The output might not beat studio monitors, but the soundstage and clarity is night and day compared to other MacBooks – and it’s not like their speakers are bad. Close your eyes and you’ll swear the sounds aren’t coming from a laptop.
Play your favourite tunes on the MacBook Pro 16in (from £2,399) and your ears are in for a treat. By all means buy one if you need a smallish Mac laptop for running Windows or legacy software. Mostly, though, this Mac feels redundant. Assuming your bank account can take the strain. And the unit itself is still solid when you consider the lovely display, quality speakers (louder than the ones on the M1 model), extra ports, and RAM and storage options that max out at 32GB and 4TB respectively. If you need a new MacBook Pro 13in and rely on legacy software that doesn’t play well with the M1 – or want to run Windows apps at a good speed alongside Mac apps – it’s an option, albeit an expensive one. So why buy this Mac? Notably, you might have no choice. Still, that at least helped us tell the two otherwise identical MacBook Pro 13in machines apart. And before that gives the Intel Mac a moment of smugness, we should note its fans fired alarmingly often when the machine was under stress. But pit it against its M1 successor and you recall shoot-outs Apple used to do with PowerPC Macs and Intel PCs (before PowerPC died on the vine) – the M1 frequently blazes ahead.Īlbeit not with Photoshop itself, which isn’t native yet, meaning you don’t with that product see performance gains on Apple’s new silicon. For everything from Photoshop work to helping you become the next Stanley Kubrick in Final Cut Pro, this Mac is capable. From a performance perspective, the older MacBook Pro now comes across like an embarrassment.Īctually, that’s not entirely fair. It rocked up in May 2020 with a shiny new Magic Keyboard and improved Intel processors. Rarely has a MacBook Pro fallen from grace so quickly as this Intel MacBook Pro 13in (from £1,799). Price: From £1,299 | Check price on Amazon | Apple | Argos
Pros: Fast and responsive great battery life fan barely fires up top-notch display Cons: Design feels old 720p webcam lack of ports That said, unless you need that sustained performance or have a hankering for a Touch Bar, save yourself 300 quid and get a MacBook Air. It’s also something to realise that this is the puniest M1 MacBook Pro Apple will ever release, yet already it often outperforms much pricier Intel models. Frequently, the M1 beat the i9 MacBook Pro 16in too – which costs twice as much. Only when we ran unoptimised Intel apps did the older MacBook Pro sometimes edge ahead, but even then only marginally. The M1 – with half the RAM – stomped all over its 13in Intel i5 predecessor. What’s more striking is how this Mac compared to Intel MacBook Pro models. (This was one of the few tasks where we got the fan to regularly spin up.) In our HandBrake video encoding tests, the MacBook Pro finished in 85–90 per cent of the time the MacBook Air took – although this encoding happened to the dulcet tones of a fan. The time taken for resource-intensive tasks is lower.
In general use, this extra grunt is hard to spot, but run a load of benchmarks or time tasks and pore over a resulting spreadsheet of figures (WIRED reviewers know how to live) and the gap between the two machines becomes clearer.įPS scores are higher. That last point is important, because it makes this machine more performant than the MacBook Air (above) for sustained, demanding tasks.