The 2021 MacBook Pros are Insane

okay time to come out from under your rock i got some news for you there's new macbook pros and we have a few of them i've got variants of both the m1 pro and the m1 max in the 14 and 16 inch sizes basically we are doing a lot of videos that are going to be very interesting over the coming weeks so be sure to stay tuned but i just got these out of the box and uh well i haven't really poked around them on purpose because i want to discover them together with you to answer questions i have and answer questions that you provided to me on twitter [Music] the first question comes to me from viewer quinn nelson of snazzy labs what did they look like on the inside what do they look like on the inside okay let's start with the 14 inch the base model because this is typically where you'll find they cut stuff out they leave out a fan or you know what have you it looks like a pretty similar opening procedure to macbooks have passed if yep it's a pentalobe p3 i'm using an ifixit kit but of course you could use any and typically these screws are slightly different lengths so you need to be aware of that when you're taking them all out i don't know maybe not this year the front ones have to be i would think okay so we've got the screws out these four are the same length and these four are the same length which is awesome the cover does not come just straight off which is seemingly a continuation of what happened with the 2016 and later macbook pros so there's some tabs we're gonna have to shim out all right we've got one more snap here and we should be able to pull towards us if it's the same as the old macbook pros and it is and have you ever seen a more beautiful design now i will note that this back rear cover is very very flexible more so than the old macbook pro covers it almost feels cheap but that's surprising because the whole rest of the entire computer feels so much more rigid and quality than the prior macbook pros holy smokes this thing is beautiful okay so even on the base model 14 inch we've got these massive blower fans that are in taking air from the sides that run along the batteries and all of these surface mount components and then they get sucked into the blowers and then there is this gasketed off section which there has always been that exhausts air through the radiators out the back of the machine obviously you've got this big massive copper heat pipe it is pretty wide and frankly the depth on this appears to be deeper than prior macbook pros there's two of them and then clearly here in the middle you've got your m1 pro or m1 max the soc is in the center and then you have your unified memory flanking both sides on the pro there's one module on each side and on the max there's two modules on each side but um just some errant observations i'm not going to do a full teardown that's someone for you know that's something for ifixit to do but i have noted that there are pull tabs on these batteries which is really really good um previously from 2012 onward apple would basically glue the batteries in so when you needed to replace them you ran the risk of damaging the entire bottom shell of the notebook or you would puncture the battery and start a fire it was really bad from a repairability standpoint and the the cells were so you know tightly fit that it was really difficult to do replacements anyway i remember back in 2015 when the original 12-inch macbook came out they bragged about how they had to precision align the batteries with a robot because there was less than a millimeter of tolerance on both sides this is clearly not the case there is oodles of space but interestingly they put batteries behind the track pad which they haven't done previously and that may be because these machines are slightly thicker you've got your subwoofers down here as well as their passive radiation chambers you've got your tweeters behind the motherboard on this side and then one thing i do note is that both the thunderbolt connectors as well as the headphone jack hey and even magsafe these are all modular so these can be removed and replaced which is excellent on the other side we've got a removable thunderbolt as well unfortunately yeah unfortunately the hdmi and sd card slot do appear to be soldered to the main board so don't break those but everything else uh looks pretty standard affair um you've got your antenna connectors down here and the connectivity on macbook pro has always been excellent and i don't anticipate that changing most of your antennas come out of the plastic section here in the back where the exhaust air is and yeah holy smokes that just is a beautiful computer let's see if the 16 inch is any different needed to break out the big guns these one this one's a lot deeper than the 16 inch on those snaps the cover oh that feels even worse because of how big it is look at the flex in that thing okay but the inside wow i mean you could definitely see that the batteries are larger and those intake fans are ginormous i mean here's a guitar pick for comparison those are very very very large i mean what probably 50 60 millimeter i don't know they're big blower fans but other than that it looks literally identical there's a little more spacing in between the components on the board but other than that same stuff that's modular on the