of this is due to the efficiency of the m1 chips, and just you know how power efficient they are because even to the touch, the new m1 max in this 16 inch form factor.

You know it's not even warm. It's really barely heating up at all, but surely some of that is due to the increased cooling capacity in this thicker case as well so again exterior wise. I actually prefer the look and feel of the 2020 model.

It's Much more slimmer just feels a little bit more sleek, but as a professional tool as something that you're going to be pushing the limits of every day. Then your model just enables a much better user experience. There are some other subtle changes as well.

There's no longer any macbook pro text on the bottom bezel the keycaps are surrounded by black, which looks super clean and on the bottom of the laptop, we get flatter grip your feet with a nicely embossed macbook Pro text, the touch bar, which I always found way Too tedious for simple stuff, like brightness and volume control, is now gone and replaced with physical keys, but you of course, still have all of the necessities. I honestly never found myself doing anything productive with that touch bar, which is a bit of a shame, because it is kind of cool in theory, but in practice it just adds a lot more steps to doing the simple stuff. Another change is that huge notch at the top of The screen, which is just unnecessarily big for the tiny webcam that it sits around apple, does pretty well to disguise it when you're in most applications, especially if you're full screen.

You don't really notice it that much, but I think most of us can agree that this is more of a visual design, cue for apple moving forward, rather than a necessary design choice. Some bigger changes, though, are the ports most notably for me, as a content. Creator is That full-sized sd card port, finally, no more having to use a dongle when just editing some photos or some footage.

They've also brought back the hdmi port, which is nice, and you still have three of the four thunderbolt 4 ports that the previous gen model had as well. And these all support charging displays up to 4k 60 hertz and usb speeds up to 40 gigabits per second magsafe. Charging is also back along with a slightly fatter power, brick for this 16 inch model, Although just keep in mind that the magsafe connection does feel slightly more solid and blocked in than I remember from previous generations.

Another big upgrade here, especially from a user experience, is the screen on the 2021 model. So here we're getting a 120 hertz liquid retina xdr display and this one is using a mini led so as opposed to a traditional backlight which might only have a single backlight or maybe up to say, eight or sixteen backlighting zones On the screen. Uh with local dimming, for example, mini led means you're, getting uh thousands and thousands of individual fighting zones.

So it's not as good as oled with individual per pixel lighting, but mini led. I guess you could say is bridging that gap between traditional backlights and oled displays. I will note that my experience so far with mini led, especially when it comes to gaming displays, has been pretty subpar.

I mean some content does look okay on mini led, But the blooming and the switching on and off of the dimming zones can be really noticeable and distracting the mini, led lighting on the new macbook. Pro, however, is different, and it is a really good implementation. Overall, you can still notice the dimming zones switching, but you really have to stress test it, so it's really only noticeable at max brightness and only when you have a really white element on top of a like completely black background.

That is Really the only time that I noticed the dimming zone, switching on and off and really any blooming at all. Otherwise i'll say that the mini, led implementation here is really good. It's not as good as oled, which has per-pixel lighting, of course, but it does get you pretty close to that oled feel with those deep inky, blacks content.

Viewing is much better here on the new macbook pro because of it and, more importantly, it's not distracting in normal. Day-To-Day use, like other mini led displays, can be then. As for pro motion and the adaptive 120 hertz refresh rate uh, it's a nice to have feature on the new screen.

I'll say that i've not played any games on the new macbook pro. Yet, although we might save that for another video uh but yeah, the high refresh rate, it's definitely nice for editing. And you know you do notice it here and there and you say: oh that's a nice little clean animation in 120 hertz.

But it's nothing Compared to the upgrades that you're getting under the hood, so the first few hours using the new macbook pro setting it up downloading apps writing some notes for the video it felt the same to the previous 2020 model and I think that's a really Important point to drive home here if you're just going to be using this for web browsing writing documents even really light editing. All of that stuff is going to feel nearly identical to a lot of the other macbooks Out there, especially the very capable lineup of these smaller m1s. Now, of course, it's not going to be completely identical.

Uh. You know you do notice the 120hz refresh rate the thicker case and stuff like that, and at least compared to the previous generation. You do notice the battery just not tanking nearly as much, especially when you're doing lighter tasks, but what you really want, the m1 pro and the m1 max 4 is when it comes to performance.

So I written a few Benchmarks here versus the previous laptop that i've been using for the last one and a half years, which is the 2020 version of this same device. The 16 inch macbook pro now this one is not the top tier spec, like the m1. Max is for the time, but it was still pretty beefy.

It's a six core intel, i7 cpu and amd radeon 5300m for the gpu. First up, though, let's talk about battery life. Here I played the same 40 minute netflix episode of arcane on both displays.

