So when these new macro pros got announced, my first thought was, huh? I wonder if we can retire the travel iMac.
Cause some of you might not know this, but whenever I go for the past couple of years to a tech event that I planned on making a video at, I packed up a maxed-out iMac Pro, put it in a huge Pelican case, and lugged it with me. Like there's countless times y'all would catch me rolling this huge box behind me through the airport. And that's because it's been the smallest machine that I could take with me to one of those events that could render and edit and export a video that wouldn't take overnight. Now this apple Silicon transition for max has been pretty impressive. And I think this is the first time I can truly say something is next level. These laptops have been next level.
So these are the new 14 inches and 16 inches 2021 MacBook pros. And they're incredible for several reasons. Now, at the end of the day, they're just tools used to get a job done. And the fact is everyone has a slightly different thing that they want to get done for me. It's making these videos. So we'll get to that in a second, but man, they have made a big jump both on the inside and the outside of these laptops. So let's start on the outside. So these laptops have a new top-notch design. It still looks like a MacBook pro, but I like pretty much all of the changes they've made. So the whole shape is squared off a bit and it resembles those old aluminum power books, just more modernized. And just aesthetically, you can see they've made these laptops thicker, like noticeably thicker, and that is fine with me.
And it has plenty of benefits. It also stands up a little bit higher on those taller feet, which seemingly gives it a bit more room for those back and side vents for better ventilation. Although I've never heard the fans spin up audibly on these laptops, the Apple logo on the back, slightly larger. And there's a little engraving at the bottom now where they carved in the MacBook protest. That's kind of nice, but functional as you've probably noticed. Yeah, there are ports. Now there are real ports and this really shouldn't be a big deal, but this is one of the few things that Apple has walked back from the last few years of MACPA pros that haven't had these ports. So while it feels kind of silly to celebrate them, I am happy that they're back. So on the right side, that's a full-size HDM.
I port welcome back. Then you have one of the Thunderbolt, four ports, and a full-size, half-depth SD card slot. This is beautiful. I use an SD card for audio. Every time I make a video, I use them all the time and it's been a long time since I just plugged in an SD card, straight into a computer. So this is fun then or on the left side, you have two more. Thunderball four ports, a headphone Jack and the magnetic MagSafe charging port has made their return. So, okay. A couple of thoughts on this port selection, first of all, MagSafe has made its return, but it's different. I've never used a MagSafe machine. Full-time in the, but this is a newer, thinner, and stronger mag safe. It's got a lot more lateral strength that it takes to pull it out of the machine. So the second there's an angle on it, it snaps out much easier, but still feels pretty mag safe to me, definitely safer than just if USBC was plugged straight in and then you get this huge charging brick.
So this is the 96 SWAT power adapter that comes with the 14 inch MacBook pro, which is already an upgrade from the 67 wats of the base model. And then there's this huge rectangular 140 wat charging brick for the 16 inch MacBook pro. But it is pretty nice that the brick is separate from the braided USBC cable with mag safe on the other end. But I am not sure why the space gray laptop doesn't also come with a space gray MagSafe connector. That would've been a nice touch, 140 Watts though. That is a lot of power. And so you can fast charge these laptops through MagSafe if you want to. It's about half a charge in half an hour, which is pretty convenient. But even if you don't want to, you can unplug and just plugin by USB C. If you're one charger for every everything kind of person like me, it'll still be about 96 Watts.
So not as fast, but still pretty good. Now the headphone Jack, you might have caught during Apple's presentation that they mentioned that the headphone Jack this time would support high impedance headphones. What does that mean? Well, if you have to ask it probably doesn't apply to you, but there's a whole ecosystem system of headphones out there with much higher levels of power required to get real volume out of them. They're known as high impedance headphones. I've got a couple of pairs here at the studio. So a normal pair of wired headphones just think about like your beats or ATM fifties might have 20 to 50 OS impedance. The high impedance headphones can go well over a hundred OMS. And so they sound like much. They'll be very low in volume if you plug them into almost anything with a headphone Jack. And so people who use these headphones will have to carry an external Thunderbolt, uh, deck, just a little thing to the plugin.
And so if these headphones jacks are high-powered enough theory, that's one less dongle. You have to carry right for my audio files out there. The preempts here are impressive and they're pushing out more power, but this isn't some incredible, super clean deck or anything crazy with these bare dynamic DT seven 70 pros, for example, which are 250 O headphones MacBook pro-M one at absolutely maxed out a hundred percent volume sounded comfortable. And these new MacBook pros hit that same level at about 65% volume. So there is an improvement. They don't sound better than the dedicated amp you would have to bring, but in a pinch, if you've only brought one pair of headphones, you can plug 'em in straight. And that's kind of neat, which is just saving you a dongle. And that's kind of the theme of all of these ports, to be honest, like the HGM I port is only actually HGM I 2.0, not 2.1.
