M1 Pro vs M1 Max MacBook Pro ULTIMATE in depth comparison!

why hello there can you help me i'm trying to figure out what the difference is between these two computers i know that one of them is two thousand seven hundred dollars and one of them is three thousand nine hundred dollars but i can't tell which one is which and that is the problem that i want to decipher in today's video because these computers are 1200 apart one of them is the base model with the 16 core gpu and 16 gigabytes of ram and the other one has the 32 core gpu and 64 gigabytes of ram now i've just been pointing at them but let's see was i right oh i was actually i color coded them for ease of use this one with the red background is the base model m1 pro and the blue background is the m1 max so today we are going to be going on an in-depth journey to figure out what is so different about these computers and whether this one is worth twelve hundred dollars more than this one we're gonna do benchmarks synthetic real world we're even gonna get to the bottom of why the m1 max weighs 0.1 of a pound more than the m1 pro and we're also going to put high performance mode to the test so this is the video you want to watch if you're trying to figure out whether or not the m1 max is worth it so without any further ado let's get started [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] today's video is sponsored by ifixit which is going to come in handy in just a few moments as you'll soon see ifixit is my go-to source for parts tools and repair guides and in fact the cheapest way to upgrade your mac is to upgrade the one that you already have and if you want to do that ifixit has the resources the parts and the tools to help you out so check out the links in the description below to find out how and now let's get into this now you might be expecting me to start out a video like this by talking about some benchmark numbers that would be a fun way to talk about the comparison between these two computers but no we're starting with this because i need to get to the bottom of something folks on apple's configuration page they say that the m1 max weighs more than the m1 pro 16-inch macbook pro and i thought to myself that is super weird and definitely warrants some investigation so we are going to find out by opening up these laptops if there are any visible differences on the inside so getting inside these macbooks if it's anything like before requires three different things from the ifixit protect tool kit first we have the p5 screwdriver then we have the guitar pick which is great for getting through the clips that hold the bottom case on and then lastly we have the suction cup which will be required because this thing is held down pretty tight so with our tools in order let's go ahead and open this up so of the eight total screws the four across the top are the same length and the four across the bottom are all the same length so that is nice you don't have to keep track more than just top and bottom that's great to see typically somewhere along the side there should be a clip there it is and you don't want to insert this too far because you know we don't really know where the logic board is where the connectors are uh it's safe to assume that the logic board is up here so i would tend to avoid sticking the pick far in at the top of the device all right there we go huh i don't like opening up macbook pros they they make it much more difficult than it needs to be and there we go so first of all right down here we have the m1 pro now this is a long soc package here you can see there's quite a bit of heat sink and we've got a pretty beefy heat pipe that's going to both sides one thing that's super interesting we uh this this particular computer has the one terabyte ssd you can see the flash storage over here but it looks like these are just empty pads so these are probably populated if you go for the larger storage tiers other things of note here you can see we have the ribbon cable for the force touch track pad that's good that means that this is still replaceable if you just unscrew these screws you don't have to take the battery out so a very interesting set of results here but now i think we need to check out the m1 max board to see if there are any differences particularly with the thermal solution okay so here's the moment of truth let's take off the bottom cover and see if anything is different oh everything looks pretty similar but this this definitely looks different this is a larger this is specifically a wider heatsink and that actually makes a lot of sense when you think about the keynote presentation when apple showed the diagram for the m1 pro and the m1 max the m1 max looks taller because it has more unified memory chips it has a bigger die so that's a look inside the m1 pro and m1 max macbook pros and i think we've got our answer i think we now know why the m1 max weighs 0.1 of a pound heavier it's because it has a larger wider heat sink for the larger soc found in this machine [Music] so now that we know what the physical differences are between these two devices we can start to get into the performance differences because let's be honest that's why you're here this is a lot to justify you know twelve hundred dollars is a big jump in price going from the m1 pro dm1 max so it's a really important question to ask yourself is it worth it now to answer this question i want to do an experiment what i'm going to do now is close these computers and shuffle them under the table so that we have no idea which one is which okay and here they come again let's line them up here now what i've done is open up the exact same final cut timeline on both of these it's got my render test clip it's 10 minute 10 bit 4k 60 fps from my sony a7 s3 and what we're going to do is export both of these clips alright so they're off to the races and now that gives us a chance to figure out which one of these is faster now one of them is twelve hundred dollars more expensive than the other one and has twice the memory bandwidth twice the gpu cores and four times the ram so you'd think this should be pretty obvious right [Music] all right we are getting close to the end here and this mac has finished with this mac right on its heels right now okay so that was what a four or five maybe a six second difference and you might have seen from the blue background that flashed over here this one was the m1 max so sure enough the m1 max finished first but did that look like a 1200 difference to you because it didn't to me and it wasn't just in the export where this happened before i exported these clips i obviously had to render them and the m1 max did it 34 seconds faster than the m1 pro that's not very much especially when you consider that they were both absolutely wiping the floor with all of the intel max that i've tested and this wasn't just limited to final cut either i loaded up davinci resolve and had a three minute version of this exact same clip and on the m1 max we exported that in 37 seconds compared to 42 seconds on the m1 pro so just a five second difference and both were less than half of the time that the imac pro which costs ten thousand dollars exported the exact same clip so if i'm looking at both of these computers and i'm a video editor and spoiler alert i am i'm thinking to myself why would i be putting twelve hundred dollars into extra performance when it doesn't really show itself all that much and this might not even be the only area where that holds true because i did a test in blender with several different scenarios on both of these macbooks and the results were pretty interesting in the longest test blender classroom the m1 max only saved 4 seconds compared to the m1 pro and in the shorter bmw render we saved just one single second 199 compared to 200. so then i thought to myself okay clearly we're not seeing a ton of gains by going to the much more expensive m1 max let's do the gpu version of the bmw render surely that will give us some impressive gains ah it was one second slower than the m1 pro wasn't expecting that so we'll do one more test the ev render this one is pretty graphically heavy and sure enough the m1 max did it in 22 seconds compared to 34 on the m1 pro but both of these are really really fast and i don't