 Is that a Mac in your pants or are you just happy to see me? We've got a total of seven MacBooks here and some are bigger than the others. But does a bigger laptop always mean more performance? Apple's M1 Pro and M1 Macs SoCs have already strutted their stuff for us in the 14 inch form factor. Now, it's time to see the 16 inch. You'd be surprised how much difference two inches can make. Just like our sponsor, iFixit. Still haven't bought something for the DIYer or fixer in your life? iFixit has a toolkit to help you tackle any job and you can still get free shipping and other great discounts for the holiday season. Learn more at the end of the video. From the outside, the 16 inch MacBook Pro is, perhaps disappointingly, an enlarged version of the 14 inch. There's no proportional in-beginning of I.O., which is a bummer if you were hoping to be able to ditch the type C hubs and type C to A adapters that you have. Even worse, we tried those type C to HDMI 2.1 adapters. 4K 60 with HDR is the best you're going to get out of these for the time being. So you're effectively limited to HDMI 2.0 on all ports, even on the 16 inch models. It's kind of lame, but it's been suggested that it's an internal bandwidth limitation. From here though, it's all positive or neutral. Starting with the notch, where because it's no larger than the smaller models, the 16 inch display actually makes it practically disappear when you're focused on content. There's also far less opportunity for egregiously large menus like DaVinci Resolve's to be cut off thanks to the larger menu bar, which makes this an appealing choice for the Mac using professional. Finally, the keyboard is no larger, which is something Apple has always done as a matter of preference. What we gain by keeping that smaller keyboard form factor is a much larger track pad and bigger speakers, which do in fact sound a bit better. There's a little more and tighter bass, which is saying something considering how good the 14 inch already sounds. The obvious reason to buy the 16 inch MacBook, of course, is the larger version of the Pro Display XDR. It's got the same pixel density and brightness as the smaller model, and looking at them side by side, it looks like Apple matched the panels extremely well in other areas like color and brightness too. That should make anyone looking into the 14 inch models breathe a sigh of relief considering in the past, smaller models haven't always been given the same pedigree. When it comes to the vastness of the screen, the 16 inch reminds me of how it felt to sit in front of a 17 inch MacBook back when they still existed. I don't have one of those to show you right now, but here's my old 15.4 inch for comparison. The shrunken bezels really do help make it feel that much bigger, and I don't miss my desktop monitor nearly as much as I did with this. Just like I don't miss my old jacket after getting the new Swackit from LTDstore.com. Flexible and thick, like I one day hope to be. But there's one more major difference between the new 14 and 16 inch models that we need to talk about. If you pop the hood, wow, they look shockingly similar, don't they? Almost like they took the 14 inch and just resized it in Photoshop. And that means the cooler is proportionally much larger, and it sits inside all that extra thermal mass offered by the bigger chassis. This might just be the killer feature for the 16 inch, assuming of course we hit thermal bottlenecks on our 14 inch testing. As usual, let's start with Cinebench, where it's obvious we haven't been thermally constrained up until now. M1 Pro and M1 Max in both form factors share the same CPU cores after all, and we get further confirmation with Geekbench. And same deal with Blender too, where we've got some minor variation, but not much else. The CPU cores on their own are simply not enough to saturate the 14 inch cooler. So if your workloads are only taxing the CPU, you may not see a performance advantage with the 16 inch over the 14. So let me move on to the GPU testing that things get interesting. Final Cut Pro sees the M1 Max picking up an extra simultaneous ProRes stream or two over the 14 inch variants before dropping any frames, which hints that the extra GPU horsepower is in fact being utilized here. DaVinci Resolve's render time gives us a shocker. The high end 16 inch M1 Max wraps up over a minute faster than the 14, and the low end M1 Max is even faster than the high end 14. So the Max GPU cores are in fact enough to saturate the 14 inch chassis. Strangely the 16 inch M1 Pro has the opposite result. It runs slower than the 14 inch, not just in the export, but in the timeline, losing a frame per second. What appears to be happening here is that because Apple's only spinning up the fans once the chassis itself reaches a certain temperature, by the time the larger machine has heated up enough to activate the fans, the SoC temperature is already so high