12 years of IT experience? LOL. Junior, you have a long way to go before you will have adequate troubleshooting skills. In your particular situation, an intelligent person would have been looking at iMovie and the clips you’re working with. iMovie isn’t exactly known for its robustness when it comes to corrupted input sources and supported codecs. Try asking about users’ iMovie experiences. Try using 4K from another source as an experiment. Don’t blame the hardware or it’s CPU architecture for any outlier performance characteristics you are experiencing. You speak of iMovie “workflow”. Seriously? Try FCP instead if you have needs beyond those of a basic consumer/hobbyist.
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Disappointed in Apple Silicon: Apple Marketing vs. Reality / Intel
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My 16" i9, 32GB, 1TB was identical spec to yours before water got the best of it. The 14" M1 Pro I used for two weeks doing fairly heavy data loads was night and day difference from my 16" i9: I'd go from full battery to empty in less than 2 hours on my 16" i9, and get over 4 hours with the same load on the 14".
It's possible the computer wasn't performing as advertised, but it's also possible that your machine/workflow has a defect/bug.
Nope, *highly* unlikely given that the setup you describe is common amongst Mac users. Therefore, people would have complained since day 1 on that fact. Since it hasn't happened en massé, it only leaves the option that your Mac has an issue.
That logic wasn't hard now was it?
OP seems to be of a line of thought that the M-series line is trash based on his iMovie experience, a laughable thought process tbh.
What do you mean by hot? Are you talking internal temps (which I don't think should concern you, since I assume they're not goiing beyond Apple's specs), or how hot the case is on your lap?
Is the issue just with your 14" Max, or also with your 16" Pro?
Why did you decide to put the Max in the 14", and the Pro in the 16", instead of the other way around?
For that to be meaningful for us, you need to make it concrete by giving us some actual numbers. E.g., since you use iMovie, how do export times for the same clip and same settings compare for your 16" Intel, 16" Pro, and 14" Max? Or are you just talking general snappines/responsiveness? That's harder to quantify.
OP clearly didn't do research when buying the machines. Hence, OP is now stuck with hardware in the incorrect placement. Again, brings my point back from a few posts of people not doing their homework on expensive hardware and then blaming said hardware for their bad choices.
OP will not give anything meaningful at this point as they would have done so already.
Junior, you have a long way to go before you will have adequate troubleshooting skills. I'm the guy leading troubleshooting calls in the middle of the night on critical systems that are down and getting them back up quickly, like 911 service in my country, etc.
Imagine a person so bias that they will blame everything and form any hypothesis other than hardware or its CPU. My running hypothesis is that it's a combination of the software (e.g., iMovie and the OS) and the hardware. It is not just iMovie, that is one of many examples, but the most recent. My hypothesis is that the OS and the individual software applications are not optimized for Apple Silicon. And if this is true, I am not surprised, because this is still early in the transition and I also know how much of a mess Apple's QA has been over the past 5 years.
"Well, knowing that, why did you buy them or buy more?"
Answer: because my expectation given Apple's sales pitches and benchmarks was X, and the real world performance is Y (far below X).
As per Apple Dev:
"Tuning the performance of any code requires separate passes on both Apple silicon and Intel-based Mac computers. Code that runs well on one platform might not run well on the other, and making assumptions about the underlying hardware can lead to unexpected performance regressions in your code. Testing on actual hardware is the only way to verify that your code runs efficiently and doesn’t have any regressions."
Easier said than done...
Posters like you will not give anything meaningful at this point as they would have done so already. Posters like you will repeat the same flawed logic and thinking: Because it's an Apple product, then it must be perfect. Therefore, any criticism of the product is flawed and incorrect and must be rejected. We all must worship a for profit company.
A beautiful strawman. Many times I have repeated it's not just iMovie.
Criticism exists where it's merited. In your case, it's as simple as not troubleshooting your issues. Again, your situation is so common, you'd be hard press to not see the issue be widespread, if that were the case.
However, as it's not, then again it's on your end, which you seem to simply ignore.
I haven't used my 14" as much but so far not impressed with the battery life either. I need to do more runs with it. The 16 I've had for some 8 months and used regularly.
Good question on the Max. I got the 16" when it came out... fast forward to just a few months ago, I got the 14" for the office and just decided to max it out and see how it goes.
I will post some more numbers but here is what I know:
- Max recorded temp on the 16" M1 MBP has been 104.
- Max recorded temp on my 16" Intel MBP has been ~108.
