MacBook Pro 14 & 16 M2: Which configuration should you buy!

Tech family today we're going to take a holistic look at these new Macbook Pros with M2 we're going to look at the Benchmark results as well as show how these laptops perform in real-world usage by the end hopefully it will be clear who should upgrade who should hang on to their current laptop and who should buy something else and guys this decision is personal for me out of all the laptops I own my M1 MacBook Pros are the ones I use the most my MacBook Pro 14 has been my primary laptop for the last year I browse the web on it play like games on it and when I travel I edit videos on it my MacBook Pro 16 is my Workhorse laptop for video editing most videos I made for this channel in 2022 were edited and rendered on that laptop the reason I use and recommended these laptops so much is because they just change the game they were revolutionary in being the first to handle high performance tasks without the laptop sounding like a jet engine or feeling uncomfortably warm to the touch plus they were really just well-rounded machines with many other positives long battery life great screen excellent sound good Port selection etc etc so when Apple announced these new models I was excited for the upgrade but unfortunately all is not as it seems here's the specs of the laptops I bought and we'll be comparing my M1 14-inch pro has the base M1 Pro processor and 16 gig of RAM I was particularly Keen to upgrade that laptop for video editing on the go so my new 14-inch M2 laptops both have 32 gig of RAM I use plural as I wasn't sure which M2 Pro chips would be better for the 14-inch form factor so I ordered both for the 16 inch both my models had the highest Max chip from their respective generations with 32 gig of RAM and for storage because I edit videos on these laptops they all have two terabytes let's start with geekbench which tests a variety of common performance tasks but it doesn't Max out the CPU you can see straight away the MacBook Pros with M2 are Faster by good margin over 20 in multi-core for the base model 14 and close to 20 for the MacBook Pro 6D and here is graphics performance as you can see similar performance gains now let's take a look at cinebench which tests how these laptops perform Under full CPU load again very decent performance gains particularly in multi-core but this is far from the full picture to see what's really happening underneath the hood I ran a torture test of cinebench on a loop for 10 minutes all laptops were able to sustain their full performance during this time which shows that the cooling solutions are up to the task you can see when it comes to power draw the new Macbook Pros with M2 do indeed draw a good amount more power I measured 6 Watts extra on my base model 14 that is as well as my fully upgraded 16. when it comes to efficiency though performance per watt is a little worse during the torture test all units about 1 got warmed at the touch but nothing overly uncomfortable and for those I couldn't hear any fan noise at all as in the fans weren't audible above normal room noise the exception was the MacBook Pro 14 with the upper and M2 Pro chip its fans were allowed and it exhibited Behavior similar to a laptop with an Intel processor the CPU temperatures peaked at 100 degrees Celsius and the fan sped up to try to cool the processor so what we see here is the MacBook Pro 14 with the upper and M2 Pro chip is really pushing this 14 inch laptop's cooling solution to the lemon which by the way was the reason I didn't even attempt to configure it with a more powerful Max chip and FYI back when the M1 pro versions came out in 2021 I did buy a 14 inch with the lower end and One Max chip it was substantially worse than the 14 inch with the M1 Pro it got warmer to the touch and had significantly worse battery life anyway let's now take a look at how these laptops perform in the real world I'm going to model this on my own use case as these are very expensive upgrades for me personally that is and I want to make sure that they are worth it there are three main tasks I do on these laptops casual use like web browsing and office work video editing and light gaming for casual use the new Macbook Pros with M2 were noticeably snappier programs loaded faster as did switching between applications in this use case these new laptops were dead silent and very cool to the touch switching to video editing I use Premiere Pro to edit my videos during the editing process is there are two tasks that I find myself waiting around for the first is running a stabilization effect this is where I film a pan of the laptop then run an effect to make the footage smoother my native footage tends to be a bit jolty as my hand doesn't perfectly Pan the camera I ran warp stabilization on a large piece of footage on each laptop what I found was there was minimal performance Improvement between the old laptops and the new hmm the next task I tested was exporting I exported my most recent YouTube video it's a nine minute long video recorded in 4k h.264 with multiple layers and effects again the export was a minuscule amount faster on the new Macbook Pros very disappointing I was hoping that these new Macbook Pros would be a decent step up for me especially as my new 14 inch with M2 now have more RAM I ran the tests again this time monitoring processor and memory usage the reason these new MacBooks aren't faster is because these tasks don't fully utilize all the course available and they don't require more than 16 gig of RAM so let's switch the last task that I use my MacBook Pros for like gaming I play Team fight tactics a game based on League of Legends it does not run natively right now on Apple's M series processors it uses Rosetta 2 emulation even with this in mind all these laptops can easily run this game at high resolution with more than 60 frames per second and you definitely don't need more than 60 frames per second on that game what I care more about is whether this laptop will get uncomfortably warm to the touch when the graphics are being pushed because they mainly play the game