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The New MacBook Pro: Is It Even As Good As Its Predecessor?
Apple’s M1 Pro/Max Graphs Make The Old M1 Look Better Than Ever
If you watched the launch of Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops last night, I hope your finger wasn’t twitching as badly on that ‘Order’ button as mine was. There’s no doubt the new MacBook Pro is a beast.
However, Apple’s presentation was also a masterclass in distraction — diverting your attention to how the new processors compare to PC rivals, whilst trying to disguise some less comfortable comparisons with its own M1 processors.
Here, for example, is one of benchmark graphs that Apple used during its presentation:
The message you’re meant to take from this is clear: The M1 Pro and M1 Max offer much better performance for much less power than comparable PC processors.
However, ignore the grey PC lines on the graph and focus on the Apple processors and the comparison isn’t quite as shiny. From those graphs, it seems that when running at full tilt, the M1 Pro/Max uses twice as much power as Apple’s M1, but delivers significantly less than twice the CPU performance.