I don't know why. And it's kind of annoying that such an expensive computer doesn't have the latest, highest-end part, but H DM I 2.0, still does 4k 60. So it's great for any projector TV. It's good in a pinch, one less dongle. The SD card slot is XD XC. It's only UHS two speeds. So it doesn't support the newer faster UHS three, but UHS two is still 300 megabytes per second. That's pretty good in a pinch, one less dongle. So it's an expensive computer. It, I could have easily had the higher-end ports. It's a knock on them, but as I said, it's kind of just like the convenient in a pinch type thing. And you know what? I might as well since we're talking sports, you know, it would've been cool ethernet on the power brick. Remember what they did with the M one iMac where they have like gigabit ethernet built into the brick.
I think MacBook pro users would be more likely to want ethernet without, dongle on the laptop like they did here, but they didn't. But anyway, there was just something hilarious about them going backward on the last four years of MacBook Pro and adding ports back to it. It's not something they do all the time. So I'm given a thumbs up on that. Speaking of going backward though, no touch bar. So there's the new keyboard on these MacBook pros and it's all buttons, all real physical keys. So they've replaced the touch bar with a full row of full height, physical function keys at the top. It's a shame. The touch bar never reached its full potential. And I'll miss the like two times. I thought it was useful with audio fading, shortcuts, and side final cut pro or fast-forwarding scrubbing through Instagram videos on the desktop up.
But these buttons are better. And the whole keyboard is an improvement from previous years, two it's backlit the keys feel good and travel decently well like their keyboards from five years ago, the touch ID button in the corner works super quickly and reliably and it's subtle, but the whole keyboard is inset in this black sized rec 10 angles. And I love it. It's a nice touch. Black keys will still show fingerprints and a few skin oils more than the lighter keyboards out there on other machines, but I'm willing to deal with that. The speakers are incredible, especially on the 16 inches, still the biggest fullest, best speakers I've ever heard in a laptop on the bigger one. And the studio microphones are also now improved, but that brings us to, uh, the front of this laptop. So let's talk about the front.
So these new displays are on paper and in real life, pretty incredible. They are 10-bit panels. They're mini L E D HDR 16 by 10, almost 4k high refresh rate displays. I mean, it is just all of the boxes checked, and then there's the notch up top. Okay. So the screens are amazing. It's a mini pro display XDR, but with even higher pixel density and higher refresh rate, I mean, it doesn't look that different from previous macro pros, most of the time you're using it, but it does hit that 1600 knits max brightness while watching HDR content, which is awesome. And the thinner bezzles all the way around were long overdue and underneath the menu bar, I'm also happy that it is still it's the taller 16 by 10 aspect ratio. And then promotion is interesting. So we know this as the adaptive refresh rate.
It's not always maxing out here at 120 Hertz, even when flying around the UI, you know, max was already decently smooth at 60, but I can tell this is not going to 120 Hertz all the time. So like scrolling and safari, for example, apparently safari still needs an update to support the highest stuff, this adaptive frame rate. But there are a couple of areas where you notice a higher refresh rate. I mean, moving your mouse around a lot, moving a lot of bigger animations, like swiping between spaces and other big flowy stuff like the genie animation for minimizing that stuff. I mean, it's awesome. Moving around a final cut timeline. That's very smooth too. That's where the higher M rate is noticeable and the extra smoothness is appreciated. So this isn't the first mini L E D display. This isn't the first HDR laptop ever.
It's not the first higher frustra rate screen in a laptop, but just combining all these things, the 10 bit display the thinner bezzles, all of it, it is a great display. So let's talk about the top-notch design. Shall we? There are only a few things up here in the notch. It's the new 10 80 P webcam, which looks perfectly decent now. Thanks for catching up apple. And there's a little ambient light sensor and a little L E D light. And that's pretty much it. There's no way the notch needed to be this big for that hardware. I mean, I'll wait for the, I fix it, tear down, but there's no way you need it this much space. So it's an odd choice. And it's really easy to complain about this when you're not using the laptop. But two things. One, I think Apple is finding this to be like a part of their design language.
