Apple 14-inch MacBook Pro review: Superb, but is it overkill for casual users?

Note: This review was first published on 5 November 2021.

A true Pro notebook

In 1998, after his return and at the launch of the iMac G3, Steve Jobs identified that Apple needed to make four types of Macs. Desktop and portable, and consumer and professional versions of both. In an ideal world, regular users like you and me would buy the consumer versions while professionals would buy what we have come to know as the “Pro” versions. But the lines between the two have blurred over the past couple of years, particularly on the portable side. 

If you ask people who know a thing or two about processors why the lines have blurred, they’ll point the finger at Intel. The company’s manufacturing woes are well documented by now so I won’t belabour the point. The short story is that they can't make the processors that Apple wanted. So what we ended up with were compromised machines. Before the MacBook Air transitioned to Apple Silicon, they were powered by low-power Amber Lake processors. Yes, they were relatively efficient which meant Apple could put it in a compact body but they also felt sluggish and slow, which really shouldn’t be the case in a notebook that costs two grand. Consequently, many people felt compelled to buy a MacBook Pro instead. If you are already spending that much, what’s a couple hundred more?

Apple’s transition to its custom silicon means Steve Jobs’ vision is finally a reality. We finally have notebooks that live up to their Pro billing. I’m not going to beat around the bush. The gulf in performance between the last year's M1 MacBook Air and Pro and the new M1 Pro and M1 Max 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros is huge. And that should be the case because these new MacBook Pros are not cheap – not when prices start at S$2,999. But does that mean these new MacBook Pros are overkill for regular folk like you and me? Should we still consider and or even aspire to own one, even if we don’t use “pro” apps like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro? Let's see if we can find an answer to these questions.

Design 

I covered much of the new 14-inch MacBook Pro’s design in my hands-on article so I don’t want to repeat myself too much. 

The 14-inch MacBook Pro has an all-new design. Nobody is going to mistake it for anything other than a MacBook but the sides don’t taper as much and are more squared off now. And as you’d expect, it’s a well-built machine. The chassis might be 100% recycled aluminium but you can’t tell. It’s smooth and extremely solid; it looks and feels first-rate. 

In terms of overall dimensions, it’s about the same thickness as the 13-inch MacBook Pro but because it has a larger display, it’s a little wider and deeper. The biggest difference is the weight. This new model is 1.6kg, which is 200g heavier, and you do feel it. It’s by no means cumbersome but it’s certainly no featherweight. As I said in my hands-on, the best word to describe this machine is “substantial.”

There are prominent rubber feet underneath which raises the notebook a tad. It didn’t bother me when I was typing but it does create more space for the front intake vents which are located near the front to left and right of the trackpad. And nowhere on the notebook does it say MacBook Pro, you’ll only find an engraved label on the bottom which I really like.

Ports

It seems odd to devote an entire section to ports but it was one of the biggest issues with older generation MacBook Pros that I thought I should address it thoroughly.

Round the sides, you’ll immediately notice that this new MacBook Pro has more ports. On the left are two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, a MagSafe 3 port, and a headphone jack. The headphone jack used to be on the right and I like that Apple has repositioned it because that means my headphone wire no longer gets in the way of my mouse. On the right are another USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port, a full-size HDMI port, and a full-size SD card reader. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see the SD card reader returning. It’s probably the most requested feature by professional users.

A MagSafe to USB-C cable is provided but you can also charge the notebook using USB-C. MagSafe works just like it used to. It attaches magnetically and disconnects itself when yanked at from an angle. There’s support for fast charging over both MagSafe 3 and USB-C, but it requires a power adapter that’s rated for at least 96W. Apple says you can get from 0% to 50% charge in 30 minutes. I tested it and they weren’t lying. 

Although we have a full-size HDMI and SD card slot, it’s worth mentioning that these are in their highest spec. The HDMI port supports HDMI 2.0 so you are limited to 4k 60Hz video with 24-bit colour and not 4K 120Hz and certainly not 8K. The SD card slot is also only UHS-II (up to 312MB/s) and not UHS-III or SD Express. But I don't think many, if any, will complain about these limitations.

