 It's here, our MacBook Pro review. We took our time, we ran a lot of tests, we drained a few batteries, and we tried to answer all of your questions. And you all had a lot of questions. Right at the top, I have to say, these laptops are incredible. So incredible that Verge laptop reviewer Monica Chin and our senior video director Alex Diaconis are gonna help me with this review. So let's get into it. We've got three of the new MacBook Pros here. A loaded 16-inch model with an M1 Max processor and two with M1 Pros, a 16 and a 14. None of them are cheap. The 14 starts at $1999 and our M1 Max 16 with 64 gigs of RAM and two terabytes of storage lists for $4,299. The first thing that you're gonna notice after your credit card takes that hit is that these laptops are robust. They're bigger and heavier than previous MacBook Pros and they are more squared off. The 16-inch is even just a little thicker than the previous 16-inch MacBook Pro. And surprisingly, that extra thickness is mostly in the display. I'm just gonna tell you, I love this. Apple has made so many compromises in the name of thinness for so long that all of this feels like a very necessary correction. One that allows for better cooling and some useful full-size ports. On the right side, you've got a Thunderbolt 4 port, an HDMI port and a full-size SDXC slot. And on the left side, you've got two Thunderbolt 4 ports and that MagSafe 3 power connector. Real quick on the ports, they are wonderful. I am very glad they're back. For our video team, they are reason enough to upgrade alone but they're not top spec. That's an HDMI 2.0 port, not 2.1. And the SD card slot is only UHS-II, not the faster UHS-III or SD Express. As for that MagSafe 3 connector, it's great. A true classic. The other end of the cable is USB-C and of course, that's where it gets complicated. You can charge all of these machines over USB-C using any of the ports, which is great. You can fast charge the 14-inch MacBook Pro using a 100-watt USB-C adapter and a regular USB-C cable. But you can only fast charge the 16-inch MacBook Pro using the MagSafe connector connected to a 140-watt or higher brick. That's the only port that supports the newest high-power USB-C PD standard. The other ports do not. What's more, there's no indicator anywhere that you're fast charging. You just have to hope for the best, which is like the entire USB-C story. Lastly, there's the keyboard, which has blessedly shed the touch bar, added full height function keys, and generally does what it's supposed to with far less drama than Apple keyboards of the past. It feels like every other Apple scissor switch keyboard I'm used to, which is very welcome news. I hope that we've all learned to stop trying to reinvent the keyboard. Leave them alone. If you wanna add touch stuff, add a touchscreen, all right? Deal. ["Sweet Home"] Speaking of the screen, it is not a touchscreen, but it is otherwise all-new as well, and there's a lot to talk about. First, there's the notch, which, well, there it is. A lot of you asked what happens when you move the mouse under the notch, and it goes under the notch. And if you're watching a movie, the upper part of the display blacks out anyway, so you can't see the notch. There are already videos of weirdo notch bugs, and it all kinda feels like what happens with every new iPhone. It takes a minute for apps to catch up. Honestly, I'm not too worried about it. The notch is there to reduce bezel size, while still allowing for a 1080p webcam, the camera LED, the True Tone light sensor, and the ambient light sensor to fit at the top of the display. Basically, you're looking at a 16 by 10 display with a little extra bit at the top where the menu bar lives, and there are already utilities that black out the menu bar and hide the notch. But honestly, I didn't even spend a second thinking about the notch after the first day or so. Especially on the 16-inch models, it's such a huge screen, and you're never really looking up there. I promise you, it's not gonna be a big deal, just like the iPhone notch ceases to be a big deal after a few minutes and a few app updates. And look, this display is way more interesting than the notch. For starters, it's now a mini-LED screen, which means the backlight is composed of 10,000 tiny LEDs, grouped into over 2,500 local dimming zones. That means blacks can get really black on this display, up to a million-to-one contrast ratio, just like an OLED screen. But just like we found with the mini-LED display on the iPad Pro, that backlight still has limitations. If you're looking for something called blooming, where there's a little halo around bright elements on an otherwise black screen, you'll find it. Here's a torture test where you can see the backlight chasing this little square around the screen. And if you're watching a movie, you'll see a little blooming when the controls come up over black, especially if you're looking at the display off-axis. I got some questions about whether closed captions would cause blooming when watching a video, and the answer's basically no. Now, I'm showing you this because a lot of you asked, and because it's interesting if you're a display nerd like me. In everyday use, this display looks great, and a little blooming is a fine trade-off for these black levels. In fact, I think this display looks better than Apple's Pro Display