

We told Adobe, and the company gently reminded us that running Creative Cloud apps in Rosetta 2 is unsupported. When we set it to 80mb/s, it delivered 40. (We found one strange Rosetta bug in this test: we set Premiere to export at a 40mb/s bitrate, but in Rosetta across three M1 Macs, it would deliver… 20.

#LOW CLOCK SPEED INTEL POWER GADGET PRO#
And the Pro seems to have a better, more effective thermal design than the Air overall: we ran our standard 4K export test in Adobe Premiere Pro several times, and the fan never came on, but export times stayed flat. And indeed, when we ran that same 30-minute Cinebench test, the fan came on after a few minutes and stayed on for the duration, while test scores held flat. This is fine for a consumer laptop but not what you want in a “pro” machine. The Air’s aluminum heat spreader eventually can’t cool the M1 fast enough, and it slows down. This is easy to see on the fanless MacBook Air, which delivered slower Cinebench scores over time when we ran that test on a 30-minute loop. It runs at its top clock speed most of the time, and when the system detects that the laptop is no longer effectively cooling the chip, it’ll slow itself down. The M1 is a little different: Apple says it doesn’t have turbo boost. The M1 MacBook Pro has the same scissor-switch keyboard and enormous trackpad as the Intel model. But if you’re excited about buying a new M1 Mac, is it worth the extra money over the Air? The long answer is a resounding… maybe. The short answer is that it’s very impressive, and the MacBook Pro is an excellent laptop with great performance and impressive battery life. There’s a lot of technical detail to get into around the M1, how it handles running apps built for Intel chips, and what that tells us about the future of the Mac. That said, compared to the last version of this model we reviewed in 2019, the new one has no concerns with its keyboard, excellent battery life, and even better performance. The $1,299 entry-level Pro with an 8-core GPU, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage is $300 more than the base-model Air, while the higher-end configuration with 512GB of storage is $1,499, $250 more than the similarly-equipped Air. And that all comes down to the fan.įor some people, that tiny edge in performance will be worth the price increase over the Air. But in terms of performance, it is essentially the same as the Air unless you push it for long periods of time. And yes, it has the hopelessly confused Touch Bar instead of a function row on the keyboard. It has a bigger battery and thus, slightly longer battery life. Sure, there are some other small differences: the Pro has a slightly better display and better mics and louder speakers. The Pro can just turn on the fan, which means it can sustain performance for a much longer period of time. The fan is the most notable difference between Apple’s two new laptops based on its own custom M1 chip: the new Air, which does not have a fan, has to throttle performance as temperatures rise. The easiest, best way to think about the new entry-level MacBook Pro is that it is a MacBook Air with a fan.