Now, like this is a recognizable laptop, the silhouette is cuz of the notch. However, we feel about that. It is what it is, but then also turns out it's okay to put a notch right here in the part of the screen that you don't notice very much when you're using the laptop. The mouse goes underneath it for those who are wondering, and the software seems to treat the screen like is no-notch. Like if you take a screenshot or do a screen recording, it's still drawing the display there with all of its pixels. And anytime you go full screen with anything, it just turns the entire menu bar black. And it looks like the bezel at the top gets slightly thicker. And it's very deep black with the mini L E D the notch never cuts into any content. Think of it as cutting into the extra display that you didn't have before.
And they've just shoved the menu bar up there into that extra display. You know, there are some weird quirks when you have an app with enough menu bar items, it runs those things right underneath the notch and things need to be patched up with a software update, maybe making them scrollable or like adding an expansion button or something like that. So at this point, it's like, oh, people are making the, you know, custom apps to black out the top part of the display to hide the notch. Which I mean, if you hate it that much sure you have that option. But like I promise you when you action least start using the laptop and you're in apps and things full screen and never cut anything off, like you're paying attention to what's on the screen. It disappears even more than it did on the smaller screen of the phones.
But that being said, if the next version of this laptop still has a notch this big and doesn't add face ID, I'll wear socks and handles for a day like Linus. Like they just, they gotta be planning on putting it there eventually, right? It almost feels useless to talk about how it feels just spinning around macOS Monterey because of course, it's fine. Like I got the improved notification management, it's got the rounded corners up top. It's got the quick mouse over at the bottom corner to get to quick notes. We all that those nice features, but we're here for the performance. We wanna know if it's as great as those graphs, apple suggested at the apple event, spoiler alert. They're both that good. So I've got a couple of different specs here. This is the M one pro in the 14 inches. I've also got a maxed out 16 inch that I've been testing.
Uh, so I'll get to the differences between M one max and M one pro and all that in a second, but just know that yeah, they are very, very good. So when it comes to performance benchmarks, I feel like everyone's more or less looking for the perfect benchmark out there that will confirm to them that it will work best for their workflow. As I said, these are tools <affirmative> and from what I've seen, it feels like that benchmark result exists for pretty much every use case so far for these. So as far as synthetic benchmarks, it dropped the highest single score geek bench CPU score I've ever seen from any Mac. And multicore lined it up right around the maxed out 18 core iMac. I also ran it through the CNA bench should have had again, very impressive single-core scores, and here's how the multi-core stacks up.
But when I say, when I tell you these laptops are next level, I mean that because the real-world performance and the real-world capabilities of these laptops are dramatically better than they have any business doing. So obviously we, about the way higher memory bandwidth, we know about the way higher number of GPU cores. And I love the 10, 15, 20 5% improvements that come across the board with all of that stuff. The vertical integration worked right, but there are parts of this chip that Apple has built with specific purposes in mind. And for those purposes, it's next level. So these laptop chips have a media engine and there's a ProRes accelerator as part of that M one, max has two of the video professionals. You can see where we're going with this. Working with ProRes at all with these laptops is dramatically better. I think an example was like encoding.
A video with a compressor is 10 times as fast as it was with the Intel MacBook Pro. That's the next level. So like I said, these laptops are, that's why they got me excited. I work with video two. So let's see how it does with the final cut pro. So, as I mentioned, I did edit the last video, the entire AirPods thorough review on the 16 inch M one max MacBook pro in various locations, both around the studio and at home plugged in and on battery. And it handled it incredibly well like shockingly, well, keep in mind, this is eight K red code raw footage. It's a mix of low and is compression shots from the V Raptor. And I'm able to bend the color and raw data and move all around the timeline and chop everything up pretty quickly and seamlessly without hiccups, just like on the desktop, on the Mac pro.
So playback was in high quality instead of high performance. So I'm getting a ton of resolution and only dropping a couple of frames here and there again, just like the MacPro. One of my ways to measure if a machine is choking or struggling at all is like how long the delay is between pressing the play button, the space bar on unended footage, and when it starts to playback and this delay, as you can see, it's like less than a quarter of a second. That's as good as I've ever seen it in the final cut. So the only thing that's caused me any concern was that a couple of times the audio waveform previews took longer to load when I was pinching and zooming into parts of the timeline. And I suspect that's Ram-related, of course, M one max only has 64 gigs of Ram versus the Mac Pro I've edited on has 768 gigs of Ram.
So it makes sense that I saw a difference there, but when the edit was finished and it came time to export it, I of course, uh, just for fun, copied the project across to multiple computers and just did the same export on all of them to see how it went. So the M one pro MacBook pro the 14 inches exported the whole thing in six minutes and 40 seconds. It's pretty good. The $50,000, 28 core MacPro did the same thing in five minutes and 42 seconds. And then the M one max Mac pro or MacBook pro did it in four minutes and six seconds. So the MacBook pro beat the MacPro handily at exporting the project. And it's not even like export times matter all that much at this level, four minutes, five minutes, whatever. But the fact that it beat the Mac pro already is ridiculous.