XDR, which costs $5,000, but has fewer dimming zones, more blooming, and off-axis color and brightness shifts that our team really doesn't like. This display has none of that, really. It's bright, it's even, and it's generally a pleasure to look at. But don't worry. There's more display nerd stuff to talk about. Apple made a big deal about how bright this display can get. It's an XDR display, just like that Pro Display XDR, and just like the Pro Display XDR, it can reach a peak brightness of 1,600 nits and a sustained brightness of 1,000 nits. But it's not quite what you think. The display mostly runs at a max of 500 nits. See, out of the box, the new MacBook Pros are set to a display profile called Apple Display XDR, which allows it to hit that 1,600 nit peak brightness, but only when you're viewing HDR content. The rest of the system is the same as ever, 500 nits. It's hard to show on video, but you can sort of see it here. The HDR video playing on YouTube is way, way brighter than everything else. If you have a newer iPhone, you sort of know what this looks like. You open up a photo and it brightens up. That's more or less what's going on with this display. I asked Apple about this, and they told me the system is content dependent and designed to run at 500 nits for most tasks. The good part is that all of this works really well. HDR video works in every app I tried, including YouTube and Chrome and Safari, and it looks terrifically bright with great colors and saturation. The HDR brightness levels even follow the content around the screen seamlessly. That's that mini LED backlight in action. On a technical level, this is really impressive and way more seamless than any HDR support we've seen on the Windows side. The last bit of display nerdery is ProMotion, Apple's variable refresh rate system that lets the display run at anything from 24 to 120 hertz. I'm just going to be very honest with you. I can only just barely see the improvement that 120 hertz offers in normal non-gaming use, and only when I'm really looking. I also have to quickly mention the speakers, which are terrific. The first thing we did with these out of the box was watch a video to check out the new display, but the first thing we noticed was that the speakers are so good. They are clear and crisp with some actual low end from four woofers, and they get super loud. It's impressive, and while the 14-inch speakers are really good, the 16-inch models in particular have some of the best speakers we have ever heard on a laptop. Okay, that's the outside. Inside these machines, you have Apple's new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, which are an entirely new kind of chip architecture with GPUs integrated right onto the chip with the CPU and unified memory for both. The basic chip design is easy enough to understand, since the fundamental pieces are all the same. Apple has three kinds of processor cores, efficiency, performance, and GPU, and all of the M1 chips are different combinations of those cores. For example, the 13-inch MacBook Pro we tested last year had a regular M1 chip with four efficiency cores, four high performance cores, and eight GPU cores. The M1 Pro and M1 Max change that around a little with two efficiency cores and up to eight high performance cores. The real big difference is in the GPUs, where the regular M1 has up to an eight-core GPU, while the M1 Pro has up to a 16-core GPU, and the M1 Max is available in 24- and 36-core GPU setups. Again, those GPU cores are the same on all the chips. You just get more of them as you go up the range, along with things like faster memory with higher total limits and additional specialized video encoders. Last year, we were extremely impressed with the performance and battery life of the M1, and now even more software is optimized for Apple silicon, so expectations are sky high. Monica, how do these things do in tests? So I'll just cut to the chase. For content creation and creative work, these are the most powerful laptops we've ever seen. To see how well a laptop performs in real-world settings, we run an export of a five-minute, 33-second 4K video in Adobe Premiere Pro and see how long it takes, and these MacBooks were off the charts. The 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max took just one minute and 46 seconds. That is far and away the fastest time I've ever seen a laptop finish this test. Now, a real-world export doesn't make for the greatest head-to-head comparison because there are different versions of Premiere Pro and sometimes the software glitches. Yeah, there are various things that can make these scores unreliable, but the synthetic benchmarks we ran were equally impressive. The M1 Max got a gigantic score on Puget Bench for Premiere Pro, which tests live playback and export performance at 4K and 8K. Nothing from Intel and AMD is touching this. It's beating NVIDIA's RTX 3080. It's beating AMD's 5900HX. I've been scouring the Puget Systems database, looking for any systems that have ever beaten this, and the only ones that even come close are desktops that use vastly more power. So the long and short of it is you will not find better Adobe Premiere performance from any AMD or NVIDIA laptops on today's market. Now, obviously the M1 Max has entirely different architecture from AMD's and NVIDIA's chips, and different parts are always good at