M1 MacBook Review + Mac Mini

all right so this is my review of the new m1 equipped macbook air macbook pro as well as the new mac mini it's the review of the m1 devices now i know that this is a very important product not just for apple but for you guys like i know a lot of you guys are very interested to see how does this stuff actually perform right some of the benchmarks that they were showing during the presentation were really vague and at the same time because it's apple i know a lot of you guys want to see this stuff fail right so i approached this whole review with a very very neutral mind just like as fair as possible to just evaluate it from the perspective of not someone who's gonna buy it right because that already biases your brain into some in a direction that i wanted to avoid i looked at this from the perspective of like just a nerd a tech nerd so we got three devices and i got to see up front the performance of these three machines was so much better than they thought they could possibly be i had to rerun benchmarks rerun tests over and over because the numbers just they didn't make sense to me i thought i was screwing something up i thought i was botching the test somehow but i reran them enough to the point where i feel confident that this is just what it is so we're going to start off here with the cinebench r23 benchmark and the single core performance on m1 is fast like really fast it's on par with any of the top single core performers on the market so amd's best stuff intel's best stuff it keeps up then we move on to multi-core performance and this is where you start to see a bigger difference between the three machines the macbook pro and the mac mini because they are actively cooled like they have fans inside them they can maintain a fast clock speed or like a high clock speed throughout the entire duration of the test to the point where there seemingly isn't very much thermal throttling even if you let this test extend on indefinitely like they're just able to keep up with the heat output of the m1 chip the macbook air it does throttle but the most weird thing to me was that this chip doesn't throttle quickly like you don't see it happen on the macbook air until about like the eight or nine minute mark like you push it full tilt and at minute eight and a half that's when it starts to slow down but usually it happens within seconds on a fanless device like this let's talk about real world applications so i'm someone who doesn't use apple's applications but we'll kind of cover the stuff first because this is what m1 is supposed to do right you take apple hardware run apple software how does it do so this is a chart of xcode build times it's the time it takes for the program xcode to compile the code and you can see a list of some pretty decently specked out systems these are systems have access to and so my friends that have are developers i ask them to test at this chunk of code give me back their numbers and all those numbers make sense to me right i've i've had some decent experience with this stuff these are numbers that i would expect and then i threw them into m1 and the numbers that came out the build times were stupidly fast like to the point where i actually thought that i wasn't compiling it properly like i wasn't doing a fresh build and i did it over and over again cleared the cache like these are legit this is super fast to the point where i had a friend he actually makes an app a pretty well known app i can't reveal his name because he uses a hackintosh a 3950x 16 core really decked out system specifically for development right this is his build time somehow these m1 devices are keeping up one of them being fanless it's pretty crazy and this was the moment like when i got the numbers back i was like this is this is real apple silicon is real now i edit videos in something called adobe premiere but it's not native to apple silicon yet so i was testing final cut and the performance there is insane i don't just mean like oh final cut's faster than premiere i'm saying that apple final cut running on apple silicon is so much faster and so much better performing than apple's existing like high-end systems it keeps up with the 16-inch macbook pro like what is going on now i want to move this conversation onto what i feel like is the more important testing how do non-native apps run on m1 right because the vast majority of apps out there are still not optimized for this type of hardware and here's the thing i've had experience with several companies that have tried to make arm-based chips that run non-arm-based software there's emulation involved and usually it's not great so i had very low expectations right i fired this thing up and adobe premiere this is again an application that was written for x86 it's not optimized right now and it runs weirdly well like so much better than i thought it would so this is playback of red raw footage 5k it's pretty gnarly stuff and there's no skipped frames completely smooth this is not what you would expect from a non-native app running on an arm-based chip like it's just so strange and you know at this point you guys probably think i sound like a fanboy but i just gotta call it like i see it my brain had an expectation i had this idea of what good would be for m1 and this so far exceeds it so it's just it's just what it is okay it's strangely good in terms of the cpu performance now i also tested the gpu performance now in order to do that i just have to play games and run gaming benchmarks and the gpu performance is good but it's not amazing right it just boils down to that eight core gpu being limited both by wattage and just by size you can't compare this to a discrete gpu they might find in like a 16-inch macbook pro it's impressive for what it is but you just can't keep up with the big boys yet now battery life battery life so i did a bunch of tests the first thing i wanted to do just to test the claims of apple's 20 hour thing so that's on this one the macbook pro they claim this that can hit 20 hours of video playback i set it to the exact same configuration so it's half brightness so that's eight ticks and i hit it i hit the 20 hours now granted that is a darker screen than my normal testing i normally run at 250 nits i redid the whole thing at my brightness i still got really good numbers and that to me is one of the best features of apple silicon right now the power efficiency is something special okay i want to move on to some concerns i feel like i've had and you guys probably share as well the first one is apps right this is the most important and fundamental core of an ecosystem right if you don't have good apps that support all the hardware then it's useless so two things number one i've always believed that the developers would come to this platform but having seen the pace at which people have been developing for apple silicon i am super convinced that it's good it's not an issue it really is a non-issue the other thing is that these aren't just developers that are just making stuff you know on a short-term basis the developers that we've seen in apple's ecosystem tend to be people that are really good teams that are so good at making extremely high performance highly optimized apps for the hardware like some of my friends do it and i've seen the development projects like i follow the stuff i see how good they are doing it and so if you're concerned about apps not appearing on this stuff i really don't think it's gonna be thing with apple silicon number two ports or the lack of ports so all of these devices have two usbc ports or thunderbolt ports and it's a downgrade for a lot of users right the mac mini used to have four now it has two the macbook pro used to have four or you could get up to four now has two uh the macbook air still remains at two and on the laptops you can have up to two technically three displays up at once you can have the laptop screen you have an external screen and you can connect sidecar if you count that as a screen so both laptops support two and a half or three screens the mac mini also supports three screens you have uh two externals and you can have again sidecar but connectivity for the two-port macbook pro is really tight to the point where i feel like some developers wouldn't be able to use this system because of its lack of ports which is unfortunate considering how capable the system is otherwise and they'd have to go with a mac mini if they want to go with apple silicon now when it comes to choosing between the macbook air and the macbook pro so obviously there's some hardware differences like the brighter screen and the touch bar and stuff like that but the macbook air is actually really powerful much more powerful than the old macbook air running intel hardware and because the thermal throttling doesn't kick in until like the nine minute mark this can go way further than you would think like you can edit stuff in photoshop you can video edit you can code really comfortably on the system it is a really capable macbook air like this product the macbook pro even though it has the fan it doesn't really stick out as being a significantly better system for pros so my thoughts on apple silicon right now it's that this hardware is impressive it really surprised me as to how good it was however i do feel like this is generation one and when it comes to generation one of anything the the rate at which things improve is super fast right generation two generation three they tend to just roll through technical improvements super fast so i wouldn't be surprised if like when m2 and m3 come out we're seeing double triple quadruple the capabilities of what this stuff is already right so just it's something to keep in mind when you make a purchase decision i think if you're someone who has just been looking for apple hardware you need a macbook for whatever reason you want to replace something that's old this is it's good like it really is something good aesthetically it doesn't have a new look the 13-inch screen has some big bezels and the 720p webcam still doesn't look amazing but the performance is on point unless you care about graphics and i really can't stress that enough the gpu in m1 is good it's so much better than the integrated stuff from intel but i really feel like they're gonna bring out some crazy good gpus real soon that's just it's just bound to happen considering the progress they've made already so if you're someone who cares about graphics i'd hold out and if you're a windows user and you're looking at these benchmarks and you're thinking i wish i had something that had that kind of energy efficiency coming down the pipe we do have lakefield from intel to look forward to we also have the like the mobile ryzen 5000 chips coming in those should be pretty good now i want to leave this video off with one last thought that i've said before in previous videos but i'm just going to repeat it in this one it's that if you're someone who's picking up a laptop right now or hardware in general and you're looking at this stuff and you're like this is the best and it looks super appealing and i can see why it would be keep in mind that with apple's hardware and this is not a chirp on apple this is just the nature of their ecosystem when you have when you give a company like apple full control the full stack the hardware the software they can make amazing stuff like this it works you saw the numbers right it works stupidly good but you also lose a lot of control over your hardware decisions like i said this before when apple does awesome stuff we all love it but when they make stuff that's a little bit weird like butterfly keyboards and touch bars on their keyboards that people don't love you have to use that stuff as well if you're in the ecosystem just put it out there for the people that care about this kind of stuff okay hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs if you liked it subs if you loved it see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: Dave2D