that it has to throttle its performance. We don't see this on M1 Max because they spin up the fans much sooner. Cinema 4D Redshift is your best bet for 3D modeling and rendering on Apple Silicon right now thanks to its support for Apple's Metal API. But unfortunately it doesn't seem to hit the SoC quite as hard as the previous test and so we see less difference between the two sizes. It seems like Redshift simply needs more optimization. If it were fully utilizing the GPU, it should be saturating the cooler and throttling on the 14 inch like we saw with Resolve. Geekbench is more of the same with a mild increase in OpenCL but roughly run to run variants in Metal. Again if it were fully utilizing the GPU, we should see some throttling with this fan profile even though this is a short benchmark. Whoa hey, future Anthony here, capital F, capital A. Remember how I said Cinema 4D was your best bet for 3D rendering? Turns out I lied. The Blender 3.1 alpha just got updated with Metal rendering support on Apple Silicon in Monterey. I couldn't let this video go up without testing that out, could I? M1 is completely destroyed by the M1 Pro and M1 Max which we might expect from doubling the number of GPU cores, twice. But there's an anomaly. The 1016 M1 Pro consistently runs a little slower than the 8 and 14 core model. This is probably down to the alpha status of the new renderer, so take with salt as needed. Overall, this is a great showing. Until we introduce the Zephyrus M16. In the VMW render, its CUDA result is 16 seconds faster, while the Optix renderer runs twice again as fast. That laptop costs less than $2,000. But with Blender, we have one more trick up our sleeves. Gooseberry. This test requires 12GB of RAM to run, and this is where Apple Silicon shines thanks to its unified memory layout. The Zephyrus in both CUDA and Optix modes is faster than the M1 Pro models, but only just. M1 Max trounces it easily, with over a 6 minute lead on the 32 core models. Finally, we found something Apple's GPU is seriously good at without needing any extra hardware like the decoding and encoding blocks. Take these numbers with some salt though. The implementation is very early, and the devs say performance optimizations are forthcoming. Okay, back to the video. We get a better look at this when we look at gaming, where the 16 inch M1 Max managed a higher frame rate than the Zephyrus M16's RTX 3060, a first for Apple Silicon in all of our testing. That's a good 15 FPS higher than the 14 inch model can handle too, suggesting that once again, the Max GPU is more than capable of overwhelming the 14's cooler, although the Pro is well within the capabilities of its cooler and sees no improvement between the two sizes. CSGO does see a small but measurable improvement on the higher end M1 Max as well, suggesting that the little bit of extra horsepower, coupled with the little bit of extra thermal headroom, lets it squeeze that little bit of extra speed out of an otherwise Rosetta bottleneck title. As messy as all this is, Mac gaming isn't as crazy as you might think, so get subscribed because we've got a video on why coming soon. But what if we sidestepped Rosetta and used an Apple Silicon native app? The Dolphin emulator running Super Mario Sunshine fits the bill, but we're still not hitting the cooler that hard, which suggests that there's another bottleneck, probably in the translation from the older OpenGL API to Apple's Metal API. We'd expect it to hit both the CPU and GPU hard because we're running the emulator without a frame rate cap, but they're not, so we see little difference between the sizes again. Which brings us to the overarching theme of this testing, thermals. We fired up Redshift and Blender simultaneously for this one, and while Redshift isn't fully utilizing the GPU, it should be more than enough to bring it up to temperature. Sure enough, even our low end M1 Pro 14 choked here, maintaining the high 90s on the CPU cores and peaking at 100 degrees throughout the run. Apple, as always, seems to favor throttling instead of ramping the fans up. Even at that 100 degree mark, the fan speed was merely 50%. Fun fact, all of the M1 Pro models choked hard enough to outright crash the Redshift render every time, and in one case it froze the machine entirely with a black screen. Given the thermal results, I don't think that it's overheating necessarily. Perhaps there's a memory bandwidth issue causing contention on the lower end chips, or maybe there's a power delivery issue. None of the M1 Max models exhibited this behavior, so make of that what you will. The top end 14 inch M1 Max model CPU cores were routinely allowed to hit 100 degrees, while the Redshift rendering performance suffered greatly. The fans are a little more aggressive than M1 Pro at around 75% at peak, but that's a small comfort when you're still leaving performance on the table. The 16 inch models, on the other