different things, so the fact that the M1 Max is dominating on the tests we ran doesn't mean it's going to dominate on every single task. But the important takeaway here is that this system is generating power in a tiny laptop chassis that in the past, we've only seen from huge desktop power supplies. And it's doing that even when it's unplugged. When we ran all these benchmarks on battery, we didn't see a difference in scores. The two M1 Pro models took just under three minutes on our Premiere export test, which is better than most of the laptops I've tested this year. And the 14 inch and 16 inch M1 Pro models got very comparable scores in almost all of the benchmarks we ran. So even in a 30 minute loop of Cinebench R23, the 14 inch and 16 inch M1 Pro devices were very close together. Even with a much smaller chassis, the 14 inch model wasn't having any trouble keeping its chip cool. I think I heard its fans spin up around minute 29 of the 30 minute run, but this is the type of task that's a massive workout for even powerful Intel laptops. And it isn't giving these MacBooks any trouble. In fact, when it comes to Cinebench, as well as Geekbench and other tasks that stress the CPU, the M1 Max and the M1 Pro are pretty neck and neck. Where the scores start to diverge is on tasks that leverage the GPU, like our export test, Puget Bench, Geekbench Compute, and gaming. This makes sense since the M1 Max is basically the same chip as the M1 Pro with extra GPU cores and higher memory bandwidth. But it underscores the primary question that should be on your mind if you're deciding whether to buy the Pro or the Max, which is how much GPU do you need? Now there's one caveat to all this and it's gaming. The M1 Pro and the M1 Max are groundbreaking chips, but they're also tightly built to do creative stuff really, really well. They haven't made the MacBooks into serious gaming laptops yet. So we ran the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark on the three units we have at its highest settings with the screen resolution at 1920 by 1200. The Pro Max averaged 84 frames per second on that benchmark, which is good, but it's not beating NVIDIA's top guns. We've also seen much better from AMD's GPUs. The Strix G15 with the AMD's RX 6800M averaged 94 FPS on this game. And that's before we even talk about price. So you could buy two Zephyrus G14s or two Strix G15s for the price of our M1 Max model and have a lot of money left over. Also, the two M1 Pro machines did way worse here. They both averaged 46 frames per second on the Tomb Raider benchmark, which is way closer to the 2019 Intel MacBook than it is to the Pro Max. So basically, don't buy these for gaming. They're not gaming laptops. Most games aren't optimized for them. Buy something else if you wanna play games. So these machines crush our benchmarks, but what about real world use? Here's Verge senior video director, Alex Diconis, who's been using these machines to actually make videos. Our workflow for a typical Verge YouTube video relies heavily on Premiere and After Effects. So I tested those the most on the M1 Pro and M1 Max laptops. I actually edited our first impressions video of the new MacBook lineup on the new MacBooks. From the start, editing in Premiere was enjoyable. SD cards transferred fast and Premiere ran smoothly with 4K footage. On both the 14 inch and 16 inch 10 core M1 Pro machines, I could play back the timeline at full res at two times speed. I added graphics though, through Premiere's essential graphics and an adjustment layer for color. And to no surprise, it started slowing down and dropping a few frames. It was minor, but after about 20 seconds or two of playing, a frame or two would drop. Also, there was a short, but definitely noticeable lag from hitting the space bar to actually playing in the timeline. Overall, the experience was very similar to editing on my regular work machine, which is a 27 inch iMac from 2019 with an eight core Intel i9 with 64 gigabytes of RAM and a Radeon Pro 575X graphics card. Although the iMac was less choppy during two times timeline playback. On the specced out 16 inch M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, there was no lag between hitting the space bar and playing and Premiere ran noticeably smoother than my iMac or the M1 Pro laptops. Scrubbing through the timeline was great. I didn't notice it drop a single frame until three and a half hours in of editing, which is very impressive. It did slow down with bigger essential graphics though. On all the machines, M1 Pro and M1 Max, I would occasionally get the spinning wheel. It was never longer than five seconds and I never had to force quit, but still it happened. Where I do feel the difference is, is in export times. My iMac took four minutes longer than the 16 inch 10 core M1 Max to export a five minute, 30 second video in 4K. That was the most in your face improvement to me. Also while exporting on the 14 and 16 inch M1 Pro and the 16 inch M1 Max, the fans were never audible, but I did feel them spinning slightly under my palms and the laptops warmed up a little bit. As for Final Cut Pro, the exports were lightning fast. I took a 14 minute 4K clip, added a LUT and exported it in ProRes 422 and it took one minute and 25 seconds. On the same machine in Premiere, it took me over 10 minutes longer. Apple did specifically call out in their