One Month Later - Apple MacBook Pro M1 (13-inch)

 Hi everyone,

I’ve  been using the m1 MacBook pro over the past  month and I’ve been using it most of the time  as my full-time editing computer so you’ve seen with the exception of a couple have  been edited completely on this m1 MacBook pro  

as well as all of the thumbnails for the video  recording all the audio and everything else so  I’ve been using it a lot and I’ve been  using it connected to a 6k pro display  xdr when I’m not mobile so if I’m in an office  where I have my display and I’m using it while  its connected to that display and it works just  fine with that so I want to talk about what it’s  like to use like I said I’ve been using it full  time connected to an external display sometimes  editing without the display and I’ll talk about  what it’s like not just editing but also for games  and more now the first thing is its  overall design of course is very familiar  you have a headphone port on the right hand side  but were lacking two additional ports apparently. 

This will be in later models but that’s probably  my biggest complaint about this MacBook at this  point is I could use some more ports we only  have two on the left hand side so you have two  but you can expand them with a dock like you  saw where I’m connecting it to the 6k monitor  I’m using an owc thunderbolt 3 dock and that  works great for things like memory card readers  maybe Ethernet and additional things like that  of course you have this nice 13-inch form factor  and thankfully apple kept the scissor keyboard  that they brought back that everyone likes so  it’s got good key travel good feedback its fairly  quiet and when you’re using it like this it’s just  much better to use at least for me anyway compared  to the previous sort of butterfly keyboard you  have that nice large track pad and a pretty nice  display as well it’s my it might be a little bit  small for me but for most people that like this  size laptop it’s going to be great.

It’s nice and  vibrant it goes up nice and bright and it seems  to work well there are brighter displays out there  and the bezels may be a little bit thick for some  people but for me it doesn’t really bother me and  like I said I’m using usually using an external  display anyway now the overall price of this I think is a good value for what you get compared  to other macs and I’ll talk about that in a moment  as far as speed so this particular mac is the top  of the line 16 gigabyte of ram with two terabytes  of storage so it’s the most expensive one you  can get about twenty three hundred dollars or so  depending on how you spec it out now you don’t  necessarily need that extra two terabytes of  storage unless you’re editing video then I would  suggest get as much as you can get. 

But for me it’s  sort of necessary with editing video you could  use an external drive maybe like a t7 drive  from Samsung which I have here I usually offload  footage to this so these are probably a cheaper  option and you can edit right through the  thunderbolt port with these so if you wanted to  do that you could get the smaller storage option  now I edit all my video on this and it’s just  super-fast in fact just using it regularly feels  much faster than an Intel mac for some reason so   if you’re just opening different applications  going through the responsiveness overall is just  crazy fast all the time so if you’re using this  for a disk speed test for example well just hit  start you’re going to get two to three thousand  megabits or megabytes per second rather just  using it normally so its super-fast there. 

Now  I did run some geek bench scores just to show you  in this but this is just sort of a general idea  of what it can do but for pencil it scored 19195  if we go to the single core versus multi-core  we had 1738 and 7645 for multi-core so it’s  pretty good so compared to an iMac of this year  it’s quite a bit faster as far as that goes  and it doesn’t make a lot of sense how fast this  is so like I said I’ve been using it for editing  and when you go into something like final cut pro  for example here’s my airpods max video that I did  an unboxing of now the amazing thing is it plays  this back in the best quality without any hiccups  whatsoever so maybe I hit space to play hit l  that will sort of scrub through this faster and  it will jump and you’ll see its nice and smooth  this is footage from an fx9 a Sony fx9 here.  

And also a Sony a7s3 is the top-down camera  and h.265 is what its playing back here  and then h.264 is what its playing back on the  fx9 so its combining this footage and it’s just  super smooth all the time my mac pro cannot do  that it will not play this back smoothly and if  we go to show in viewer for example and show  the angles at the same time and play it back  you’ll see it’s still playing it back smoothly  now it’s starting to hiccup a little bit here  but my mac pro does the exact same thing and I  cannot play this back smoothly using a mac pro  if I play it back in real time its fine if I try  to go faster it will sort of start to hiccup it’s  the only time I could get it to do that and when I  was exporting a video I exported a video the exact  same video this video and I had it rendered out to  about 2 minutes and 19 seconds on both the mac pro  and this MacBook pro the mac pro finished it in 7  minutes and 46 seconds. 

When I exported the video  the m1 MacBook pro finished it in 45 seconds  longer 8 minutes and 31 seconds so this plays  it back smoother and exports a little bit slower  but this costs twenty three hundred dollars the  mac pro is over fifteen thousand dollars so this  is basically like a portable mac pro that’s of  a much higher value in when you compare it to  things like that now not everyone’s going to be  editing video of course but things that are  built in such as documents or pages or word  any of that’s going to be super-fast no issues  there but when you’re playing games you might be  surprised that it actually runs pretty smoothly  so maybe I go into something like steam for  example and I want to play planet coaster which is  fairly intensive well go ahead and go down here  hit play well wait for it to launch and the  impressive thing is this is using Rosetta 2  to actually play this so in order to play this.  