And I also did that while not plugged in which doesn't lose any performance on the battery. And the battery dropped 2% from 96 to 94% while exporting. So you might have heard there are different performance profiles. And this is true on the 16 inch MacBook pro was interesting playing with these most of the time, I just left it on automatic, cuz it would just do its thing, no hiccups at all. And I could edit fine. But when I went to go export just for fun, I turned on the 16 inches high power mode, which in theory should let the chips run full throttle. More often spin up the fans a little bit more, et cetera. I still never heard the fans ever, but the export time was even faster, three minutes and 49 seconds. Jesus. And on top of all that the plug-in suite that I used motion via effects is updating steadily, all their stuff to support apple Silicon, which is great at this point.
Honestly, I think it's a no-brainer the travel iMac is now retired. I can safely edit everything on a laptop, but the final cut pro is just one use case. There's plenty of other stuff. If you watch the verges review, they did a lot of Adobe stuff and you can check out there are incredible findings with the newest version of after-effects. Finally taking advantage of multi-threaded GPU rendering. They also showed it outperforming the mobile RTX 30 80 when editing in the premiere, there are some glowing reviews for music, producers, and sound designers who love having a whisper-silent computer that can also process way more audio effects and that they can take with them. And Ty Stallman did a great video reviewing the laptop for photographers where the M one max laptop is importing and generating previews, et cetera, twice as fast as a 2018 MacBook pro.
And he also opens up every single habit once and streams, a bunch of pro-re videos all simultaneously next to each other and you guessed it. It doesn't even blink. Then there's also a great tweet from a staff engineer at Reddit. The machine is cutting build times for their Android app in half. And a little napkin. The math says that buying a team of them, a bunch of these laptops would end up saving them a lot more money than they'd spend. These experiences are of course, all dependent on the apps you use as a professional and how optimized they are. All of Apple's apps are the first ones to be updated right out of the box. So the final cut pro that I use is great, but over time more of them will continue to be updated, and see those gains as well. And I didn't even talk about battery life, but it does all of this high-performance stuff while also being incredibly efficient.
So you have fast charging already if you want it. But I found that the 16 inch with the hundred-wide hour battery lasts a bit longer than the 14 inches with a 70 wide hour battery and M one pro will last a bit longer than M one. Max turns out those GPU cores do run a little bit hotter and use more power. But ultimately if you want the longest possible battery life, that would be 16 inch M one pro nevertheless, they all get around the aim battery life. I found the M one MacBook pro, which is to say all day best in class. Ah, you can still kill it in like four hours. If you're just sitting on battery editing video in high power mode the whole time, then yeah. Then you can crush it. But again, fast charging turns out to be very useful.
So, you know what, here's the recommendation. If you are a professional that works on your laptop and you're on an older version or you find yourself reaching the limits of one of these and you're thinking maybe you should try to look at one of these new macro pros. I feel very confident saying, yeah, you, you could pick one up and be very, very happy. I think the real choice is between M one pro and M one max and 14 inches and 16 inches. Now for me, I'm going with a 16 inch M one max, just because I take advantage of the extra GPU course. And I wish I could go with the 14 inches maxed out, which you can max out to the same specs as 16 inches with maybe just small thermal differences, they'll perform about the same, but I like having the bigger screen for editing video.
So I'm going to max out a big laptop. So then for M one pro versus M, one max is the most powerful, but it does Nick a bit, your battery life. So I would upgrade only if you need that extra GPU course and you'll know if your app is supported and I will even pretend to game on a Mac. Some people do though. And if you do theoretically, the M one max would also handle that better. But like I said, from the beginning, this is a tool and it happens to be a good tool at what it does. And it happens to be next level at a couple of specific things that it's been designed and optimized for. So there's gonna be a lot of professionals like me who are happy with these. There's also gonna be a lot of people who don't need this power, but just have a lot of money to spend and just want to get a nice laptop.
And it is a nice laptop. So I wouldn't blame you. That's fine too, but I'm just happy. I can finally say that this is, I will be editing videos on a laptop, which is it's awesome. And uh, yeah, I haven't been able to say something's truly next level in a long time, but these are, it's one of my favorite products of the year, to be honest. I also really, really can't wait until the apple Silicon Mac pro desktop, that thing's gonna be wild either way. That's been it for the review of the laptops.