hand, performed admirably. The top end SoC may have hit 100 degrees a lot, but the fans barely hit 50%, and the Redshift render only took about 10% longer than when we were running it on its own, suggesting that it's only being mildly throttled, less so than the 14 inch M1 Max. Interestingly, the GPU clusters weren't allowed to hit the 90 degree mark on any of our MacBooks in this test, which hints that Apple's thermal management is aiming for somewhere around 90 degrees as the upper limit for the SoC itself. Taken together, this suggests that, with the fans cranked up, the 16 inch would actually be totally capable of handling a combined load like this without batting an eye. Sadly, this isn't the default behavior, but you can force it to max speed using a third party program like TG Pro. Surface temperatures were also significantly lower on all of our 16 inch models, although the exhaust temperatures were still in the 50s. Crucially, the hotspot is well under 50 degrees on the highest end 16 inch, and the underside is just a hair over 40 at its hottest, which means that even if you're stressing the machine, you're not going to be burning your pants off if it's in your lap. Apple's done a fantastic job managing skin temperature on this generation of MacBooks, and again, if they were a little more aggressive with the fan, they could have their cake and eat it too. The noise isn't even that bad, IMO. At a $200 premium over a similarly equipped 14 inch MacBook Pro, the 16 inch models represent a reasonable option if you value screen real estate. But as we've seen, the thermal constraints of the 14 inch chassis rarely come into play until you upgrade to the M1 Max. So choosing which size you get for an M1 Pro mostly comes down to form factor, not performance. In fact, if you're okay trading storage for screen size, the base model 16 inch is the same price as the 14 for the same SoC. However, I don't think I could recommend less than one terabyte of storage for a professional class machine. Even over the course of our benchmarking for these videos, we ended up running out of storage. Your mileage may, of course, vary. Apple's engineers are good at their jobs. Since abandoning the pursuit of ever thinner designs, they pulled off a solid chassis with good cooling and paired it with next level battery life thanks to Apple Silicon. While we're still in the transition phase of the rollout, it's almost complete. And there's reason to be optimistic about Apple Silicon. Maybe not quite as optimistic as Apple is, not yet anyway, but optimistic nonetheless. It's expensive for what you're getting, that much is clear. Only in video editing does Apple Silicon truly shine the way Apple claims it does. And far cheaper PC notebooks currently outperform it in other tasks like 3D modeling and gaming. But the entire M1 Pro and Max lineup has a unique combination of performance, efficiency, and endurance rolled into a form factor that's pleasing to use with fewer compromises than we're used to. You're also getting a display that's unmatched in the PC world, speakers that are legitimately some of the best in the industry, and a tightly integrated ecosystem that speaks to many. It's really a combination that no one else is in a position to match right now. And let's be honest, if any of that is a dealmaker for you as it is for me, then you're probably already eyeing one of these new MacBooks. And if anything remotely resembling the Apple logo makes you recoil in disgust, you're probably looking for reasons to hate it instead. I'm simply not going to change your mind, but regardless of what your feelings about them are, Apple is moving in the right direction. And this is a major step towards what could be a brighter future for the industry. After all, wherever Apple goes, the PC surely follows. Just like you're already at this segue to our sponsor, iFixit. Thanks to iFixit for sponsoring today's video. iFixit has the perfect gifts for the tech hobbyist or professional in your life. Their ProTech Toolkit is a great general kit to fix almost anything in your house. I reach for one all the time. It's got 64 bits and iFixit's most popular opening tools all rolled up into one package, including suction cups, spudgers, anti-static wrist straps, and more, all covered by iFixit's lifetime warranty. It's the gift that keeps on giving because you can save time and money by repairing your own electronics using iFixit's step-by-step guides. iFixit also still has great holiday sales for a limited time. Check out their new toolkit bundles and get 20% off all laptop batteries. Plus you can get free shipping on orders over $50 with code FORYOU, that is F-O-R-Y-O-U, at checkout. Give the gift of repair this holiday season at iFixit.com slash LTT. Thanks for watching guys. Go check out our initial review of the 14-inch M1 Pro MacBooks if you haven't already so you can get more context for today's 16-inch review.