There's also improved support for using external displays.  The M1 Pro 14-inch MacBook Pro can output to two external displays at up to 6K resolution at 60Hz while the M1 Max 14-inch MacBook Pro can output to three external displays at up to 6K resolution at 60Hz and a fourth at 4K resolution at 60Hz simultaneously. If you include the built-in display and the ability to use Sidecar, you could have a grand total of 6 screens with an M1 Max system.

Gorgeous display

Let’s address the elephant in the room. There’s a notch at the top of the display. Within it resides an improved 1080p camera. It’s not Face ID nor does it have Apple’s fancy Centre Stage tech, but the images it produces are miles sharper and clearer than any other MacBook camera before it. Did Apple have to make it quite so big? Probably not, and I suspect it was a conscious design choice. 

As odd as a notch on a notebook display might seem at first, it’s a non-issue for most people. Apple has a notch on their phones and no one complains about them. After some time, you simply don’t notice it anymore – especially if you use a dark wallpaper. And if it really annoys you, there are apps to turn the entire menu bar black and conceal it. But because I use menu bars (iStat Menus and Music Bar), it bugs me a little. It appears these apps are not yet properly optimised for the Menu Bar and the way the apps interact with the notch is still buggy. This happens with every new iPhone too so I’m pretty confident these issues will get ironed out in time to come. 

Besides, you won’t notice the notch when the display is this impressive. The 14.2-inch display is a Liquid Retina XDR display – similar to the latest 12.9-inch iPad Pro – and it uses a mini-LED panel. There are over 10,000 tiny LEDs grouped into over two thousand lighting zones. These lighting zones give the panel better control over which areas of the screen light up and that means darker, truer blacks, and some incredible figures like 1,000 nits of sustained brightness; 1,600 nits of peak brightness; 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio; and the ability to show a billion colours. Resolution is 3024 x 1964 pixels which gives us a pixel density count of 254 pixels per inch, which isn’t that much higher than previous MacBook Pros. It also has ProMotion technology which automatically adjusts refresh rates depending on what’s onscreen. It can go from a low of 24Hz up to a high of 120Hz. 

Unsurprisingly, this is a gorgeous display. It looks crisp and sharp, and the colours are super vivid and punchy. The screen also gets bright enough. The high refresh rates also mean scrolling around and dragging windows about look smooth and give the impression of a very fast and responsive system – which this MacBook Pro absolutely is. 

The only shortcoming of this display is that it has a slight blooming issue. Blooming occurs when light from bright LEDs bleeds into the space of dark LEDs – kind of like monitor bleeding but within the panel itself. To be honest, you don’t really notice this in normal use, unless you use a word processor like me which shows white text on a black background (Ulysses, in case you were wondering). 

Keyboard and trackpad

A round of applause, please, because Apple has – finally – ditched the Touch Bar. In its place, is a row of full-height function keys flanked by a large Esc key to the left and a power button that doubles up as Touch ID authentication on the right. As for the rest of the keyboard, Apple has wisely decided not to muck about with it and have fitted their standard Magic Keyboard. 

Key feel is consistent with other Magic Keyboard. There's a rather prominent tactile bump and a rounded feel until you bottom it out. It’s a little light for my liking (most notebook keyboards are) but it’s generally a good keyboard to type on. Key travel distance is quite substantial and it’s also fairly quiet, so you won’t draw unwanted attention should you be typing in a library or a quiet cafe. The sound it makes is a low-pitch thud, which I actually find quite soothing. Some people have commented that the keys can be a little hard to see because it’s black on black, but because I touch type, it didn’t bother me at all. Besides, the backlighting gets quite bright. As for the trackpad, it is faultless. It’s massive, smooth, and impeccably responsive and accurate.

Sound (speakers and headphone jack)

The 14-inch MacBook Pro has significant audio features worth mentioning on its own. To start, it has a six-speaker system that consists of four force-cancelling woofers and two tweeters. It’s a similar system to the 24-inch iMac and it sounds fantastic. It’s hands down the best speakers I’ve heard in a notebook of this size. Apple says the woofers go half an octave deeper and produces 80% more bass. It certainly sounds like it. Older MacBook Pros already have very good speakers but the speaker system in the 14-inch MacBook Pro sounds even fuller and more authoritative. The best thing I can say about them is that they sound like decent standalone computer speakers.  

