Gadgetory

hey what's up guys i'm pbht here and yes this laptop does cost and did cost me six thousand seven hundred dollars over off the bet you probably should not upgrade to this 2018 MacBook Pro if you already have a 2017 or even a 2016 MacBook Pro and it's not even really because of the price but yeah so this laptop did cost obviously a ton more than most other laptops or even most other desktops but the real story is that this is the most powerful new laptop Apple's ever made it's the new 2018 8th gen Intel Core I 9 15-inch MacBook Pro and this is everything you need to know about so first of all here are all the new specs this is the new 8th gen Intel Core I 92.9 gigahertz 6 core CPU there's also a less powerful version but every single new 15-inch MacBook Pro now has a 6 core chip which is dope it has an AMD Radeon pro 560 X with 4 gigs of video RAM that's the highest end GPU option has 32 gigs of DDR 4 RAM up from the baseline 16 gigs and a 4 terabyte internal SSD up from the baseline 256 gigs so yeah this thing's clearly a beast on paper but there are also a couple other things that are technically new also about this laptop that are more minor but that are also worth noting number one is the new true tone display so is everything we knew and loved about the old MacBook Pro displays but this time in ads the ambient light color temperature sensor so it can dynamically adjust the white balance of the display based on the room you're in this is cool on a smart phone and even on tablets but I turn this off immediately and I suspect a lot of other video editors or photographers will do the same thing but interestingly enough the touch bar is now also a true tone display and it will match so whenever the main display changes color temperature to match the room you're in the touch bar will match and change temperature too so that's pretty cool the keyboard is also slightly updated it will look nearly identical from the outside except for a slightly different option key not sure why that's different but it is but they're calling this a new Butterfly mechanism that's a bit quieter than previous generations basically for those who don't know Apple has had some reliability problems with the MacBook Pro keyboard in the past couple years I actually haven't personally had any problems with mine but I've read about a lot of this which is people having you know dust and dirt and things like that getting under the keys and breaking it so tear downs have revealed that with this generation Apple has added a bit of a membrane under each key cap to prevent debris from entering and it happens to have the effect of slightly dampening the noise and feel from the keyboard so I can feel the difference when I type on them back-to-back but honestly it still feels like a normal load travel MacBook keyboard it's not game-changing I would take more travel if I could get it and then what's also new is the t2 chip so last years machines had the t1 chip as you probably remember you got touch ID things like that the new custom t2 chip has a bunch of other improvements and benefits things like improve an encryption and secure boot but one of the most interesting user facing features that you get from it is hey Siri so now there's a new always on always listening hey Siri feature which I don't even know what you would do with the Siri very often on the desktop maybe turning a screen saver on or open some folders or something like that I guess here's what I found on the web for what you would do hey Siri open my downloads folder here's that folder good stuff in there please make Siri better anyway those like I said are pretty minor things but I'm really concerned about with this new laptop and what I'd be paying for is the new specs the new performance and that's what's going to decide if this laptop is worth the extra money and upgrading so the new six core i9 is new at the highest end and I'll talk more about that as far as render times and processing power and what that's useful for but that's a welcome upgrade the RAM as you heard me mentioned is now faster ddr4 versus last year's ddr3 and while I almost never use the 15-inch MacBook Pro on battery power Apple did acknowledge that they wanted to maintain battery life so they bumped up the size of the internal battery just a little bit to keep the same claimed 10 hour battery life rating with the less efficient ddr4 memory so now it's faster and this four terabyte SSD or any size really is literally the fastest internal drive I've ever seen in a laptop I mean I'm seeing nearly 3 gigabyte per second reads and writes which is incredible you've probably already heard it's slightly a controversial because it's so expensive but pro tip if you don't upgrade to spend the $3,000 on a 4 terabyte internal drive you can get the exact same MacBook Pro as far as performance in a $3,000 machine so clearly it's just kind of click bait but the thing about a drive this big number one it's hard to think of like to name another high-end laptop right now with a 4 terabyte internal SSD that's a big drive and number 2 you really just get a lot as far as convenience where I call it peace of mind of having a big drive having a 4 terabyte drive on your mobile workstation I said this in my Q&A if you work with big files like I do you need a big drive to have all those things in one place without external hard drives and things sticking out of your laptop I think I can personally get away with having just a 2 terabyte option on mine just because pretty much every project I do is less than that but having a 4 terabyte option is great you just probably don't need it you may have heard about the thermal problems with this specifically this I 9 15-inch MacBook Pro some have called it overheating some have called it