- Export time from iMovie to an uncompressed, full 4 k resolution file that was 20 GB once exported (6 min 47 sec clip) was around 11 minutes. I am going to run this again to test.
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I've not used iMovie in a very long time, but I can run Final Cut Pro for a couple of hours with 4k footage and not lose even 10% of my battery. And that includes the exporting of videos, not just assembling them and adding effects and what not. These are short videos of about 10 minutes in length.
This leads me to believe that booksbooks has some sort of serious problem with his system(s) as that is certainly not normal for the vast majority of us and is most definitely atypical of the general performance of Apple Silicon SOCs.
I too came from a maxed out Core i9 16" MacBook Pro and while it was a decent machine, the 16" MacBook PRO M1 Max runs circles around it in both performance and power usage. It gets a lot more done in less time and uses far less power. On average, it gets about double the battery life of the Core i9 system.
These are facts based on my usage and my real world experience.
I'm sorry that booksbooks doesn't have the same experience as the vast majority of users do, but claiming that Apple is misleading folks based on his outlying experience is absurd.
As many have stated here, it's time to look into why your MacBooks aren't performing correctly. Clearly something is wrong with your systems.
As for booksbooks infatuation with his M2 MacBook Air, I am at a loss. He states that it is doing well and is likely to become his main computer, but it's based on the same Apple Silicon technology as his Pros are, but is somehow performing beyond his expectations. This doesn't really add up.
I'd recommend trying your iMovie editing on the M2 MacBook Air and see how it compares to the M1 Pro and Max experiences. If the M2 does well, that's another indicator that something is wrong with your MacBook Pros.
This leads me to believe that booksbooks has some sort of serious problem with his system(s) as that is certainly not normal for the vast majority of us and is most definitely atypical of the general performance of Apple Silicon SOCs.
I too came from a maxed out Core i9 16" MacBook Pro and while it was a decent machine, the 16" MacBook PRO M1 Max runs circles around it in both performance and power usage. It gets a lot more done in less time and uses far less power. On average, it gets about double the battery life of the Core i9 system.
These are facts based on my usage and my real world experience.
I'm sorry that booksbooks doesn't have the same experience as the vast majority of users do, but claiming that Apple is misleading folks based on his outlying experience is absurd.
As many have stated here, it's time to look into why your MacBooks aren't performing correctly. Clearly something is wrong with your systems.
As for booksbooks infatuation with his M2 MacBook Air, I am at a loss. He states that it is doing well and is likely to become his main computer, but it's based on the same Apple Silicon technology as his Pros are, but is somehow performing beyond his expectations. This doesn't really add up.
I'd recommend trying your iMovie editing on the M2 MacBook Air and see how it compares to the M1 Pro and Max experiences. If the M2 does well, that's another indicator that something is wrong with your MacBook Pros.
Criticism exists where it's merited. It is not relevant whether anyone else has the same issues as me. The point is that I am having issues, and that is what matters.
Further to this, it is a strawman saying others don't have the same and similar issues. They do. I've linked to several threads on Reddit. There are YouTube videos with maximizing battery life and dealing with "Battery drain" on M based MacBooks that have hundreds of thousands of views. Here is a sample of some comments from these videos as I've collected in researching this:
"Just got a 14" and I was shocked at how quickly it drains....down 60% in 2 hours"
"What''s the point of having a laptop if you have to turn off App notifications, Wifi, Bluetooth and other necessary features?..." "Sadly. Even if i do it all. Still drains"
@booksbooks - I assume that you meant your temperatures are in degrees Celsius and not in Fahrenheit as listed.
Please do the same video project on each of the machines, including the M2 MacBook Air and post the results. Be sure to include the starting battery percentage and the ending battery percentage along with the time to complete. This will give us a much better idea of what may be going on. You should see significant measurable performance improvements from the Apple Silicon-based systems. The M2 MacBook Air will likely be slower than the Core i9, but as it is a less performant version of Apple Silicon, this is to be expected.
Please do the same video project on each of the machines, including the M2 MacBook Air and post the results. Be sure to include the starting battery percentage and the ending battery percentage along with the time to complete. This will give us a much better idea of what may be going on. You should see significant measurable performance improvements from the Apple Silicon-based systems. The M2 MacBook Air will likely be slower than the Core i9, but as it is a less performant version of Apple Silicon, this is to be expected.
No, it doesn't add up, does it. But that is MY EXPERIENCE. Do you get it. My experience. Not yours. Not marketing. Not what a benchmark says. Not what a rando YouTuber says. I will absolutely be doing side by side tests with the Air and my other rigs when I get some time later this week.