keynote, M1 Pro and M1 Max chips being optimized to handle ProRes. And honestly, these export times make Final Cut Pro a little tempting to switch to. In the middle of my testing, Adobe released a pretty big update for After Effects, allowing it to use more CPU cores and supporting multi-core GPU acceleration. It's still an Intel app, which runs in Rosetta on these machines, but it's still cut export times by nearly 75%. We ran the same exports on the Mac Pro and although it beat the M1 Max export time in After Effects 2022, the Max was not far off. So that's all incredible performance and we're still in the early stages of apps being optimized for Apple's chips and a lot of catching up to do on the GPU optimization side. Years of Apple ignoring good GPUs will do that, I suppose. But Apple's not only back in the game, it's already winning parts of it. The big question is what does all that performance mean for battery life? And that's really hard to answer, since modern chips are all optimized for specific things and we all work differently. And I don't think Apple's metrics like 21 hours of video playback in the TV app at 1080p are all that useful. So we just went with real world testing. We all just use these machines for our jobs on battery as long as we could. The 16 inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro is the longest lasting laptop I've ever tested in my career as a hardware reviewer, like period. I got 16 hours of continuous use with the 16 inch M1 Pro model. I was jumping between a dozen-ish Chrome tabs using a couple apps like Slack and Spotify, and often running Zoom calls and YouTube videos over that. And I have never seen a laptop last this long. The other two MacBook Pro models didn't last quite this long in similar testing, but the results are still exceptional. The 14 inch model with the M1 Pro gave me just over 10 and a half hours and Nelai got just over 10 hours out of the 16 inch M1 Max model. This makes sense when you look at what's inside these devices. So the two 16 inch models both have a 100 watt hour battery, which is literally the biggest laptop battery you're allowed to bring on an airplane. And the 14 inch has a smaller 70 watt battery since, you know, it's a smaller device. But the M1 Max has a whole bunch of extra GPU cores to power. So the 16 inch M1 Pro model is hitting a sweet spot with both a massive battery and a power efficiency. I edited and worked heavily on the 16 inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Max, including Zoom calls, downloading apps, dumping cards, Premiere, After Effects. And I ran the battery from 100% down to 10% in four hours. And like I said earlier, performance started lagging after three and a half hours. On the 14 inch with the M1 Pro, I ran the battery completely down in four hours of heavy editing. So that's not great, but on a typical day, I don't necessarily use that much battery, but there are times when it happens. A lot of you asked whether the extra money for the M1 Max is worth it. And after all of that, I think my answer is no. Carrying around all those extra GPUs appears to have an impact on battery life, whether you're using them or not. And unless you can identify a specific part of your workflow that would benefit from serious multi-threaded GPU acceleration, you're probably not gonna use those GPUs. This is the same thing we found with the Mac Pro. The Mac just hasn't had good GPUs for a long time. And the software ecosystem has a long way to go in order to take advantage. So for me, the 16 inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro is the sweet spot. I cannot say no to real all day battery life. It might be different for you, but I recommend really thinking about whether the battery penalty of the M1 Max and its additional GPUs is worth it for what you need to do. So those are the new MacBook Pros. They are some of the best laptops we have ever tested with an unbeatable combination of lightning fast performance and terrific battery life. And Apple seems to have come back to reality in terms of design, apart from the notch. But adding some useful ports and ditching the touch bar are just smart, practical choices. And honestly, worth the upgrade for many people. So what are the knocks? The biggest one is that these machines are expensive. If you're an actual pro, the prices are easy to justify given the performance. But if you're just doing everyday things, you can get a lot of great laptops for way less than the $2,000 starting price of the 14 inch MacBook Pro. The other knock is that Apple is still pretty early in the transition to its own chips, and the software ecosystem isn't totally there. These machines feel like the future, but parts of that future are still a little bit hazy. While Apple's GPU ideas get fully supported by app developers, we've been asking that question for a while now, and we still don't know the answer. But all that said, the new MacBook Pros are excellent. And I hope we've all learned an important lesson about ports and buttons. Hey everybody, a lot of you had questions about this new 1080p webcam and the studio quality mics on the new MacBook Pros. Here they are in my basement. They're fine, they're fine. Anyway, check out Springboard, Dieter's new documentary about HandSpring. It's streaming now on our new Verge Connected TV apps. We'll see you next time.