The release of the new 16″ MacBook Pro has been a long-awaited and highly anticipated addition to Apple’s notebook lineup. Teamed up with the arrival on the market of the monstrous Mac Pro, the newcomers are indeed a big hit to all that criticism that defined Apple as a consumer-oriented, iOS-centric, multi-billion, not-loyal-to-pros company.
So, Apple has remembered its true ancestral path, but is it up on par with today’s scenario? Intel CPUs, AMD graphics, there’s a lot to be weighed in and balanced with the proverbial stability and smoothness of MacOS. Now, we’ll leave that to Max Yuryev, who has been testing these new machines and will draw the conclusions in the video below.
In this case, the two laptops that Max has been comparing are the 16″ MackBook Pro and MSI P75 Creator. Both rivals have great specs while being extremely powerful and useful to those that need to edit on the fly. Right off the bat, it’s obvious that the MSI is slightly bigger, not so sleek and light as the MacBook, mainly due to the wider 17.3-inch screen.
The increased size, however, allows MSI to add a lot of standard ports, unlike the MacBook Pro which comes with the usual post-2016 Thunderbolt only configuration. This can be a hassle, even though it’s not 2016 anymore, so we have much broader support to USB-C with a plethora of options that can eliminate the need for a dongle in the first place.
Considering the hardware inside the laptops, we can see that the renewal has been beneficial to Apple users since a similar configuration on an older 15″ would have been much more expensive. Besides that, the increased thickness (if confronted with the 15″) made room for a larger battery, exactly 100Wh, the legal limit to fly.
This is an area where the MacBook Pro still has a lead. The adoption of Thunderbolt power input allows using any power bank with power delivery to charge the MacBook Pro – a great lifesaver if you’re on the move.
On the specs side, the two CPUs are quite comparable, or at least, they seem to be in the same league. The latter doesn’t apply to the graphics department, though. The NVidia RTX 2070 simply annihilates the latest and greatest card in the MacBook Pro.
Unfortunately, while AMD has been making leaps in front of Intel thanks to the new Zen architecture and the Ryzen lineup, it can’t compete against Team Green. Nvidia has the upper hand as per raw power thanks to its Cuda cores, but raw power is not everything, right?
If we ignore Premiere Pro CC and its poor core count optimization, we can see that both laptops perform quite well in Resolve, where the computing power of GPUs is well used, but that is until the power cable remains plugged. Even though all the energy-saving settings were disabled, Max still had a terrible drop in performance on the Windows machine.
We’re keeping scores on Final Cut too, even if the comparison is not complete since the software is lacking a Windows version. That is going to be of tremendous importance if you are trying to make up your mind between the two platforms: the power-hungry GPU is indeed extremely powerful, but the battery in the MSI simply can’t feed it properly, so the performance will drop down consistently, and if you are relying on a lot of editing on the go, with the laptop unplugged, it’s going to be a downfall.
Apart from that, both machines are a great option for video editing. They handle Raw, H.264, and H.265 media without breaking a sweat, with the sole exception of mastering 10-bit H.265 video, where there’s a complete and devastating victory in Nvidia’s rendering algorithms that narrow down the 65 min of the MacBook Pro to an incredible minute and a half on the MSI.
Yes, you’ve read correctly. Apart from that specific user case, however, the comparison will be almost on the same level for both contenders which also have similar price tags, hence the choice becomes more than ever a matter of habits.
So, are you used to Mac or Windows? Do you prefer to edit on the go, with no power available, or maybe you roam from coffee shop to client’s offices? Would you opt for thin and light, or no cable and adapters instead? Weigh in the factors and it’ll be easy to choose: it’s up to you!
[source: Max Yuryev]
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