Views: 1,773,317

Rating: 4.925808 out of 5

Keywords: Dave2D, Review, macbook m1 unboxing, macbook, macbook air m1, macbook pro m1, macbook m1 review

Id: XQ6vX6nmboU

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/adunofaiur]

The key takeaways from this were:

M1 Mac’s outperformed the 16” Pro in Xcode.

M1 Mac’s outperformed the computers they replaced in Premier (with Rosetta)

No throttling on the MacBook Air until eight minutes of continuous, all core load

Battery life claims are exaggerated in real-world scenarios, but these machines still out perform their predecessors by a significant margin, and cross the 10-hour threshold in real usage

[u/AvoidingIowa]

So it looks like unless you're really pinning the device for 10+ minutes, you're not seeing throttling. The Air is probably a better bet in most cases.

[u/toelessfoot]

Does anybody find it a little weird that he has to apologize to the audience in advance that the M1 is so fast.

[u/firelitother]

Dave is possibly the most impartial reviewer I know.

I know he is a PC Gamer but he doesn't diss needlessly on Apple.

[u/dontpokebearz]

Dave makes great videos.

[u/BodhiWarchild]

The throttling in the Air is what impresses me the most.

[u/mtc__]

Really optimistic for the M2/3 Airs, can finally get rid of both Intel and the terrible keyboard on my 2018 Pro

[u/jeemchan]

Are we seeing the death of Intel in slow motion?

[u/sodopro]

Really good stuff but I think I'll wait for the next iteration + more support (no docker yet :( )