However, the spatial audio experience is inconsistent. While it often sounds odd on Dolby Atmos music tracks in Apple Music, the experience is a lot better watching movies. This boils down to the fact that most Dolby Atmos music is simply not remastered as conscientiously as movies and therefore cannot convincingly convey the full spatial audio experience.

The headphone jack has been improved. There’s no optical output like MacBook Pros of old but it has greater power output to support a wider range of headphones – even high impedance ones – and an improved DAC. I tried this with what is possibly the most popular high impedance headphone in the world, the Sennheiser HD 6XX, and I couldn’t hear any glaring issues. Typically, if you plug these headphones into notebooks, they’ll sound flat, lifeless, and the bass, in particular, would be loose, but I heard none of these when I plugged them into the 14-inch MacBook Pro. 

I love what they did to improve the audio capabilities of the MacBook Pro. In the past, I would bring a portable DAC and amplifier like the AudioQuest DragonFly on trips but I don’t see the need anymore. The built-in speakers are great and the 3.5mm jack is more competent at making headphones sound good.

Introducing M1 Pro and M1 Max

You can spec the 14-inch MacBook Pro with your choice of either Apple’s new M1 Pro or M1 Max chip. Let’s talk a bit about these new chips first.

Broadly speaking, these new chips are scaled-up versions of the M1 chip that made its debut last year. They have more CPU cores, more GPU cores, more memory, higher memory bandwidth, and dedicated accelerators for ProRes videos. In its final form, the M1 Pro has a 10-core CPU (8 performance cores, 2 efficiency cores), 16 GPU cores, and can be equipped with 16GB or 32GB of unified memory. With 16 GPU cores, the maximum graphics performance is a claimed 5.2 teraflops.

I say final form because there’s two binned versions, one with the same 10-core CPU but a 14-core GPU and another with an 8-core CPU (6 performance cores, 2 efficiency cores) and a 14-core GPU. CPU and GPU cores aside, the M1 Pro also has various media engines that support H.264 and HEVC codecs. It also has a single ProRes accelerator to speed up ProRes workflows. This single ProRes accelerator can process up to 20 streams of 4K ProRes videos or up to 4 streams of 8K Pro Res videos.

As for the M1 Max, you have the same 10-core CPU as the M1 Pro but with a maximum of 32 GPU cores. Maximum claimed graphics performance is up to 10.4 teraflops – about the same as a PlayStation 5. The M1 Max starts with 32GB of unified memory and can go up to a whopping 64GB. There’s also a binned version with 10 CPU cores and 24 GPU cores. Like the M1 Pro, the M1 Max also has specialised media engines for H.264 and HEVC codecs and two ProRes accelerators. Because it has an extra accelerator, the M1 Max can manage up to 30 streams of 4K ProRes videos and up to 7 streams of 8K ProRes videos.

Is it confusing? For sure it is, but it’s a necessary evil of chip manufacturing since not all chips are going to meet spec. Here’s a table showing all the possible configurations.

During the keynote, Apple talked at length about how powerful and efficient these new chips are by showing a couple of graphs and I’ll show some here.

The secret sauce, as Apple has said in the past, is the unified memory architecture, and it enables these new chips to match or even exceed the performance of comparable PC notebooks while consuming significantly less power. This also explains why Apple can fit the M1 Max in a 14-inch body. Apple says that for almost all workloads, the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros will perform similarly and that it is only in the most extreme cases that the 16-inch MacBook Pro will have an edge. After all, bigger means better cooling.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to test this since I only have the 14-inch MacBook Pro. This particular unit I have has the full-fat M1 Max chip with 10 CPU cores, 32 GPU cores, the maximum 64GB of memory, and a 2TB SSD. Now let’s take a look at how it performs against other recent Macs. I have also included results from a PC notebook that has a Core i7-1130H processor with 16GB of memory and GeForce RTX 3050 Ti graphics.