with the laptop on my lap so I set the game's resolution to Max higher settings and uncap the frame rate after playing the game on each laptop for 30 minutes straight I measured the surface temperatures that you'd feel they were in line with other test results that I showed you earlier all felt warm but were manageable except the 14 inch with the upgraded M2 Pro chip it got noticeably warmer than the others alright let's now switch gears and talk battery life I started with my standard battery test I set both laptops to their best battery setting lowered the brightness to 200 nits and ran a Netflix movie on repeat over Wi-Fi for 4 hours what you can see is yes the new Macbook Pros last longer than the old ones substantially so in fact the MacBook Pro 16 with M2 is an absolute monster after this test it still had a whopping 84 battery remaining if you extrapolate this out that laptop should last an epic 25 hours on battery please note my MacBook Pro 14 with the M1 has had a lot of use on battery over the last year so its battery is a little worn down and likely reduced its longevity in this test but is this the whole story what happens if you are doing something intensive on the laptop when on battery to test this I ran cinebench on a loop for 30 minutes the good news is that all laptops maintain their performance but we're now seeing something different than the video playback test I showed you earlier the older M1 Pro 16 slightly beat out the newer M2 Pro 16 and in the case of the 14-inch the base model with 10 cores that is the M2 did very well when compared to the prime model while the higher end 12 core M2 did poorly I'm surprised the base 10 core M2 did so well as the performance per watt we measured showed the M2 chips being consistently a little worse okay let's talk about some of the other changes in this year's models the more modern HDMI 2.1 which now supports 8K monitors at 60 hertz is good to see as is faster Wi-Fi 6E these are certainly the kinds of devices that you will want to transfer large amounts of data to and from here's how the webcam looks on the older M1 version now here's how the webcam looks on the new Macbook Pros with M2 I find it looks a little bit better I did see Max's review stating that the sound wasn't as good in this year's MacBook Pros I spent a ton of time listening to different tracks back to back on these laptops and I just didn't find find that I used to be a professional DJ by the way and I'm neurotic when it comes to good audio unsure what's happening there and lastly the notch it's too large especially considering it doesn't even contain face ID many Mac OS applications run only in the menu bar that means to access their functionality you must click on the icon there Dropbox for example if there are too many of these icons some of them will disappear behind the notch this means you can't access their functionality at all this issue is mostly prevalent on the 14 inch where you have limited horizontal screen space alright let's wrap overall the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 with M2 are a decent upgrade but not something you should feel you are missing out on if you have an older M1 model the main thing most people will notice is that they are a little snappier things like opening programs are faster that being said the older m1s weren't exactly slow and what I discovered as I deep dive my own personal tasks is is that nothing I'm doing fully utilizes all the course available in any of these processes so for me I'm mostly throwing money away for this upgrade so here's who I think should buy which one as I said if you have an M1 MacBook Pro 14 or 16. be confident that your purchase is totally fine you should only be considering upgrading if you are certain that your software will take advantage of all those extra cores or you're just insanely rich and would like to gift some of that money to Apple if you're coming from another laptop the M2 version provides a nice upgrade but be careful of which config you get for those buying the 14 inch I personally would advise you save money and not upgrade to the upper and M2 Pro processor that's because under any load that laptop feels warm to the touch and you will definitely hear fan noise I'd only consider that config if you know for certain your software as I said will use the extra cores and do not upgrade it with the M2 Max chip the 14 inch that is I'm willing to bet that this laptop with that processor will be a hot mess on the configuration options as I've said one of my biggest findings of all the tests I ran is to be careful not to waste money on upgrading to a processor you don't need in my personal use case the extra memory bandwidth of the upgrade from the M2 Pro to the M2 Max is worth it in the 16 inch but I should have got the lower end M2 Max processor with a 30 core GPU I wasted 200 on those extra 7 GPU cores that I will never use and lastly for many people looking for a good bang for your buck laptop the biggest thing that these M2 MacBooks have done is make the older M1 versions a much better deal as you can now find those still excellent laptops much cheaper particularly if you're willing to consider a renewed one well what do you guys think of these new Macbook Pros with M2 let me know in the comments below that's all for today folks make sure you're subscribed and click the like button not only does it show your appreciation for the insane amount of effort spent making these videos and it is insane but it also makes my mother very proud till next time go do something awesome with your day and I will catch you later

Channel: Just Josh

Views: 122,446

Keywords: Apple Macbook Pro 14, Apple Macbook Pro 16, Macbook Pro 14, Macbook Pro 16, Macbook Pro M2 Review, Macbook Review, Macbook Pro 16 Review, Best Apple Laptop, Best Laptop, Best Laptop for Students, Macbook Pro 14 Review, M1 vs M2, Macbook Pro M1 vs M2, M2 Pro vs M2 Max, Best Student Laptop, Laptop Review, Macbook Pro 13 vs 14, Macbook Air vs Macbook Pro, Which Apple Laptop

Id: OezOluKHyVw

Length: 12min 0sec (720 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023