- Apple, we need to talk. Like actually talk, for real. You don't return my calls, you don't acknowledge me in public. I mean, I had so many good things to say about the 16-inch Mac Book Pro. My new 13-inch Mac book pro. All kidding aside, Apple's 16-inch Mac Book Pro was a breath of fresh air.
See this comparison chart between all mac book generations:
It brought smaller bezels, rocking sound, beefed up cooling, and a vastly superior, while not strictly speaking new, keyboard that blew the butterfly switches of older Mac Book Pros out of the water. That's why the 13-inch is such a weird device for me to look at. A lot of what I thought was new, well isn't. The chassis hasn't been significantly redesigned since 2016 with the refreshed touch bar-equipped 2019 Coffee Lake model sporting the same design for this year's low-end models. Kind of flew under our radar because we frankly had enough Apple on our hands at the time. So, we're looking at a pretty similar user experience overall to those refreshed models. Shockingly good speakers that don't quite measure up to the 16-inch, but definitely hold their own against most other laptops out there. An awesome P3 - enabled 2560-by-1600, 16 by 10 screen, and improved triple microphone array, essential for modern teleconferencing. And four Thunderbolt 3 ports, like previous gen high-end 13-inch and all 15-inch models. Although it would be nice to see Apple give more love to USB type C enthusiasts on the lower end too. Lttstore.com. On the Surface then, that places the new 13-inch Mac Book Pro in a difficult position where the refreshed Mac Book Air is significantly less expensive, while providing a very similar set of features. The Air does have a slightly less impressive sRGB screen of the same size and resolution, though. It has two fewer Thunderbolt 3 ports, the same number as there freshed low-end Pro models with Coffee Lake CPUs. And both of them are rocking the new Magic Keyboard, just without the polarizing touch bar on t he Mac Book Air. Speaking of the touch bar,Apple has completely killed off the touch bar-free Mac Book Pro, so the only Apple laptop that you can buy brand new today without the touch bar is the Mac Book Air. To the Pro's credit, its dimensions and even weight, aren't significantly different from the Mac Book Air,whose wedge-shaped design actually peaks at a greater thickness than the Pro does. What sets the new 13-inch MacBook Pro apart then, is primarily its CPU. Both the Pro and the Air use Intel's 10 nanometer Ice Lake CPUs, but the Pro gains access to the Core i7 1068NG7, the fastest of the bunch,coupled with 16 gigs of RAM and a 512 gig SSD as standard. Though we equipped ours with a terabyte to make room for our Windows and mac OS test suites. Speaking of which, we'll grab our 16-inch Mac Book Pro, the 2020 Mac Book Air,and the new Dell XPS 13 to help us understand who this rather expensive machine is actually for. Oh and make sure you're subscribed, because we're also midway through testing out whether the iPad Pro really can be used as a real laptop. Now gaming is obviously not the Mac Book Pro's forte, as demonstrated by the relatively poor AAA gaming experience that you're looking at right now. But, it does hold itsown in e-sports titles like CS: GO, and actually managed to outpace the Dell XPS 13 despite that computer's supposedly identical GPU configuration and faster core clocks. Not too shabby. Moving on to the actual reason people buy Macs though, to get work done, things get a little interesting. Quad core versus quad core, with the same memory and architecture, the Mac Book Air falls well short of the Mac Book Pro, particularly in multi-threaded tasks. The XPS 13 meanwhile, hangs close, trading blows here and there, thanks to its higher core clocks. But Apple's more aggressively-tweaked power profile in mac OS helps it in certain workloads, like our Firefox compiled,where it beat the XPS by about five minutes. And beat the Air by nearly an hour. We had to rerun some of our tests, like the Adobe Suite test to confirm these numbers. But the Mac Book Pro 13 dominates even the 16-inch Mac Book Pro in Photoshop, presumably as a result of its faster memory and larger cache, while the Air ends up languishing at half the score. It's worth noting that both the Mac Book Air and Pro crashed during our After Effects test, something that we didn't see on the 16-inch, nor on the XPS, which might point to a bug in mac OS when you're using an Ice Lake CPU. Speaking of mac OS, let's see how Apple's aggressive boost settings affect things, shall we? Over the course of a long Blender render, we're seeing core clocks spike to 4.1 gigahertz, and remain steady in the 3.2 gigahertz range throughout the run. That is well ahead of the Mac Book Air and even the supposedly faster XPS 13. Power consumption is naturally quite a bit higher as a result,clocking in around 44 watts peak and settling in the 32 watts range. So around a watt per megahertz, nice. Finally though, temperature. It's just one word to describe it. Ouch. It's not as much straight up fire as the Mac Book Air is, but the Pro 13 2020 is firmly past 95% sustained with 100-degree peaks, while the XPS 13 sits, and I really hate to use this word this way, but at a relatively cool 90 degrees. We've said this before,but it bears repeating. In my opinion, 100 degree low temperatures basically invalidate a pro machine for these kinds of professional workloads. Optimization at any cost is the name of the game here folks, and it's clear that Apple has pulled out all the stops to push this CPU to its limit. That means though, that alongwith new Ice Lake goodies, like deep learning boost, ABX 512, and an expanded cache layout, yeah, this thing is fast, especially per thread, but it leaves us with the same concerns that we had when they first launched the touch bar Mac Book Pro. Is the slightly slimmer profile really worth the trade-off in lifespan? 