Performance analysis - CPU

I’m not going to beat around the bush. The new 14-inch MacBook Pro is fabulous if you do a lot of heavy computing work. Single and multi-core performance is way beyond any mobile chip from both Intel and AMD. In fact, the two companies have to call upon their highest-end desktop or server-class processors to match what the M1 Max delivers.

Since the individual CPU and GPU cores of the M1 Max’s are more or less similar to the M1, there wasn’t much difference in single-core scores on both Geekbench and Cinebench. However, thanks to having double the number of performance scores, the M1 Max recorded around 60% higher scores when it came to multi-core tests. This corroborates with Apple’s claims that the M1 Pro and M1 Max can deliver up to 70% more CPU performance than M1.

On our video transcoding test, which measures the time taken to transcode an hour-long Full-HD video, the 14-inch MacBook Pro took just under 12 minutes, which is 27% faster than even last year’s 27-inch iMac which has a fairly high-end desktop-class Core i7-10700k processor. It’s over 30% faster than M1 systems and even the last-generation 16-inch MacBook Pro which has a high-end Core i9 mobile processor.

Performance - GPU

Graphics performance has improved tremendously. On Geekbench’s GPU-intensive Compute benchmark, the M1 Max 14-inch MacBook Pro with 32 GPU cores racked up scores that were over three times higher than the M1-equipped 13-inch MacBook Pro and 24-inch iMac. It was also over 84% higher than the last-generation 16-inch MacBook Pro with an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M GPU. Huge gains were also recorded on GFXBench where the 14-inch MacBook Pro was over 3.4 times faster than M1 systems and 2.7 times faster than the 16-inch MacBook Pro. That said, you’d need the application to be optimised for the new chips to perform at their maximum potential. On an older benchmark like Unigine which runs in OpenGL, even the fully-loaded M1 Max chip in this system was only about 13% faster than M1 systems. 

Performance - Gaming

Many readers asked about gaming so I ran Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Deus Ex. These games were chosen because they run on both PCs and Macs, which gives us a chance to compare the 14-inch MacBook Pro’s performance against PC notebooks. Apple claims the M1 Max can just about match the graphics performance of a high-end PC notebook with GeForce RTX 3080 graphics, so we are including results from the Razer Blade 14 which just so happens to have GeForce RTX 3080 graphics paired with a high-end AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor.

Seeing that these games are not optimised for Apple Silicon and the 14-inch MacBook Pro is forced to run them in Rosetta 2, it’s not surprising to see the 14-inch MacBook Pro falling behind the Blade 14. The Blade 14 was about 40% faster in both games. What’s more instructive perhaps is that the 14-inch MacBook Pro is over 3.5 times faster than the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro and 24-inch iMac, which demonstrates just how much more graphics performance the M1 Max has over the regular M1. 

Real-world experience & battery life

There’s no doubt the M1 Max is a much higher performing chip than the M1 but the million-dollar question is: does it feel any faster than the M1 in normal day-to-day tasks like web browsing, watching videos, and reading and replying to emails?

Incredibly, it does. The difference isn’t day and night but this 14-inch MacBook Pro does seem to launch apps a tad quicker, and apps are generally more responsive. The spinning beach ball doesn’t appear nearly as often if at all compared to the 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro that I’ve been using for the past year. And with a whopping 64GB of memory available, I can be nonchalant about leaving unused apps and tabs opened. For the kind of work that I do, the biggest step up in improvement is how easily it handles large image files. Large TIFF files used to be a bit of a challenge for the 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro but this new machine chews through them easily – thanks to its faster chip and storage.

Perhaps what’s more amazing is that despite all the power on tap, battery life hasn’t seemed to suffer one bit. Sure, the 14-inch MacBook Pro has a larger battery (70Wh vs the 13-inch’s 58.2Wh) but it could easily last a full day of work even with the display’s brightness set at around 80%. Once, I started at 9 in the morning with about 84% of battery and it only died on me in the evening at around 7. The efficiency and the way the M1 Max chip manages power is staggering. 

Money matters (configurations & options)

Remember I said that in this review I’ll try to answer the question, “Is this notebook overkill for regular users?” Before we do that, let’s talk prices.

