Apple MacBook Pro 16 2021 M1 Pro in Review - The best Multimedia Laptop for Content Creators?

[Redaktion]

We review the new MacBook Pro 16 with Apple's latest M1 Pro processor in its most powerful version with 16 GPU cores. The Mini-LED panel once again impresses with great pictures just like on the smaller 14-inch model.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-16-2021-M1-Pro-in-Review-The-best-Multimedia-Laptop-for-Content-Creators.579013.0.html

[@sim]

games performance 100%, what's a joke :o

[Borui Xu]

I think the 100% game performance is given according to the low gaming standard of multimedia laptops. But it is still absurd to give 100% since it does not even run most of the games.

[verne803]

games performance 100%, what's a joke :o

This is not a gaming laptop - it is a professional workstation.

Apple does not advertise this computer as a gaming machine.

However, you can't really downtick it for the the fact that games are not compiled for it - that's on game developers which largely ignore the Mac market.

Any games that do support Apple Silicon Macs run pretty much flawlessly, and games written for Intel Macs run very well except for a slight deficit in that they have to be translated from x86 to AArch64 for about a 20% performance penalty.

[Jebadeb]

Gaming laptop or not, it is nothing but obvious score padding to give it a 100% in the gaming category when it is outperformed significantly by its competitors and often can't even run the programs at all.

The "its not a gaming laptop" defense doesn't work when "gaming" is a category in this rating system. Furthermore, the overall score given is weighted based on the category of the laptop, in this case it is "multimedia". So it makes even less sense to give it an auto 100% in the gaming category.

The lenovo used in comparison in this article, that significantly outperformed the mac in gaming, did not receive a 100% score in gaming. Yet the objectively much worse mac does. Interesting.

[Aquila Imperiale]

93% overall and a screen with ghostinng issues.

Great Innovation that Mini Led  ;D ;D

[philcomments]

How can the display backlight flicker at 14880 Hz if the display does not have a backlight? Are the thousands of mini-LEDs supposed to flicker at 14880 Hz? Does the display have a backlight in addition to the thousands of mini-LEDs? Please explain and help readers like me understand.

[Benjamin Herzig]

@philcomments,
a miniLED scren is still an LCD with backlight. miniLED is just a more advanced type of backlight.

miniLED is not like OLED or microLED, which are screen technologies without a backlight, as the pixels them self emit the light on those.

[aesthetic]

one category is missing: aesthetic

that pad is huge, your wrists rest inside them when typing on the keyboard

screen aspect ratio
163:100 >> MacBook, iMac, Pro Display
163:77 >> iPhone
163:123 >> iPad, Watch

[Fazal Majid]

How can the display backlight flicker at 14880 Hz if the display does not have a backlight? Are the thousands of mini-LEDs supposed to flicker at 14880 Hz? Does the display have a backlight in addition to the thousands of mini-LEDs? Please explain and help readers like me understand.

MiniLED means instead of having a single backlight you have thousands. There are two ways to control how much light is emitted by a LED: control the current fed to it, or switch it rapidly on and off from full brightness to off, with the LED being on in proportion to the brightness, something known as pulse width modulation or  PWM.

Controlling current is better but requires more complex circuitry and can be less power-efficient. PWM, on the other hand, can be detected by sensitive people as flickering, specially in peripheral vision where the rod cells are more sensitive to flickering because evolution planted predator-detecting neurons there.

On the MiniLED display, each zone is individually controlled, but still uses PWM to dim each zone.

[123]

The 2019 model put next to the 2021 one looks like if it came from the future...

[Sorwis]

"An HDR video at the maximum brightness ran for about 4.5 hours on our test unit of the MBP 16 with the M1 Max SoC (currently also in review), which is a bit longer than on the smaller MBP 14 with about 4 hours."

Was this with hardware decoding?

Impressive laptop. I just wish the upgrade prices weren't as extortionate and that the software support for M1 native applications (or even games) quickly increases.

[123]

> This is not a gaming laptop - it is a professional workstation.

It is definitely NOT a professional workstation.

Impressive premium consumer laptop - nothing more, nothing less.

Slow Wi-Fi is very disappointing, but target audience probably doesn't care - and it's common of Apple to gimp their products in some areas to later introduce improvements bringing them up to speed with competitors with tremendous pomp as some major innovation.

Progress compared to Intel Macbooks is immense - to a large degree because the former suffered from poor internal design, admittedly - but power efficiency and, consequently, battery life are nothing short of excellent.

[enormous]

that touchpad size is so enormous, one can fit steve's & tim's brains together inside of it !?!?!?!

[Polyphonie]

The large touchpad works fine

that touchpad size is so enormous, one can fit steve's & tim's brains together inside of it !?!?!?!

Apple uses the same palm rejection algorithm from the iPad onto the large trackpad. Meaning it works really well in macOS. Not so much if you're bootcamping Windows on the MBP.

Also the large trackpad on the 15/16" MBP uses two touch controllers to make sure touch, gesture and palm are precisely detected.