last one is module on this one same stuff that's not isn't obviously your subwoofers are a little larger as well so sound on the 16-inch should in theory be better and we've already kind of determined that that is the case but holy smokes that's a hot piece of gear viewer brett actually in high school with brett wants to know if the thunderbolt 4 ports share the same bus on previous generation macbook pros from 2016 onward the ports on one side shared a bus so you could get 40 gigabits per second through one of them but if you were using both of them your effective bandwidth was halved now if we go into about this mac and go into system report we can go down to thunderbolt thunderbolt 4 and look at that there is actually a bus per port there were a lot that theorized that maybe they might share a single bus that would not have been good that is clearly not the case here every single port gets its own 40 gigabits throughput directly to the soc and that is excellent that means that if you're docking this as kind of a desktop computer you probably don't have to meddle with the ports on the right side you can just chill with the left side provide power data displays and everything you need that's awesome alan asks can you charge using the three thunderbolt ports and magsafe port all the same time will it be faster this is a question that we actually got a lot and the answer is obviously no but i will demo it just to satiate you okay so we've got our 140 watt adapter right here we're going to plug in the magsafe connector boom and then i've got a 96 watt adapter and you know what why don't i plug this into the other side so we don't put in too much power and explode the machine that's a joke okay let's go to about this mac and then if we go back to system profiler we can go down to power and if we scroll down to the bottom it'll show us our ac charger information there's just one the 140 watt usbc adapter okay i did plug that in first so let's unplug that let's refresh it and yeah now it says the 96 watt adapter now what if i leave that plugged in plug the 140 back in is it going to stay on the 96 watt no so it just defaults to whatever the highest wattage power adapter is plugged in but no you can't charge faster by plugging in every single port the thing charges to 50 in 30 minutes how fast do you want alan listener joe asks about high impedance headphones apple specifically called out that there was a new headphone jack on these uh on these new macbook pros how headphones work are well as complicated but i've explained this in previous videos which i'll link below basically what you need to know about impedance is that is the resistance required in order to drive the headphones the smaller diameter of the wire the higher the resistance therefore the more voltage that needs to go through to move the specific drivers so if i plug a pair of headphones into something like the old old it's still available for sale m1 macbook air and i press play on a song from the band silver cup with whom i have zero affiliation it's not like it's my brother and sister or anything okay i've got the system maxed right now it's it's pretty loud um this is louder than i would listen to normally but it's not it's not deafening me it's it's fine this is why i was interested by apple statements because i've always felt that the macbook and frankly all of their computers have been pretty good at driving higher impedance headphones now they don't sound great because the headphone amplifier quality has never been that good but they can drive power hungry headphones so i'm interested to see how it performs on this new machine i will note that they have relocated the headphone adapter to the left side which is amazing because on most pairs of headphones these are kind of weird you have a single lead and it almost always comes out of the left ear cup and for whatever reason with 2016 macbook pro apples let's put it on the right and then you had to cross the cable around your body and around your hand and your type it's it's sucked it's back to its proper position on the left and that is very very nice okay let's go to music we'll press play okay it's already it's already too loud this is about the same volume i was at before on the macbook air and we're at 70 if i cranked it all the way up that's um it's that's not tolerable it'll blow your ears out so yes there is more volume on this machine i will note through uh the very short listening sessions i've had that the amplifier quality still doesn't seem very great it's fine on the sennheiser hd600s because they're kind of mid-range headphones on high-end headphones like my lcd threes from odyssey it was bad they sounded bad they were dying for power they had the volume they needed but just everything sounded so mushy and crunched it this is not replacing a headphone amp is what i'm saying on your desk but if you're around town and you have slightly less efficient headphones great but it's not a game changer it's just like it's a thing mike asks with a seemingly thinner magnet area how does max save 3 compared to generations one and two in terms of ability like holding in place that's a great question and uh you know what better way than to just show you so i have a 2008 macbook here which ran on the original magsafe one and now i have the new max a3 as you