'Cause remember guys, these numbers are on a brand new machine,a professional machine. Not one that's been running for a year or two sucking in dust. It's not all bad, to be clear. Thanks in part to its ridiculously speedy 3733 megahertz LPDDR4X memory, this thing dominates, first-year memory-heavy tasks. And not only do you get a significant performance improvement, it also runs at significantly lower voltages, something that has allowed Apple to slightly reduce the total battery capacity using more power-hungry CPU and still advertise the same battery life as before. Which actually turns out in the real world to be roughly on point with an overnight 1080p YouTube video lasting for about nine hours at half brightness, placing it just slightly behind the Mac Book Air, with the Dell XPS 13 far outpacing it at over 14 hours. That's actually, now that you think about it, half again, as long as the Pro lasted and with a smaller battery to boot. Guess that's what aggressive CPU power tuning gets you. Another point in the XPS 13's favor is the price. For our similarly-specked machine, you're looking at around$150 of Apple tax over the Dell, which includes Windows Hello, and in its non touch configuration, also manages to be lighter than the Mac Book Air, making it a more mobile friendly machine. Apple does get some points, however, for having double the Thunderbolt 3 ports, along with better performance, even if it comes at a thermal cost, and awesome speakers. The feeling I can't shake here though is that Apple's kind of carving out a niche within a niche with this one. It seems like it would be a great Photoshop machine, or maybe audio mixer for DJs. But for any pro work that demands full loads of more than a minute or so at a time, the truth of the matter is, I'm sorry Apple, but I just can't recommend it. If you guys enjoyed reading my article maybe you'll enjoy the deeper dive that we went into with Apple's thermal throttling and sort of their mald design on their devices featuring the Mac Mini. It's definitely worth your reading
It brought smaller bezels, rocking sound, beefed up cooling, and a vastly superior, while not strictly speaking new, keyboard that blew the butterfly switches of older Mac Book Pros out of the water. That's why the 13-inch is such a weird device for me to look at. A lot of what I thought was new, well isn't. The chassis hasn't been significantly redesigned since 2016 with the refreshed touch bar-equipped 2019 Coffee Lake model sporting the same design for this year's low-end models. Kind of flew under our radar because we frankly had enough Apple on our hands at the time. So, we're looking at a pretty similar user experience overall to those refreshed models. Shockingly good speakers that don't quite measure up to the 16-inch, but definitely hold their own against most other laptops out there. An awesome P3 - enabled 2560-by-1600, 16 by 10 screen, and improved triple microphone array, essential for modern teleconferencing. And four Thunderbolt 3 ports, like previous gen high-end 13-inch and all 15-inch models. Although it would be nice to see Apple give more love to USB type C enthusiasts on the lower end too. Lttstore.com. On the Surface then, that places the new 13-inch Mac Book Pro in a difficult position where the refreshed Mac Book Air is significantly less expensive, while providing a very similar set of features. The Air does have a slightly less impressive sRGB screen of the same size and resolution, though. It has two fewer Thunderbolt 3 ports, the same number as there freshed low-end Pro models with Coffee Lake CPUs. And both of them are rocking the new Magic Keyboard, just without the polarizing touch bar on t he Mac Book Air. Speaking of the touch bar,Apple has completely killed off the touch bar-free Mac Book Pro, so the only Apple laptop that you can buy brand new today without the touch bar is the Mac Book Air. To the Pro's credit, its dimensions and even weight, aren't significantly different from the Mac Book Air,whose wedge-shaped design actually peaks at a greater thickness than the Pro does. What sets the new 13-inch MacBook Pro apart then, is primarily its CPU. Both the Pro and the Air use Intel's 10 nanometer Ice Lake CPUs, but the Pro gains access to the Core i7 1068NG7, the fastest of the bunch,coupled with 16 gigs of RAM and a 512 gig SSD as standard. Though we equipped ours with a terabyte to make room for our Windows and mac OS test suites. Speaking of which, we'll grab our 16-inch Mac Book Pro, the 2020 