 When we ordered the iMac 2019 for our review, we decided that it didn't really matter which graphics card we configured it with, if we were willing to upgrade later using Thunderbolt 3, which then got us thinking, this is after the review, you know, the MacBook Pro has Thunderbolt 3 ports too, which means that for better or for worse, both of these machines actually have similar upgrade paths. So maybe by evaluating the iMac solely as a desktop, we missed out on another viable option. I mean, if you're giving up a lot of the traditional benefits of a desktop anyway, given that both of these are running high-end Core i9 processors, are you better off with an iMac or a MacBook? Well, there's only one way for us to find out by sitting through this belabored segue to the message from our sponsor, GlassWire. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. So the first thing we'll need to give little Mac here a fighting chance against King Hippo is a graphics card. Now, unfortunately, Nvidia is still in talks with Apple to get official GeForce support under macOS, but it's not all bad news. The Radeon 7, which we're going to connect up via a Razer Core V2 enclosure, is still significantly more powerful than the top-end GPU configurations for either of these machines. And armed with the beta of Apple's macOS Mojave 10.14.5, we, and by we, I of course mean Anthony, should be able to get it working. Now, while Anthony's setting that up, I want to answer the burning question that I'm sure is on everyone's mind right now. These two computers here are fundamentally very, very different. So why compare them at all? And that is a good point, except for a few things. One is that they're both actually aimed at a really similar market segment, namely graphics artists and professionals, thanks to their high resolution wide-gamut DCI-P3 displays. Number two, in both cases, our bang for the buck recommended config includes a dedicated AMD GPU, a Radeon Pro 560X in the case of the MacBook, and a Radeon Pro 580X in our iMac. Finally, number three, they both suffer from thermal constraints that affect their peak performance in ways that you can't easily read off of a spec sheet. So what we want to know then is if they have similar purposes and design goals, well, which one of them should we choose? A MacBook Pro with some upgrades and, I don't know, maybe a secondary display or something like that, or an iMac, which is running faster dedicated graphics and, of course, a larger monitor in the first place. Furthermore, how do the costs pan out? And is the mobile processor bottleneck going to cause real performance problems for professional work? So what do you think? I think for compute, we're probably looking at a much faster experience with the MacBook Pro just as a result of the much faster Radeon 7. However, the iMac has two more much faster cores. So depending on how they thermal throttle, it might be a wash or it might be a win for either of them, really. Before we do that, though, we're going to do a quick Cinebench run to get a baseline for the CPU performance. It's worth noting, too, though, that our iMac isn't equipped with the fastest GPU that it could have had. The thing, though, is that paying for that upgrade to Vega 56 or something like that. Yeah, Vega Pro 56. Yeah. Paying for that upgrade would have gotten us half of the way to a much faster external Radeon 7 anyway, so we just didn't think it made sense. So I'm looking at somewhere in the 4100 range and, uh, woof. Yeah, 2340 on the MacBook Pro. Okay, so as expected, more cores is more better in a heavily multi-threaded workload. And furthermore, our MacBook Pro thermal throttled considerably harder than our iMac, which widened even our anticipated performance difference. But of note is the fact that a single threaded score between these two machines isn't that far off. And often, your single threaded performance is more important for light tasks like web browsing, application launching, and general use. Yeah, on that subject, actually, I also ran Blackmagic's disk speed benchmark, and while it's not a great test since it only looks at sequential speeds, it appears that Apple is using a similar class of SSD on both of these machines, which probably contributes to the fact that I didn't really notice any chugging between them. That being said, the iMac is equipped with a fusion drive, which is spinning rust along with the SSD, meaning that after a certain period of time, the caching stops and it becomes slow. And that's kind of the thing about Mac OS, isn't it? For all its shortcomings, it's really well optimized, and you almost need a heavy load in order to tell the difference between one decently equipped Mac and another. So with that in mind, we're going to go full opposite end of the spectrum and hit our machines with Luxmark, a GPU-dependent 3D rendering benchmark. And this is where things get really interesting. So right out of the box, with no upgrades to either machine, there is a