can see the new connector is significantly thinner it's a little longer but it is much much thinner now ignoring the old mag say for a second the new max safe seems very very good if i apply pressure to pull it straight out it requires a ton of force however it still serves its purpose where if i rip it out at even the slightest angle it's going to come straight out one frustration i had with the original magsafe and max f2 i think will remain here and that's if you're like in bed and you have a blanket in the way or something it requires very little pressure to disconnect this cable and that happened very very easily so the great thing is you still have usbc if you want to leave a more kind of permanently attached connection but it absolutely serves its purpose as a magnetic connector now as for how it compares to the original magsafe at first i thought well it's pretty close to the same but it is not if i get the original magsafe this connection is significantly weaker i mean i wish i had a scale to show you how much force is required to remove them but it's not even close i mean this connector the new one has got to be like at least two to three times stronger it's really impressive and it becomes obvious when you put a piece of magnetic paper in front of it because there are these two ginormous neodymium magnets flanking each side of the connector which is really really nice now that we have the paper out you can check out the speakers there's the left tweeter here there's the right tweeter here so you've got stereo tweeters and then you've got a subwoofer on each side they're actually two subwoofers that are basically stuck right against each other and then they passively radiate through this massive chamber here in the keyboard deck area now all these little dots you might be wondering what are those that is of course the magnetic connectors or the magnets that hold the screen in place so you've got a row of four on this side you've got a ton of them on the top there's none in the middle there's a ton on both sides and there you go i'm kind of just rambling now but magnets how do they work connor asks how deep is the sd card slot well there's no better way to test it than to just grab an sd card and stick it in the returned slot now the old one was just standard sd this new one is sdxc i bet it's not going to be too deep and it's not it's less than half the depth of the card which is good because you still need the ability to easily grab it out if you were hoping to use this as expandable storage a i would discourage it because sd cards are fairly slow and b just buy more storage for your computer however uh i do anticipate there being the return of these little guys um they were like these little tiny short cards and basically it was just an adapter to fit a micro sd card into a stubby sd card that you could stick in through the side and then there was usually a hook that you could use to pull the card out so if you want a more permanent storage solution this could work um i don't know if it's the same depth as old ones i would suspect not but uh who knows maybe there will be a return of these drives i think they suck i will not be using them but it is a cheap way to get a lot of storage you can get a terabyte microsd card for like a couple hundred bucks now it's amazing i'm sorry we've avoided the questions long enough we've got to talk about the knowledge now i'm not going to hate on it i just want to get to know you i want to understand why you exist i want to be your friend hey notch okay so the first question is what's behind the notch if we take our cursor we can just drag it behind the notch and i can move it around and it feels like that part of the screen is just missing our cursor does not crash into the black part of the notch it doesn't jump from one side to the other it feels like there's just screen behind here and that leads us to our next question how do screenshots look with the notch and well they don't because if we take a screenshot and go full screen you can see that it just it draws all the pixels as far as i'm concerned the computer might not even know that the notch is there and it just keeps drawing stuff behind it despite your eyes not really being able to see it it's kind of weird that is a contrast however from the next question is the os aware of the rounded corners on the top and left side of the screen so that the cursor doesn't just kind of disappear there because it thinks that the corners are squared with those missing pixels there's a problem in windows not only windows 11 but with the surface laptop studio your cursor will just go behind the rounded pixels because it's drawing them the computer thinks they're there they're just not um as you can tell the bottom left and right corners are still perfectly square but as we move our cursor all the way up into the top corner you'll see that it actually goes around the curve so if i keep my finger and go perfectly straight up it kind of just goes around all by itself so there you have it it does actually know that those pixels are missing and it draws them in kind why not the notch though and that's going to take us to our next question what happens if the icons on the right side of the menu bar are too numerous or on the left side you have too many tabs does that just get lost in