At The same brightness, the 2020 model dropped 12 percent of battery during that time, whereas the new model dropped only 3 percent, and this is something that I noticed even just after using both devices over the last few days. The new model basically feels like it can. Last forever, if you're not doing anything, super intensive on it - and I think that's primarily due to the new apple m1 power efficiency versus the older intel cpus, taking a look at 3d Rendering this is where stuff gets pretty crazy and in cinebench r23 m1 max is 75 faster here when we look at multi-threaded performance and at the same time, consumed about half the amount of battery to do the same task.

Considering these products are only one generation apart, that is a huge jump in performance. Single threaded performance is also just insane. 35 gained here with again far less battery power used scores in v-ray 5 also showed a huge leap in Performance when using only cpu, rendering so yeah.

The new m1 chips are absolutely insane, at least when we take a look at the cpu next up, though, I want to take a look at performance in blender and here's where things get a bit tricky. What I really wanted to test out here was gpu performance because m1 max and m1 pro. These are apple's really first attempts at a high performance gpu.

That personally gets me really excited because my own workflows in davinci Resolve and occasionally blender. They scale incredibly well with a beefy gpu, but unfortunately, at this time at least our blender does not support gpu rendering on apple m1. It will in the future via apple's metal api and that's going to be seriously cool.

But for now it is cpu rendering only so we'd expect the previous model to have the edge here with the radeon 5300m. But even there the blender gpu, rendering implementation is a bit janky. You have to use amd's pro Render plug-in and although performance is good, the actual rendering result just looks terrible.

To be honest, the lighting looks really bad everything looks flat, and so it's not something that I personally use for my own projects. So then, back to cpu, rendering only on either device the 2020 model completed. This thumbnail render in a little over nine minutes, while the apple m1 max did it in under six.

Now, you might think cool four minute saved big deal, but the big Difference here is when it comes to actually rendering in real time and editing your scene. Not only is the 2021 apple m1 model, noticeably more responsive and just resolves the scene much faster, but it's literally dead silent, while doing so. On the other hand, the 2020 model with the intel chip - this thing gets loud, it's much warmer to the touch and you can see the battery draining as you're working away now, when you're trying to be creative and get Some work done, that extra noise and just Watching the battery tank, that does affect you creatively.

On the other hand, the m1 is just absolutely chilling and is waiting for you to boot up something more demanding overall, the new m1 macbook pro it's just a more creative and confident tool to work with next up. I want to talk about video editing, which is primarily why i'm interested in this device here. But it's not something that I got a lot done on this previous 2020 Model.

Part of that is due to lockdown and just being here in the studio. Most of the time, and the other part of that is due to final cut pro, not supporting blackmagic raw files yet anyway. So, whenever I needed to edit on this device, I would always use davinci resolve studio, which is what I use anyway, but I definitely felt the compromise compared to my rtx 3090 pc, which I use at my desk.

So, what's the performance like here then well, along with the beefy m1 gpu and That 32 gigabytes of unified memory, this thing can handle my 6k blackmagic raw files like an absolute champ, we're talking full 6k resolution, timeline, no dropped frames, flawless, scrubbing and again a quiet And comfortable experience, the 2020 model, on the other hand, is rough. A 6k timeline was basically impossible to work with and even dropping the timeline resolution to 4k, which is what I mainly use anyway. We do still get dropped frames with timeline, Playback and scrubbing.

As for video exporting, the 2020 version could not export a 6k timeline at all, like it basically just choked up and said, eta was a couple of days, whereas the new m1 max did it in under 10 minutes, while only using 13 battery. Now, of course, the previous device was not impossible to work with for video editing, it's still a relatively powerful device and for stuff, like final cut pro, which is pretty apple optimized, if you're using 4k footage From a sony cam, for example, that will work pretty much Flawlessly, lastly, I want to mention photo editing, which is something that I did quite a lot of and really enjoyed on the 2020 model and despite the fan, spinning up and noticing the battery draining over those longer editing sessions, I felt like it always met my expectations. The m1 max is a completely different beast, though it takes significantly less time to export photos in lightroom, and I have to say it Once again, but the device was dead silent while doing so so then the new m1 max macbook pro.

I think we can agree that it's just a completely different level of performance. I mean if this right here is what applewood prepares called pro. This is like a god mode in a laptop.

It really is just that much faster, but at the same time that much more efficient, it's so fast. In fact that I have even considered returning it seriously, Because i'm not sure I need a laptop this fast. At the end of the day, though, it is a device that will enable me to save time and be more creative and even support those heavier workloads that i'd usually only be confident doing on my pc, which has a ryzen 9 cpu and an rtx 3090.

I will say, though, that if you are considering the m1 max, i'd also encourage you to find other benchmarks and reviews out there, comparing it to the m1 pro and the regular m1, because Those two are very fast and efficient devices and will more than likely meet The needs of what most of you are trying to get done for those that do work with very high res heavy footage, though or perhaps other apps, that can really take advantage of that 32. Core m1 gpu i'd say: go for it, especially if what you're trying to do is save time, be more creative and maybe ultimately make more money, but for the large majority of everyone else watching this, I would Consider the other m1 laptops.

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Video Credit: Optimum Tech