throttling just generally the thermal problems so only break that down generally Apple loves thin quiet laptops basically to a fault they of being thin and sleek and quiet so much that they would rather throttle down the CPU a bit then kick up the fan speed to keep it cool so like if I told pretty much any company in the world look you got to make the highest end most impressive workstation laptop you can with a big screen and big internalist you probably picture something with huge vents you know this big thick chassis maximum performance fans cranking you're only gonna match a desktop by making a big laptop that Apple comes along and their most powerful laptop is this thin unibody aluminum enclosure it's very different you definitely do get phenomenal build quality I mean this thing feels like a tank it's rigid it's dense it's sharp and clean but it also means not as much airflow these fans are smaller these vents are smaller and just overall thermal design could be a lot better and then on top of all of that since Apple wants its laptops to be as quiet as possible all the time even though they don't have to be in Pro machines but since they want that instead of ramping up the fan speed to cool off the laptop when it's getting warm they throttle down the CPU so they don't have to ramp the fans up as high that's the problem that's what's led to people trying all kinds of things like sticking the laptop in the refrigerator to get it to cool properly and doing all kinds of tests with all these different apps and benchmarks to see how much it throttles actually decided to do my own test because I really rely on these MacBook Pros for one thing and one major thing only and that's mobile video editing with Final Cut Pro so the iMac pro at the studio is a beast zero complaints from me they're fast edits fast exports that's my slightly unfair benchmark when I go mobile when I go to like CES or some some event where we're shooting a video and we need to have that laptop there that's when I'll bring the highest end Final Cut Pro machine that I can which is now this I nine MacBook Pro and actually can edit 4k even 6k and 8k red raw footage on the MacBook Pro at this point there's a lot more dropped frames in the iMac of course but I typically bring the whole project to internal storage since it's so fast and then the fast RAM and storage help me chop through and scrub through the timeline play through media and work through everything relatively easily it's when I finish the project and hit the render button that things change and just take forever it takes these laptops forever to render out videos and transcode all these are 3d 8-k RAW files into 4k ProRes for the timeline that's really where the bottleneck is and where it takes forever so I might as well hit render and like go get a meal go to sleep wake up the next day it's that long so basically with the extra cores and the higher clock speeds and the improvement of the architecture of new chips I'm hoping to see an improvement there so I did my own tests in my normal use case for a video I shot a three-minute sample test clip on red 8k eight to one compression dropped it on the timeline with background rendering off and just timed an export of that timeline keep in mind it's a super simple clip obviously but with a longer project with lutz and effects and transitions and many more clips to transcode the difference would be exaggerated between all these machines but anyway for transcoding and exporting this is my results I did this on the iMac Pro and I got a final export time of 6 minutes 53 seconds pretty good the 2017 so last gen MacBook Pro I've been using did it in 25 minutes 38 seconds and the new MacBook Pro here did it in 21 minutes 21 seconds there you go I mean I might not see a huge difference as far as like the timeline and scrubbing through media and editing and making the thumbnail and all that stuff but when I hit render it will be 15% faster so yes technically I'm getting the faster laptop I wanted here by a bit but when you translate that out to like the bigger projects that means I'm gonna go from rendering in like three hours maybe to two and a half but again keep in mind that's just my situation and there is much more testing going on out there with other variables that might be closer to your situation so you might be 4k or 1080p you might be not red footage maybe sony footage or maybe re footage you might be in DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro so there's a whole bunch of other different variables so that I'll give a shout-out to my buddy John over at the TLD today channel where he's doing I mean he's been tweeting his results for all of these tests as he goes through them but he's putting together a video that will have all of that in one place so I'll link to that if I can hopefully that's live around the time this one is probably is by the time you're watching this but for me personally for the exact way that I will use this laptop it's just barely worth it like I'm gonna keep it because I already have it but for someone again who ready has a 2017 MacBook Pro or already has a 2016 machine that's already high-end you're probably because of the throttling and because of the slight limited performance not really gonna need to spend the money on this one at this point it feels like Apple could probably get a bigger boost of performance out of actually changing and updating the MacBook Pros design than just putting new chips in it maybe we should actually start asking Apple for thicker Pro laptop anyway the point here is tread carefully spend wisely and I think for a lot of people the smart move is gonna end up being to skip this great laptop and wait but either way that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace