The 14-inch MacBook Pro was more than twice as fast as the Surface Pro 8 (running Intel's Xe graphics) and the M1-equipped 13-inch MacBook Pro, while the bigger notebook was on-par with the Surface Laptop Studio equipped with an NVIDIA 3050 Ti. The GPU-heavy Geekbench 5 Compute score made it clear that Apple hasn't completely surpassed the likes of NVIDIA and AMD, though. Another nice plus: Both of these computers are equipped with very fast NVMe SSDs, which will be a huge help when working with large projects. But the multi-core figures were far higher. That includes the NUC 11 Extreme powered by Intel's Core i9-11900KB, a high-end desktop CPU! The single-core performance on the M1 Pro and Max was similar to the M1, which is unsurprising.
And the benchmarks didn't disappoint: According to GeekBench 5, both MacBook Pros blew away every Windows PC we reviewed this year by a significant margin. Just based on specs, I expected to see some wild performance improvements. For now, you'll still have to rely on the TouchID sensor on the power button. It would have been nice to see FaceID on the MacBook Pro though, which would have brought it on-par with Windows Hello-equipped PCs. And it definitely looks better than the M1 MacBook Air, which had a few tweaks, but was still stuck at 720p. There's a clear leap forward in resolution, sharpness and detail compared to my 2017 MacBook Pro. And judging from the dozens of video calls I've been on over the past week, it's a huge upgrade. I'll happily give up a bit of screen real estate, though, if it means Apple can finally squeeze in a decent camera. You could also use a black wallpaper which effectively hides the notch. The menu bar also gets blacked out entirely whenever you put an app or video in fullscreen. But, honestly, the notch isn't a big deal.Īpple wisely pushed the MacOS menu bar around the camera, so it's really just taking up space that would go unused anyway. Upon first glance, it's almost laughable that Apple is leaning even more into a design element that everyone hates. Much like the last batch of iPhones, Apple carved out a portion of the display to fit in a camera.
Now let's talk about the elephant in the room: that notch in the middle of the screen. These aren't OLED screens, but mini-LEDs get Apple pretty close to that level of contrast. Just know that they look incredible, with eye-watering brightness in sunny HDR scenes and inky black darkness in night shots. Really though, you don't have to think about all of the technology going into Apple's Liquid Retina XDR displays. ProMotion is also intelligent enough to lower the refresh rate when it makes sense, which goes a long way towards saving battery life. Microsoft already beat Apple to the punch by putting a 120Hz screen in the Surface Laptop Studio. This is becoming more common in the laptop world. And after spending hours writing up this review, I definitely noticed that my eyes were less fatigued thanks to the speedy refresh rate. With that flipped on, scrolling through web pages and documents just felt silky smooth. Neither are true 4K (the 16-inch comes close), but you'll still be able to work on 4K and 8K video, just at a reduced scale.īest of all is that the MacBook Pros support ProMotion, Apple's technology that enables refresh rates up to 120Hz. The screens are a sharp 254 pixels per inch, with a 3,024 by 1,964 resolution on the 14-inch and 3,456 by 2,234 on the 16-inch. Mini-LED backlighting lets them reach up to 1,600 nits of peak brightness, which is great for HDR content. They feature 14.2-inch and 16.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR displays, respectively. Looking at the MacBook Pro's screens makes it clear they're anything but retro, though.