Mac Book Air,and the new Dell XPS 13 to help us understand who this rather expensive machine is actually for. Oh and make sure you're subscribed, because we're also midway through testing out whether the iPad Pro really can be used as a real laptop. Now gaming is obviously not the Mac Book Pro's forte, as demonstrated by the relatively poor AAA gaming experience that you're looking at right now. But, it does hold itsown in e-sports titles like CS: GO, and actually managed to outpace the Dell XPS 13 despite that computer's supposedly identical GPU configuration and faster core clocks. Not too shabby. Moving on to the actual reason people buy Macs though, to get work done, things get a little interesting. Quad core versus quad core, with the same memory and architecture, the Mac Book Air falls well short of the Mac Book Pro, particularly in multi-threaded tasks. The XPS 13 meanwhile, hangs close, trading blows here and there, thanks to its higher core clocks. But Apple's more aggressively-tweaked power profile in mac OS helps it in certain workloads, like our Firefox compiled,where it beat the XPS by about five minutes. And beat the Air by nearly an hour. We had to rerun some of our tests, like the Adobe Suite test to confirm these numbers. But the Mac Book Pro 13 dominates even the 16-inch Mac Book Pro in Photoshop, presumably as a result of its faster memory and larger cache, while the Air ends up languishing at half the score. It's worth noting that both the Mac Book Air and Pro crashed during our After Effects test, something that we didn't see on the 16-inch, nor on the XPS, which might point to a bug in mac OS when you're using an Ice Lake CPU. Speaking of mac OS, let's see how Apple's aggressive boost settings affect things, shall we? Over the course of a long Blender render, we're seeing core clocks spike to 4.1 gigahertz, and remain steady in the 3.2 gigahertz range throughout the run. That is well ahead of the Mac Book Air and even the supposedly faster XPS 13. Power consumption is naturally quite a bit higher as a result,clocking in around 44 watts peak and settling in the 32 watts range. So around a watt per megahertz, nice. Finally though, temperature. It's just one word to describe it. Ouch. It's not as much straight up fire as the Mac Book Air is, but the Pro 13 2020 is firmly past 95% sustained with 100-degree peaks, while the XPS 13 sits, and I really hate to use this word this way, but at a relatively cool 90 degrees. We've said this before,but it bears repeating. In my opinion, 100 degree low temperatures basically invalidate a pro machine for these kinds of professional workloads. Optimization at any cost is the name of the game here folks, and it's clear that Apple has pulled out all the stops to push this CPU to its limit. That means though, that alongwith new Ice Lake goodies, like deep learning boost, ABX 512, and an expanded cache layout, yeah, this thing is fast, especially per thread, but it leaves us with the same concerns that we had when they first launched the touch bar Mac Book Pro. Is the slightly slimmer profile really worth the trade-off in lifespan? 'Cause remember guys, these numbers are on a brand new machine,a professional machine. Not one that's been running for a year or two sucking in dust. It's not all bad, to be clear. Thanks in part to its ridiculously speedy 3733 megahertz LPDDR4X memory, this thing dominates, first-year memory-heavy tasks. And not only do you get a significant performance improvement, it also runs at significantly lower voltages, something that has allowed Apple to slightly reduce the total battery capacity using more power-hungry CPU and still advertise the same battery life as before. Which actually turns out in the real world to be roughly on point with an overnight 1080p YouTube video lasting for about nine hours at half brightness, placing it just slightly behind the Mac Book Air, with the Dell XPS 13 far outpacing it at over 14 hours. That's actually, now that you think about it, half again, as long as the Pro lasted and with a smaller battery to boot. Guess that's what aggressive CPU power tuning gets you. Another point in the XPS 13's favor is the price. For our similarly-specked machine, you're looking at around$150 of Apple tax over the Dell, which includes Windows Hello, and in its non touch configuration, also manages to be lighter than the Mac Book Air, making it a more mobile friendly machine. Apple does get some points, however, for having double the Thunderbolt 3 ports, along with better performance, even if it comes at a thermal cost, and awesome speakers. The feeling I can't shake here though is that Apple's kind of carving out a niche within a niche with this one. It seems like it would be a great Photoshop machine, or maybe audio mixer for DJs. But for any pro work that demands full loads of more than a minute or so at a time, the truth of the matter is, I'm sorry Apple, but I just can't recommend it. If you guys enjoyed reading my article maybe you'll enjoy the deeper dive that we went into with Apple's thermal throttling and sort of their mald design on their devices featuring the Mac Mini. It's definitely worth your reading
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