Apple offers two off-the-shelf configurations for the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Both come with M1 Pro as standard but can be spec’ed with the M1 Max, extra memory, and extra storage. You can go as far as your bank account will allow you. Here are the two configurations.

Options are naturally pricey. The unit I'm testing with an M1 Max chip with 32 GPU cores, 64GB memory, and 2TB SSD is an eye-watering S$6,149. 

Using the entry-level model as a reference, doubling memory from 16GB to 32GB is S$600, and stepping up to an M1 Max with 32 GPU cores is a whopping S$1,650. But that pales in comparison if you want more storage. The maximum 8TB of storage? Yours for S$3,600. Fortunately, going up to 1TB is a more reasonable S$300. And as is the case with all modern Macs, these new machines are non-upgradeable so you have to be really sure about the specs you need and want.

Casual users can probably get away with 16GB. I’ve been using an M1 13-inch MacBook Pro with 16GB of memory and I hardly ever have memory issues. On the storage front, 512GB could be sufficient for users who store most of their stuff in the cloud, rely primarily on streaming services for entertainment, and don’t have huge or lots of working files.

Buying advice

There’s no question that these are excellent notebooks – possibly Apple’s finest ever. It checks so many boxes. The display is magnificent, performance is otherworldly, battery life is fantastic, and connectivity is good. Perhaps the only dent you can make of them is that gaming performance isn’t absolutely first-rate, but that can be chalked down to the fact that the games are not optimised for Apple Silicon. Really, the only thing stopping people from running out there and getting one is price. 

With prices starting at S$3,000, these are expensive notebooks and if all you are going to do with them is browse the web, answer emails, work on spreadsheets, and perhaps edit the occasional video or photo, it’s frankly overkill. Last years’ M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are more than capable. However, performance aside, casual users considering the 14-inch MacBook Pro will benefit most from the superior display and connectivity options. The speakers are also better, and as is the webcam. Overall, the 14-inch MacBook Pro is a nicer notebook, you just have to weigh the pros and see if the premium justifies it. I think it does.

If you are not doing any kind of work that relies heavily on the GPU, I’d say the sweet spot is the M1 Pro with 10-core CPU and 14-core GPU. That costs S$300 more and you will be getting the same CPU performance as any higher-spec unit. Thereafter, just decide on the amount of memory and storage you need. 

It might be tempting to go opt for a highly-spec’ed M1 13-inch MacBook Pro. An M1 13-inch MacBook Pro with 16GB of memory and 512GB SSD is going to be S$2,449 – S$500 less than the most affordable 14-inch MacBook Pro. However, even the 14-inch MacBook Pro is still going to have an edge on performance because it has more performance cores and more GPU cores. Not only that, it benefits from a nicer display and better connectivity. I think I rather pay the extra S$500. 

Thankfully, the situation is much simpler for professionals. If you are any type of creative professional that relies on Macs for work, these new MacBook Pros are a revelation. You won’t find a notebook that will edit videos or photos faster than this. For video editors, this is even more true if you work with ProRes. Because Final Cut Pro is highly optimised for Apple Silicon and these new chips have built-in ProRes accelerators, exporting renders on these new machines are orders of magnitude faster. Check out these reviews from professional video editors (1, 2, 3) and think of the time you will save.

Final thoughts

Where would Apple go from here was the thought that I had when I reviewed the 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro last year. That was a fantastic product and it’s hard to imagine how Apple could add more performance, retain efficiency, and create an overall better notebook. But it turns out that they have. And not only are the new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips are significantly powerful, but they also do so while at little cost to battery life. For regular day-to-day tasks, battery life hasn’t really changed.

The amazing chips aside, props to Apple for listening to their customers and walking back on some of the recent MacBook Pro changes. Gone is the questionable Touch Bar and making a much welcome return are the SD card reader, HDMI port, and MagSafe connector. And the icing on the cake is that brilliant Liquid Retina XDR display. 

Bravo Apple, this is a brilliant return to form. Now can you please get to work on my dream Mac?

You can find the 14-inch MacBook Pro on the Apple Online Store, the Apple Flagship Store on Lazada, and the Apple Flagship Store on Shopee.