the notch let's find out okay so davinci resolve is installed and if i open it wait what okay hold on hold on so you'll see that in the menu bar our app items seem to span across the notch oh what and now look our mouse just jumps from one side to the other so that behavior we just explained look at that it just zooms over the side okay so that okay hold on hold on i'm just trying to wait a minute where's the rest of our app items they're just gone can i scroll them hang on no they're they're just gone hold on if i quit davinci resolve they come back but when i open it they just disappear this is not like bartender where they're like collapsing they're just gone what the hell okay okay hold on now let's see what happens if i have a lot of app items so that's the stuff over excuse me uh status items that's the things over here on the right so let's open uh istat menus okay let's turn this on there's this stuff behind the menu bar what they're behind the notch it's just i can't even see the stuff it's just there what the freaking heck dude okay now what happens if i open both at the same time presumably resolves yeah resolve just as like ci stat menus were more important what the freaking okay this is clearly like not well baked because this i mean this is weird but this is doable right where like stuff jumps over to the right side and the left side because you need more room i do think that they need to make something like allow you to extend your other items in your status or in your menu bar but okay and then when you close it this stuff just straight up hangs out underneath the notch now maybe that's a nice dot menus problem but i doubt it that should be that should be the system's job not what i'm still trying to process what just happened that's so weird that's so bad i mean like they're gonna fix it but come on here's another thing that's weird okay someone asks what happens if you go into full screen mode here's how this display works people don't understand that the notch is not cutting into the display that used to be there the aspect ratio from macbooks for the last like several years has been 16 by 10. this display without the menu bar right here this is 16x10 so don't think of it as like your display losing pixels because of the notch think of it as your display gaining like horns or something these are all new pixels that do not count into the old aspect ratio and so you actually have effectively more space because your menu bar is no longer in the way but because it's no longer in the way you would hope that it would stay there in full screen mode because again it's not getting in the way but i don't know maybe the apps go like if we go full screen on maps no okay so the app just goes below the notch like this actually looks like an old macbook pro but now look if i move my mouse cursor up into the menu bar the menu bar pops back up but why not just leave that persistent there all the time because it why the app's not using any of that space so why would you get rid of that just leave that there did notch needs some work this is this is messy okay so you know that feature added in ios 15 where you can change i think it was ios 15 where you can change the tonality of the microphone that is now in mac os unfortunately it's in like really weird places so here in facetime i can go up into the control center and i can add video effects i can also change my mic mode from standard to voice isolation and wide spectrum exactly the same as on ios now where it's weird is that this so far has only worked in facetime if i open voice memos which is also a catalyst app so it should be supported and i press record the video effects option pops up which why i'm not using the camera but the mic mode is grayed out that's very strange and then if i open an old app that's not written in catalyst like photo booth i just have no options whatsoever so this is weird it needs some attention and some love but i guess the question is how do the microphones actually sound um so let's try them hello i run the youtube channel snazzylabs and i'm making a video about the new macbook pros and boy let me tell you the notches is an interesting thing all right we can be done rob asks keyboard feel keyboard feel keyboard feel keyboard feel he goes on for a while how does the keyboard feel because that's pretty important in a laptop let me uh answer the question by not starting with the trackpad the trackpad is exactly the same if you felt a recent trackpad it's the same it's ginormous it feels amazing it uh it still uses the taptic engine it still has force touch capabilities which i wish we had freaking 3d touch on ios it's great okay the keyboard is it's the same with the caveat it is the same as the 16-inch macbook pro and the most recent m1 macbook pros so pretty much 2019 and later remember that awful scissor switch in 2016 that was introduced yeah that's been gone for a while forget about that this is not the same as this it's travel feel is fairly similar actually to the 2015 macbook pro but it does feel better i think it's the best keyboard yet they've backed to the inverted t which a lot of people really really love um i don't love it but i don't hate it it's just fine and then the function bro would you hear that apparently oh that's scary the function row is full height you've got