It actually has to convert from I-86 type footage  to this m1 mac footage seamlessly and it does that  when it installs it sort of puts all the libraries  necessary to convert it and its surprising that  this will play it without a problem so well wait   for it to load and I’ll show you what I mean  now this is running at 60 hertz so the games  running at 60 hertz that’s what the display  is capable of anyway I’ve got full resolution  2352 by 1470 and I have most settings set  to high so I don’t have everything on but  most settings are set to high and I just kind of  bumped this up to custom but if I hit ok you’ll  see how smooth this is and this is not really  something I would necessarily recommend to buy  to play a game but you’ll see there was  a slight hiccup when I began to move.

Now it’s nice and smooth if I want to zoom  in or zoom out I can do that move around and  it’s not perfect but you can see here’s a little  bit of a line in the game so it’s not perfect but  it is nice and smooth for the most part and  very playable and this is being translated  through Rosetta 2 so that you can actually  play it that’s the impressive thing about it  and this is probably the only time I’ve actually  seen the mac get warm so yes you’re not going to  have blazing fast frame rates you’ve got 60 hertz  displays anyway but it’s definitely playable for  most games if they’re supported on mac and you can  just translate those through Rosetta which is very  impressive so if I close out of this for example  just hit ok it does take a while to load the game  this is one of the few things that will actually  make the MacBook warm in my use of it so.

 

It starts to get a little bit warm sometimes the  fan will kick in and sometimes the bottom will  get warm right now it’s just barely warm on the  bottom so the thermals are managed very well in  this laptop it’s a little warm right here and the  only time I’ve got it warm when it was editing is  when it was connected to that external display so  the 6k resolution was really pushing the graphics  chip on here and that’s when it started to get  warm and as you can see when its connected in  closed clam shell mode where the display is closed  but it’s using an external display it’s getting  quite warm you can see that with a clear thermal  camera that the bottom gets warm and also the top  and you can actually see where the exhaust vent is  pushing out air so it definitely will get warm.

But  it’s nothing like max of the past it doesn’t  have ever thermal throttle on me and it just  sort of pushes through this footage no problem now  using this for anything other than final cut or  a game for example it’s going to sort of blaze  through any of that footage so for example  you’re using it for maybe I guess final cut  pro well open safari if we go to apple.com  you can have all of these things open news the app  store settings you’ll see how fast everything just  sort of pops open so if we go over to well  open this app again everything’s just instant  on here and that’s where it’s really amazing  it just feels so fast all the time and that’s  what makes me go back from my mac pro to this it  just seems like its super-fast all the time so.

  

That’s great about it it’s got great microphones  and let me have you hear the speakers and then  well take a look at the microphone but if I go  to a comparison I did where I edited down here  I’ll jump to the section with music well  go over here and I’ll play back some of  the music for you so well turn up the  speakers here and I’ll move my microphone so hopefully that gives you an idea of what  it’s like to use the MacBook with its speakers  but let’s take a look at the microphone because  the microphones quite good on here it has studio  mics as well now let me switch over to the  microphone on the MacBook pro and now I’m  recording with the MacBook pro now the audio from  it is quite impressive when you’re just using it  to record audio maybe you need to voice something  over it will work great for that but this camera  is probably the lowest possible quality camera  you could put in this laptop I think for what it  is it should be a better camera and I think we’ll  see that in the future. 

But they do use the neural  engine on the new chipset in here to help out with  that so it’s better than before but it still needs  an upgrade as well so let’s go ahead and close  out of that so well save that and what I’ll  do is ill just export this well export it to  720p so you could see it earlier at this point so  720p webcam you’ll see its saving this will take  a moment so I’ll just minimize it here takes just  a second to save that were good to go I can  close QuickTime player so well delete this now  and were good to go its super-fast to use for  everything and of course the last thing is battery  life battery life is amazing on this MacBook pro  so battery right now is at 74 I’ve edited a full  15 to 20 minute comparison using this from 100 and  wasn’t even down to 50 after I exported the video  that’s something. 

I can’t do on a 16 inch MacBook  pro for example it just won’t handle that maybe  two or three hours max on that 16 inch MacBook pro  apple says you’ll get 20 hours of video playback  this easily lasts me two days I don’t know  about 20 hours for what I’m doing but at least  six so you can see this is usage and I plug it  in a lot but screen on usage some days I use it a couple hours and I don’t plug it in often  unless its plugged into that external display  it’s just incredible how long this battery  lasts so yes you’re going to get through a  couple days if you go to work and you’re working  an eight-hour day even a 10-hour day you’re going  to get at least a day and a half of use out of  it or two days depending on how often you’re   using it if you leave it on and you’re not at full  brightness all day long it will work just fine so.

  

It’s amazing how long the battery lasts it’s not  a bigger battery it’s just got the m1 chipset  which is more similar to what we have in  the iPhone so it just lasts a lot longer so  the only thing I don’t like about this is I would  like a bigger display I don’t really care about  the touch bar and I would like some extra ports  otherwise it’s the perfect travel laptop and I’ll  use it to travel even if they come out with a  bigger one I’ll probably use this one to travel  and edit videos with when were back to actually  traveling and going to different events so when  that time comes I’ll probably use this unless  apple has something that’s much better at that  point but right now this is in my opinion a  portable mac pro so this does all the tasks.