I also wouldn't just jump to the logic that if my MBA is doing well something is wrong with my MBPs. This is running an M2, and on paper it isn't supposed to be as powerful as the M1 Max in my MBP, real world stuff for certain tasks may be different.
Are you running low power mode on your rig? How are you getting such good battery life?
The newer 12th gen Intel laptop chips are much much faster than 9th gen 16" i9. Heck the M2 Air you have is faster. The 16" 2019 was sadly overpriced and it was outclassed so quickly by newer chips from Intel and Apple
OP's aggression is a breath of fresh air in this otherwise stale forum.
Like I've said before in another similar thread, some things are just best dealt with a bit of physicality. Words can only go so far.
I propose a classic brawl between those siding with OP and those against. Location will be somewhere central US and we'll have to arrange a time and date. I'll go first, this weekend is good for me, any time.
Like I've said before in another similar thread, some things are just best dealt with a bit of physicality. Words can only go so far.
I propose a classic brawl between those siding with OP and those against. Location will be somewhere central US and we'll have to arrange a time and date. I'll go first, this weekend is good for me, any time.
This M1 Max MBP 32/32 is pretty amazing. Fastest laptop and fastest laptop on battery I’ve ever owned, and I prefer it over my gaming PC as my main rig, despite that having a 12900k OC on a custom water loop and 3080Ti. Sure that guy is faster in games but it’s a 3 foot tall tower that despite water cooling still is audible. My MBP is silent 99% of the time and it doesn’t heat up my office.
I will be trading this MBP in / selling and immediately getting the M2 Max MBP with 64+ GB ram when they drop. No questions.
I will be trading this MBP in / selling and immediately getting the M2 Max MBP with 64+ GB ram when they drop. No questions.
Sounds like yours is defective. Take it back/exchange it or get it looked at. It will be far more effective than just whining about it here and trying to tell everybody else that their contrary experience is wrong.
edit:
I see you ignored or didn't see the other post stating that maybe you got a lemon. If you're interested in resolving the issue, take it back to apple and get it checked out / exchange it.
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this case is definitely correct - even though i think that claim was for the Ultra. Apple can be (and often are) some of the biggest liars in the business, but still Apple Silicon is damn good (if you don't need some uber performant GPU)
All of you troll guys need to hop over to Apple forums and tell these people they're just trolling and holding it wrong. It's your fault! I worship Apple!
"My new Macbook Pro M1 Pro 14' drains really quickly on battery - more than 20% an hour - doing just reading PDFs using adobe. I know this isn't an adobe problem because using other programs in isolation (Word, safari, etc) makes it drain even faster."
"I have a brand-new 2022 16 inch MacBook Pro M1 Max and my battery life is terrible."
discussions.apple.com
"My new Macbook Pro M1 Pro 14' drains really quickly on battery - more than 20% an hour - doing just reading PDFs using adobe. I know this isn't an adobe problem because using other programs in isolation (Word, safari, etc) makes it drain even faster."
"I have a brand-new 2022 16 inch MacBook Pro M1 Max and my battery life is terrible."
MBP M1 Pro battery draining really quickly - Apple Community
In what real usage are the M1 Max and M1 Ultra being stressed because you cannot play games on Mac's, unlike on AMD and Intel machines.
So Apple Silicon is nice on laptops, because you get the 21 hours battery life. But for desktops (Mac Studio), it's probably better to go for a desktop PC as you have more power and much more real world applications for that power.
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yes, Apple Silicon are first and foremost very impressive mobile / laptop chips.
You can also use them in a desktop setup, as they are still very performant CPU wise, but on the GPU side of things, top of the line graphics cards are still vastly superior.
They also should be, as one graphics card alone could be drawing up to 600W on it's own.
Software availability / compatibility is another thing to put into consideration.
Thankfully, pretty much everything i use (except for one single plugin for my DAW) has long made the switch to native Apple Silicon, but for people who have to rely on software that's not been ported yet, this could be problematic.
Most stuff runs well using Rosetta emulation, but of course at a slight expense of performance and efficiency.
If you don't want us to think this is just a troll post, stop calling-out everyone whose experience is different to yours and asking them to justify why they're happy with their purchase. I've only got to page 2 and that's literally all you've done.
The results of the poll you started are conclusive: over 95% of respondees are overall happy that the transition to silicon has brought the improvements and efficiencies as advertised.
The results of the poll you started are conclusive: over 95% of respondees are overall happy that the transition to silicon has brought the improvements and efficiencies as advertised.
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