necessarily think you need to spend an extra twelve hundred dollars to save 12 seconds that's a hundred dollars per second in this test but we also can't gloss over the fact that both of these are absolutely bonkers i mean we're now dealing with laptops with 30 watt cpus and 30 or 60 watt gpus that are beating a full desktop system that draws hundreds hundreds of watts of power i guess while we're on the subject let's do some gpu benchmarks to see what the differences are starting with geekbench 5 compute the m1 pro scored 41 856 the m1 max gave us a score of 65 884 a pretty noticeable improvement but in a more real-world test i fired up rise of the tomb raider which keep in mind is running under rosetta and that gave us 55 fps on the m1 pro and 97 on the m1 max that is seriously impressive considering that this is not being run natively moving over to gfx bench the m1 max absolutely wipes the floor with every other mac gpu i've ever tested in the aztec high tier off screen test we scored 308 fps much higher than the 165 on the m1 pro and 167 on my vega 64. again in the manhattan 1080p off-screen test we scored 12.98 compared to 892 on the m1 pro and in the t-rex benchmark we saw 2244 on the m1 max compared to 1579 on the m1 pro and 1413 on the vega 64. and then finally in the basemark gpu test we got 9601 on the m1 max which is much higher than the 4883 on the 16 core gpu and again significantly higher than the vega 64 and the radeon pro 5300 in my 2020 imac and then finally i wanted to do a test that would compare how the gpus are scaling here and that is 3dmark wildlife extreme this benchmark is extremely well optimized to take advantage of apple silicon gpu cores and in fact when we measured the 16 core gpu against the 8 core gpu and the m1 chip we found that the 16 core performed a little bit more than twice as well that was not the case however going from the 16 to the 32 core we saw a score of 18 18750 which is significantly better than the 10 333 but it's definitely not twice as good so it appears that we're starting to run into some scaling limitations with m1 gpu cores so overall i'm really impressed with the gpu in the m1 max in most cases it wasn't quite double what the m1 pro was able to achieve but we're talking about significant increases in performance over a gpu that is already extremely capable so if graphics intensive workloads are on your list of things that you need to do then the 600 upgrade to go from the m1 pro to the m1 max with 32 gigabytes of ram might be worth considering on the other hand if you want to do gaming i don't necessarily think that this is the best use of 600 you'd probably be better off just buying like a base model 14 inch and then taking the other like two thousand dollars that you've saved and just buying an entire gaming desktop computer now moving over to a cpu comparison between these two there's really not a lot of difference because they have the same 10 core cpu so we'll run through these results pretty quickly in cinebench r23 we have basically the same score 12 315 same goes for single core same goes for geekbench 5 multicore and geekbench 5's single core they're all basically identical in the v-ray cpu benchmark we scored 77.56 on the max and 76-27 on the pro so a very slight difference there and then in nova bench which by the way is running through rosetta we saw 2796 on the max and 2483 on the pro that one was weirdly a larger difference but i don't think it's super applicable but it does show us that both of these machines hold up very well even when running through a translation layer so clearly the story here is that the m1 max gives you some pretty tasty gpu gains if you can take advantage of them in a lot of real world applications like the rendering and the exporting that we did with some footage really there was not a ton of difference in it to the point where i don't think the m1 max would be worth it but there is one more feature that we should talk about and that is high power mode because the m1 max 16 inch is the only configuration of macbook pro that allows you to use this feature and i was really curious to find out if it made a difference in any of these tests in cinebench r23 turning on high power mode gave us an extra 40 or so points so really not a big deal and similarly in geekbench 5 multi-core we jumped from 12 711 to 12 863 a pretty minor difference where i did see a difference was in geekbench 5 compute we jumped from 65 884 to 68 111 but more practically in shadow of the tomb raider going into high power mode yielded exactly no difference in fps both were 97. the story is similar in the final cut pro render where enabling high power mode yielded an additional four seconds of render time strangely and no change in export time same z's in davinci resolve with the export it took 37 seconds with or without high power mode over in gfx bench we did see a little bit of difference consistent gains across the board but we jumped from 308 to 311 in aztec high tier 1298 to 1313 in manhattan and 22 44 to 2460 in t-rex so the biggest difference was in the t-rex benchmark and really none of those were that big of a difference certainly nothing that you'd be able to notice and the same applies in the 3dmark wildlife extreme where we jumped from 18750 to 18784 and then again in basemark gpu 9601 jumped to 9613 with high power mode so it is interesting because with the exception of the final cut pro render where this in high power mode took four seconds longer i'm gonna call that a fluke everything pretty much was a tiny tiny bit faster across the board but not such that you would ever notice it so if you're concerned about missing out on high power mode i really wouldn't worry too much about it i think if you're trying to decide between an m1 max 14 inch and a 16 inch the big difference is going to be the thermal envelope that you might be afforded with the 16 inch now i didn't order a fully decked out you know spec for spec 14 inch because it's just so much money i already bought five of these dang things and i just ran out of willpower and money but if you do want to see those differences i am going to be comparing the m1 pro 16 inch 2 an identically configured 14 inch with the exact same specs so that should allow us to see if there are any differences between the thermal performance on these two different screen sizes definitely make sure to get subscribed so you don't miss that okay so welcome now to the honesty couch this is where things get real and we can really talk about whether the extra 1200 that i spent on this macbook pro was worth it and i can honestly say that the answer is no because i mean for what i personally do which is video editing there was no difference that was really noticeable with the tests that i performed now i might do a more extended video editing test and really try to push this thing in fact i've been planning since i bought this to do a video where i tried to fill up 64 gigabytes of unified memory which should be a pretty daunting task so definitely let me know if you want to see that below but with the exception of these fringe cases i don't think most people would be able to tell the difference unless you're playing games or using the graphics all the time now obviously you can draw your own conclusion and we did notice a ton of gains in those graphics tests it's just that for me and for i think a lot of people it doesn't always translate into real world performance gains especially at that much of a price premium and really i think for most people when you're looking at this new generation of macbook pro the thing that really stands out that you don't have to pay any extra money for over the 24.99 base model for the 16 inch is the design the display promotion xdr the return of the ports mag safe fast charging those are the type of things that you don't have to pay anything more than the starting price for and those are the things that you're gonna see all the time so with that thank you guys so much for watching as usual don't forget to follow me on twitter at lukemiani and definitely stay tuned because i've got more macbook pro coverage coming your way any questions you have leave them down below and with that i will see you guys in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 255,307