this massive escape key and then touch id is still like a real it's like a it's a button so you've got your keys and your button and now we get to the section that actual professionals care about performance relative to lower bin versions of itself and prior generations of computer now stay tuned for our full review we recognize that a lot of youtubers have the tendency including us to just talk about video because that's what we do professionally but i have been reaching out to a number of people that work in vfx and 3d rendering and machine learning and developer like we're getting a lot of people to try this machine out and give their thoughts on how it affects them in their field rather than just oh look how fast davinci resolve is but while we're here let's look at how fast davinci resolve is okay we're pretty blown away not only are we running a screen recording but we've got final cut pro davinci resolve and a number of other applications opened i want to show you some red code footage right here inside of final cut pro this is 8k raw footage on an 8k timeline and despite all that and by the way we have grades applied we can go full screen and the playback is shockingly good now we are dropping some frames but it's absolutely viewable and this is at a full 8k resolution view if we move to the better performance tab it will cut down the effective resolution it dynamically scales based on the load of the computer but this brings back pretty much every single frame you need and it still looks shockingly good to me it's amazing how well this stuff runs but davinci resolve is a little more impressive in my mind because it gives you more real data and it's bananas what this thing can do so similarly to final cut we do not have optimized or proxy media turned on we are running this at the full resolution this is as mentioned 8k red code raw it's a 15 to 1 compression ratio which is actually fairly compressed so it's even more taxing on the computer to uncompress all of that as it plays it back and then additionally we are decoding that at a full resolution premium decode so this is a very taxing task and it's pretty impressive playing back just the the regular log footage we're pulling about 24 to 26 frames per second now that's not as good obviously as the 30 fps frame rate that the footage is shot in but that's shockingly close and what's more amazing is that the more layers we apply where machines typically come to a crawl this seems to keep on chugging so let's apply a rec709 color grid and it's about the same frame rate now if we go back and turn on both the slight color adjustment we made and then another artistic grade this is now three color layers and it's still managing about the same frame rate 24 to 26 frames per second effects are where you can really bring footage to its knees particularly blurs and why not just throw on a couple other effects as well and despite all of this we press play and we're pulling pretty much the same frame rate 24 to 26 frames per second it's absolutely incredible now it is important typically to be able to view your footage in the frame rate that it was shot in when you're editing so what's great about this is you can go back into the playback you can use a proxy mode at half resolution and half resolution plays back at a fixed 30. i mean it's it's great it doesn't drop a single frame this performance is incredible it is very close if not maybe in some areas superseding what our mac pro can do and we don't have a base configuration we've got a 13 000 mac pro and this thing in certain areas is if not kicking its butt getting really close and this is a laptop the fans are turned off it's barely warm it's freaking incredible i am so excited what is in store for these computers and we have a lot of stuff that we're going to be testing over the coming weeks so be sure to get subscribed like this video if you enjoyed it well if you didn't like it send it to someone you don't like they're going to hate it but most importantly and as always stay snazzy [Music] you

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 539,578

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, macbook pro, mbp, m1 pro, m1 max, notch, hdmi, 2021 macbook pro, 2021 macbook, m2, m1x, m1z, imac pro, mac pro, jade-c, jade-c die, macbook pro review, mac vs pc, benchmark, gaming, test

Id: Qh1ElqW5dEY

Length: 27min 21sec (1641 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/quitethewaysaway]

Someone needs to tell him that you can make the menu bar persistent in full screen mode with macOS Monterey, unless Apple doesn't have the feature for notch Macs

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/dijano]

Like many of you I'm sure you've watched most of the content on youtube for the macbook pros but his one (as usual) is so much better and in depth.

[u/notabot53]

I like his videos

[u/[deleted]]

Hate those types of thumbnails

[u/motionbutton]

Had max for half a week. It’s top notch.

[u/Fantastic_Second_870]

The notch part is nice and the only review video that I saw showing the real problem with it, at least by now

[u/wino6687]

I’m surprised I haven’t watched him before because this video is great. He’s super knowledgeable and the info was much less superficial than others

[u/R2Didgeridoo]

I didn't know Seth Rogen had a brother