clear performance advantage for our desktop. I mean, we're talking double the horses here and $400 cheaper. But that's not to say that if you ran out and bought yourself a MacBook Pro, you are plum out of luck. If you can afford the graphics card upgrade, it can inject a lot of fight into your portable machine. So with the Radeon 7 in tow, our core i9-equipped model managed anywhere from three to even four times the performance of our all-in-one desktop. It's worth noting though, when our iMac is similarly kitted out with the Radeon 7, it actually does a much better job of combining the power of both the onboard and external graphics, which allows it to keep performance advantage, albeit a much smaller one. Next, let's take a look at video editing. Adobe Premiere, whether it's related to the external nature of our graphics card or the beta version of Mac OS that we're running, didn't actually benefit from our Radeon 7 GPU upgrade. So we had to pull it off, which means that we're looking at a 20 to 25% performance difference in export times with what I would describe as pretty darn similar on timeline scrubbing performance. And this is with pretty heavy footage, but I think you can go a little bit worse. This is only 20 to 1 footage, if I recall correctly. Is that right, Brandon? Yeah. As for final cut, let's go ahead and fire that up. This is a tricky one to benchmark because Apple has a really cool feature that pretty much renders your video ahead of time in the background while you are cutting it together. And this avoids the traditional long wait times while your finished project exports. What we can do, though, is we can cancel, delete our rendering cache, and then start off the rendering process manually, as well as look at our timeline performance while doing the render. I've attached four looks to each of these. Yeah. So it should be pretty... So, yeah, it's smooth. Mousing over, I'm getting really quick previews. What's yours like? I think I'm actually faster than you. That actually does look a touch faster, but I've got the Fusion Drive and these are large files. That's true. So that could be affecting me there. Interesting. Also interesting, when we actually did benchmark our renders, we found that the iMac was about twice as fast as the MacBook Pro, even with the external GPU. So this seems to be pretty much purely dependent on multi-threaded CPU performance. Finally, one more heavy thing that Macs are used for pretty often these days is for programming work. So I've taken the liberty of downloading the Mozilla Firefox source code onto both of these machines so we can pit them head to head and see just how much of a practical difference those two extra cores on the iMac can make. One thing that I had wanted to do was gather results on Windows for both machines, but getting an external GPU running under Mojave's boot camp requires quite a bit of extra setup and I'm not even sure if it'll work at all with a T2 enabled Mac like our MacBook Pro. Right, so there's no T2 in the new Mac. Yeah, so that's a point in the iMac's favor, in my opinion. You lose the hardware encryption and secure Enclave features that Apple touts as benefits, but you gain the ability to run Linux and you stand a much better chance of recovering your data in the event of a hard drive or a logic board failure. It's kind of important when your machine is constantly overheating. So, since we've actually run this before in the Sisters Movie Magic, I guess we've got enough data to draw our conclusion then. At a price difference of about $400 between our Core i9 equipped, MacBook Pro over here, and our 8-core iMac 2019, it's clear you are definitely paying a mobility tax with the laptop. You get two fewer and overall much slower cores, you're getting a weaker included GPU, and obviously, you're getting a smaller display. Furthermore, if you were going to buy the external GPU anyway, the extra spend of about $1000 for a Radeon 7 plus an enclosure is less likely to be bottlenecked by the more powerful CPU in the iMac. And, at this time anyway, it also happens to team up more cooperatively with the graphics cores it already has. But, and it's a big but, the iMac isn't portable. And if you need something that is, then from our testing, you're actually still getting a lot of bang with our tricked-out MacBook Pro. So, if you need a laptop anyway, then compared to the prospect of buying a laptop and an additional desktop, an external GPU upgrade looks like a great way to close the gap, since it's a lot cheaper than even the entry-level iMac. By the way guys, just one last note, we did it, but to be clear, we're not actually recommending running beta versions of your operating system on a machine that you use for professional apps. Those crashes are going to get you when you least expect it, and poor Anthony, this video was quite a lot of hassle to get done. What's not a lot of hassle though, is our sponsor, Pulseway. 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