Keywords: M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Pro vs M1 Max, M1 Max gaming, MacBook Pro 2021, M1 vs M1 Max comparison, comparison, MacBook comparison, performance test, m1 max performance, m1 max benchmarks, m1 max video editing, m1 max rendering, m1 max vs pro, pro vs max, apple silicon, MacBook Pro 16, MacBook Pro high power mode, high power mode, m1 max high power mode, m1 max tested, MacBook Pro m1 max, MacBook Pro m1 pro

Id: q8F3K7se2ww

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/grishkaa]

I wonder how much better the M1 Max performs on workloads that are memory- and IO-intensive. Things like compiling code, especially large projects, and especially doing so in many threads (-j30 anyone?). Since its memory bus is twice as wide as the M1 Pro, there should be a noticeable difference, in theory.

[u/mumei-chan]

This video was pretty good, much better than expected!

Interesting to see that Blender is still pretty slow on these awesome machines. On a RTX 3090, the BMW render takes 12-15 seconds, I believe. And for gaming, he is absolutely right. The argument is basically the same as the argument for Logic Pro: If you want to use Logic Pro, you need a Mac. If you want to play many games, you will need a Windows PC.

But that’s probably not the best use case for these machines. I think the differences will be more prominent with longer, more complex Final Cut Pro projects.

I liked his conclusion on that the biggest value comes from the design, the ports, etc., regardless of which model you choose. Ans you can finally plug more than one external monitor to these machines!

Speaking of which, I would have liked to see a test on that. Wondering if the M1 Pro can be connected to 3 monitors if they are 1080p. According to the apple website, I don’t think it’s possible, but I’m not sure.

[u/PeaceBull]

This was a helpful breakdown, but lord did this guy decide to study Wil Wheaton acting smug and then make it his whole persona?

[u/tekreviews]

​

	M1 PRO	M1 MAX
Final Cut Pro		5 seconds faster
DaVinci Resolve 3 min 4K Prores Export	42 seconds	37 seconds
Blender BMW CPU		1 second faster
Blender Elephant	34 seconds	22 seconds
Geekbench GPU	41856	65884
Tomb Raider (Rosseta)	55 FPS	97 FPS
GFXBench Aztec High Tier	165 FPS	308 FPS
GFXBench Manhattan 1080P	892 FPS	1298 FPS
GFXBench T-Rex	1579 FPS	2244 FPS
Base Mark GPU	4883	9601
3D Mark Wildlife Extreme	10333	18750

Both GPUs are faster than Vega 64, and have very similar CPU scores with one another with the Max being up to 10% faster.

[u/Altruistic-Emu3867]

Seems like he did these tests unplugged. I wonder what the difference would have been if they were connected to power.