MacBook Pro 16" vs 14" and what I picked for software dev

hey everybody it's alex here welcome back now you've seen probably a ton of videos already on youtube comparing the 16-inch macbook pro the new 2021 edition versus the 14-inch macbook pro and there's a lot of performance benchmarks and other kinds of comparisons between these two but i wanted to give you a perspective of my perspective from uh somebody who does development work day to day believe it or not youtube is just uh something i do for fun as my day job i'm a software developer i like to think of it as a overflow stack developer not full stack overflow stack take it as you will all right now let's get into it here's some comparisons that i'd like to bring up from a developer perspective between these two machines maybe they'll help you decide which machine you'd want to buy let's get some of the more obvious things out of the way first shall we this is a 16 inch machine it's actually 16.2 inches and therefore the screen is bigger the laptop itself is bigger it's heavier a friend of mine is seriously considering buying the 14 over the 16 because of the weight difference i myself am used to the 16 and i carry a whole ton of other stuff in my backpack so i don't really care but if you are weight sensitive 14 might be for you and this one is actually 14.2 inches all right the obvious stuff out of the way here's some less obvious stuff stuff that i've noticed while using these in the last few days the notch okay let's get that out of the way too um the notch it's there you'll get used to it right just like you did with your iphone if you have one if you don't have an iphone you might still have a notch because notches are in i guess but the notch does seem bigger on the 14 inch it just feels bigger even though they're the same size it's more noticeable it's going to take up a little bit more space percentage wise relative to the rest of the screen now you might have seen my other video comparing vs code and how it affects the notch in full screen mode not if you haven't checked that out but i did want to show you xcode and how the notch affects the menu system and the difference between these two so here is an xcode project and take a look at the menu up at the top now you'll see that on the 16-inch model the xcode menu fits on the left side of the notch but on the 14-inch model that menu is broken up between menu items on the left and menu items on the right of the notch this is a native apple program right so they've considered the notch so they're probably using the safe area api that comes with these new macs make sure you look it up if you are going to be creating software for the mac and that's the new apis for that safe areas for the notch now some third-party vendors are not taking advantage of that yet and we've seen uh tweets and messages going back and forth people complaining that their menu is actually hiding behind the notch couple other things you can look up on the website is the battery life right this 16 inch has a maximum battery life of 21 hours and the 14 inch has a maximum life of 17 hours the last time i stayed up coding for 21 hours straight was um never the last time i stayed up coding for 17 hours was uh never in fact i've never coded for probably more than two to three hours in a row but you might be one of those workaholic people or if you don't have access to a power outlet for an extended period of time you might appreciate these kinds of things and i certainly do this is very noticeable especially the difference between my old intel mac and the new ones the lifespan is considerably better now 17 versus 21 yes it is a difference it's four hours but uh are you ever gonna realistically run into that probably not couple of other things the speaker panel is bigger on the 16 inch than the 14 inch look at that the speaker panel is more than twice the size for each side of the speaker that's something to consider if you like using the speakers that are on board and the speakers that are on board are pretty darn good so might as well use them i can tell the difference i don't know if you can but this is much louder that's the 16 inch considerably louder so if you're going to be using those speakers do consider that difference do you like a large trackpad the 16 inch has a much much larger trackpad so if you're dragging an item i always have this problem i start a drag and then i don't calculate in my mind how much space i need to drag so i have to restart my drag i know it's there's ways around that of course but uh i always run into that issue so this larger trackpad is for me i like that there's also a lot more space to put your hands and rest your palms on the 16 versus the 14 you have less space but you can reach the keys easier and let me add that now that we're going to be doing a little bit more traveling via airplanes maybe i hope and if you're the kind of person like me that likes to bring your laptop pull out the tray table and work on the airplane then there is the consideration for the 14 inch some serious consideration here take it from me i've flown with a 16 inch 2019 model at least on american airlines not the company but generally airlines in america everything is so tight on those seats that uh i felt like like working like this the whole time and uh the trade tables are not big so the 16 inch just barely fits and if the person in front of you leans back forget about it you can't use it now the 14 inch you'll have a little bit of space to slide that forward and still be able to lean the screen back a little bit so you can see the screen something to consider if you're going to be flying and working also please note that the 16 inch has a slightly higher panel than the 14 inch it's about a millimeter difference i thought i'd point it out i mean somebody's gonna mention it and somebody's gonna complain about it so there you go if you care about the difference in height of the bottom panel where you rest your hands there you go it's a little bit taller now before we get into looking at code uh just a couple more things and as far as configuration options for these things with the 14 inch you have the option of going down to 8 cores for the cpu and 14 for the gpu you don't have that 814 option for the 16 inch the minimum is 10 16. the way i like to remember it is uh for the 14 it's 14 gpu and for the 16 it's 16 gpu those are the minimums and also with the 14 inch you get a choice of the power adapter you can have a 67 watt power adapter or 96 watt power adapter with the 16 inch model you only get the 140 watt power adapter i've tried the 140 and i've tried the 96 with both of these everything works fine i've even tried a third-party 36 watt power adapter on both of these machines it charges fine on all those now i'm sure you're gonna get some benefits from a bigger block like it's gonna charge faster but if you're traveling you might consider the weight difference there as well that 140 watt adapter is huge and it's heavy now as a side note i don't recommend using third-party power adapters just had to put that out there let's take a look at some code shall we here is visual studio code i've got a project open it's webkit i mean it doesn't matter what project it is right but uh we have a markdown file here open i wanted to open this so that we can get the number of lines and the number of columns and see how much each one fits here in this markdown file we see 48 lines of code or in this case markdown lines and on the 14 inch we have 34. now if you've seen my previous video these do vary a little bit depending on whether you're going full screen with vs code or not of course you can adjust the resolution you can adjust the font size i'm running these as defaults just to get a comparison now let's take a look at the columns somebody in the comments asked about this so i figured we'd do it let's go to the end of the line here we have 180 columns here by default no adjustments in settings for vs code and on the 14 inch this one wraps quite early we're at 180 right there where the cursor is and let's go back here we're at 136 at the end of the line and that's where it starts to wrap so here you can get 180 characters wide here it's 136 and one more thing this is just a guess but i'm going to guess that cooling is going to be a little bit better on the bigger machine especially if you're going to max out your machine if you're getting the 14 inch and you're gonna max it out and by that i mean you're gonna get the max processor okay i'll stop but assuming the same kind of processor in each one of these machines you have a lot more metal and a lot more space and the fans are spread out more on the 16 inch model so the cooling is probably going to be better and if the cooling is going to be better perhaps since the airflow is going to be a little bit better too because the fans might be on if you're doing some demanding tasks which we're gonna be doing very soon here perhaps your code will build faster maybe we should test that out anyway that's it for me today thanks a lot for watching give me a thumbs up if this was informative i'd appreciate it and if you're not subscribed yet go ahead and do that turn that button gray i'll see you next time

Channel: Alex Ziskind

Views: 35,073

Keywords: apple, macbook pro, macbnook new, new mac, new macbook, new apple, new apple laptop, new macbook pro, m1 macbook, m1 macbook pro, macbook m1, macbook pro m1, apple silicon, apple silicon mac, apple m1, apple m1 chip, apple silicon macbook pro, m1 macbook air, apple silicon macbook, new macbook air, macbook air, apple silicon macbook air, apple macbook, m1 chip, macbook pro m1 fan noise, macbook fan, macbook fan noise, macbook pro m1 max, macbook pro m1 pro

Id: rsTKDbvPB4I

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021