The M1 MacBook Pro is capable of encoding a 25-second 4K MOV video clip to a 1080p MP4 file in one minute and nine seconds, while the Intel-powered MacBook Pro does so in one minute and 17 seconds.Īpple's M1 MacBook Pro is also much better at rendering graphics when playing "Shadow of the Tomb Raider." You shouldn't expect the M1 MacBook Pro to behave like a gaming rig by any means, but it holds its own when running the game at 1,650 x 1,050 and 1,200 x 800 resolutions. The differences are certainly noticeable in everyday tasks like gaming and encoding video. Apple's M1, however, has an 8-core graphics processor (GPU) similar to that found in the latest iPad Pro, a device known for impressive 3D graphics performance.
Recent MacBook Pro 13 models have struggled with graphics because they relied on Intel's weak Iris Plus graphics. Graphics performance is also a strength for the Macbook Pro 13 with Apple M1. It's an 8-core CPU with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, and comes with an 8-core GPU, plus the 16-core "Neural Engine" that enhances certain machine learning algorithms.
So an M1-powered Mac probably isn't the right choice just yet for computer programmers who rely on that software.īut on balance, the MacBook Pro 13 with Apple M1 is now the better option for most people, but it's not the obvious choice for everyone.Īpple's M1 processor is intimidating on paper. The M1-ready version of the app development platform Docker, for example, is still under development and in preview mode, according to the company's website.
However, if your job relies on using specific software that goes beyond basic web browsing and word processing, it's worth looking into whether the programs you need are M1-optimized. In our testing, popular apps like Microsoft Office, Slack, and Cisco WebEx worked just fine through Rosetta back when Apple's M1-powered laptops launched in November.
Developers need to update their software to fully support Apple's M1 chip, though Apple claims that process is quite simple through its Rosetta 2 translation software. Intel hardware is also a known quantity that can support all current Mac apps. Taken together, the M1-powered MacBook Pro's lower price, superior performance, and longer battery life make it the right choice for most people.īut Intel models have an edge in high-end specifications, however, as they can be configured with more memory and more storage. The cheapest Intel-powered model you can get, by comparison starts at $1,799. It's the most affordable model,at $1,299, and it has twice the battery life of Apple's MacBook Pro 13 with an Intel Core processor. The MacBook Pro 13 with Apple M1 has a few important advantages. MacBook Pro 13 (Intel Core): Which is best? In the meantime, I’ll keep pulsing anti-Apple sentiments out on every information medium.MacBook Pro 13 (Apple M1) vs. I’ll give them the right to repair trust, but it will take major effort on their part. The sociopathic intent of Apple is clear. And to be clear, I was going to just stick with the Apple tower because it makes it easy to run OSX fully legal, but now I’m going to take a different path, one that involves punishing Apple for crippling my laptop’s viability as a docked mobile workstation. I’m going to build my own computer I’m gonna make a hackintosh and also just not use OSX if they ever figure out a way to prevent it from loading on my machine. Now I’m though that I can’t even swap my 16GB chip out for a 32GB. They’re $5k which is expensive but that kind of power would be viable for the next decade. Lately I was thinking about buying one of the new Apple towers with 28 cores and capability of 1.5TB RAM. This laptop is only a year old, and if I had known it can’t even handle normal software engineering loads, I would have forced my company to buy the 32GB version. It makes me feel like I’m back in the year 1999 with 24 megs of RAM. It takes sometimes like 30-45 sec to refresh the page, make a one character change in a file, save, and reload the page again. This is of course horrific because I am developing, so I am saving JavaScript files every 5-30 sec and reloading the page. Once I get around 20 tabs open, the 16GB RAM is pegged out, and then every time I refresh a page, it takes like 5-10 sec because I have browser caching disabled. I’ve been pegging out my 2018 MBP RAM 24/7 due to doing JavaScript development, so I am running VS Code, webpack, and four instances of Chrome for various reasons.