Tested: MacBook Pro 2021 | Quite a leap of faith

With its new MacBook Pro, Apple shows that it was finally right to create its own chips. With a power worthy of professional stations, the new range of laptops also benefits from impressive battery life, a magnificent screen and numerous ports. But at this price, the 2021 MacBook Pro version likely exceeds the needs of the average person and still isn’t an optimal choice for video games.

Karim Benessaieh
Press

WE love

What to start with ? By trivial tasks like opening software in a fraction of a second? Go from site to site on Safari as fast as a human can click? In all of our years of testing, we’ve never had such a nimble and fast laptop on hand.

A small passage under the knife of Geekbench 5, a calibration platform, confirms our first impressions. The 2021 MacBook Pro we tested, with a 14-inch display and equipped with an Apple-designed M1 Pro chip, is quite simply in a world of its own, both for graphics processing and for the power of its eight-core processor. Judge for yourself.

We can see that in less than six months, Apple has managed to increase the performance of its homemade chips, from the M1 to the M1 Pro, by 47%. Our poor 2020 MacBook Pro, our work computer, is already completely downgraded.

The test unit that Apple lent us included a whole host of software, from Adobe Premiere to Logic Pro to Final Cut Pro and XCode, used by video and audio editing professionals. Whether for handling 8K video or hundreds of audio tracks simultaneously, the MacBook Pro showed remarkable fluidity, quite worthy of a professional workstation. We were able to change the lighting of a scene with a quick click, cut and repost 8K video in under 130 seconds. With Logic Pro, we were able to recombine 1594 audio tracks (yes, 1594, that’s not a typo) into a single AIFF file in 22 minutes.

The Liquid Retina display becomes for the first time, in an Apple laptop, XDR with a technology called mini-LED, giving magnificent contrast and maximum brightness of 1600 nits. Its normal 1000 nits operating mode makes it twice as bright as previous MacBooks. Another first, the refresh rate is adaptable, to preserve the battery, and can go up to 120 Hz.

The webcam on the front is integrated into a notch, as with the iPhones, with a resolution of 1080p. Battery life has been improved. We got 15 hours of video content on a single charge – Apple promises 17 – and a dozen hours of fairly heavy mixed use, involving a lot of web browsing and using multiple software.

The keyboard called Magic Keyboard is backlit, with a good deep touch. The “Touch Bar” has disappeared, replaced by the classic 12 function keys at the top.

Finally, note the generosity of connections of this MacBook, with three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot and a 3.5 mm audio jack.

We like less

At $ 2,499 as a starting price, for 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and the M1 Pro chip, the MacBook Pro is expensive. Adding in a few options, like a 16-inch screen, 64GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage, the bill is close to $ 5,399.

This laptop has everything you need for video games, and the Apple ecosystem offers thousands of them, including mobile games that are now compatible with the M1 chip. Unfortunately, the big studios never got on board and there are very few high-caliber games available. Perhaps it will change with these new capacities.

One buys ?

The new MacBook Pros will probably delight professionals who are already used to the Mac environment and who can now count on such a powerful laptop. And we only tested the M1 Pro chip: the M1 Max, with its four times faster graphics card and a transfer speed of up to 400 GB / s, is even more impressive.

The purchase, for them, is clearly recommendable.

For the more modest user, unless you have deep pockets, this is obviously an overqualified device.