My 2020 Intel MBP 16" is still blazing away!

[bradman83]

Mine feels thicker too. I am not sure if it's because it isn't tapered or if it really is that much thicker. But yes, it's pretty much silent and the battery lasts forever

The 14" model is the same thickness as the previous 13" model MBP at it's thickest point. The 16" model is 0.02" thicker than the 16" Intel model. The lack of the taper is absolutely what makes it feel chunkier. Plus both models weigh significantly more than the 13 and 16" Intel models, which adds to the perception of size.

 

[Cirillo Gherardo]

This was the worst computer I have ever owned. I waited long for this because I wanted a 16" Pro, but the thing got white hot during use making it impossible to be laptop, and the battery was toasted in 45 minutes under heavy loads. A year later I got the M1 Pro and the difference is unbelievable.

 

[Pans Dance]

Haven't come to these forums much because I've been so out of the market for a new MacBook. Just wanted to post here that my 16" MacBook is still going strong. I use the computer daily 8hrs/day. Mostly photoshop (big files for print), and design work. Realtime animation stuff as well for video installations (projection mapping, this laptop can run 4 projectors at once). The laptop has traveled tons on flights and over 20k miles of roadtrips in the back of my backpack.

This computer is so fast I haven't noticed any type of lag that makes me want to upgrade. Maybe when I finally upgrade I'll notice more snappiness, but right now I really don't feel like I'm missing anything. Which is strange because usually after 2 years I really start to get the itch to get a new system. Also the new 16" laptops are bigger and heavier than what I have now.

64gb ram, Radeon 5600M upgrade.

It's crazy we live in a time when a 4 year old computer isn't all that much slower from the latest and greatest laptops. Not too long ago a 4 yr old computer would be unusable in my line of work.

That is great and how it should be! A macbook should last for around 10years, a iphone for around 7years if you ask me. We have enough e waste and computer tech does not evolve fast enough to make a good argument for a shorter replacement cycle. Exception would be if your work requirements changed drastically and you need certain new technologies to execute them.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Nah. Instead of over-speccing and paying exorbitant upgrade prices, one should just save the money for a future purchase and trading in the old device.

What’s the point of buying 64 GB if 16 GB worked for me in 2020? In 2024, I could use the money saved from not upgrading to part-purchase a M3 Pro MBP - a much faster machine. Total money spent would be very similar.

This all depends on how often you want to be buying a new computer. If you want to spend more money upfront and not have to deal with the hassle of upgrading sooner, then fine. A lot of people would prefer to delay that endeavor as long as possible, especially since a $200 RAM bump (however much of a rip-off up-front) is much cheaper than another $2000 machine. But to each their own.

I have a 2019 16" MBP with 16GB ram. No issues on my end. There goes that "theory"

Are you from the future where it is four years from now?

There goes THAT theory.

 

[joloriquelme]

A 2020 Intel 16" MBP is the same as a 2020 Windows High Performance Notebook. It should be more than okay for most tasks, even the demanding ones.

The thing is, an Apple Silicon MBP is on another league, specially if you want battery and less heat.

 

[boak]

This all depends on how often you want to be buying a new computer. If you want to spend more money upfront and not have to deal with the hassle of upgrading sooner, then fine. A lot of people would prefer to delay that endeavor as long as possible, especially since a $200 RAM bump (however much of a rip-off up-front) is much cheaper than another $2000 machine. But to each their own.

The original post suggested a bump from 16 GB to 64 GB, which is $1000.

 

[Yebubbleman]

The original post suggested a bump from 16 GB to 64 GB, which is $1000.

I was speaking more generally. A bump to 64GB on that kind of Mac does have benefits, but not necessarily of the future-proofing variety and more of the "I'm running a portable datacenter with VMware Fusion" variety.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

I have a 2019 16" MBP with 16GB ram. No issues on my end. There goes that "theory"

Hardly a "theory." I doubt if you are running the workflow described by the OP or like I was with my 16 GB MBP. I too still do mundane activities on the 16 GB MBP, but for the more substantive real work described by the OP additional RAM makes a very substantive difference.

 

[superparati]

Running for now the same Model with different spec only 16Gio ram and Radeon 5500m with 4Gio and I can see the limit of my computer when working on heavy PSB files, the Mac slow down very quickly and swap massively using the NVMe drive where I struggle to free some space when working.
due to low ram, Photoshop is using my hard drive and eat all my free space ending sometime with the message "not able to save due to "space limit reached in your hard drive" this is frustrating me.

Then I move to my old cMP with 6 time more rams -1To NVMe and no more issue :lol: and quieter in the long run.

I'm actually planning to migrate over a 16" m3 later this summer.

Cannot wait to see the difference in speed/efficiency and especially the noise

 

[Tyler O'Bannon]

I have that machine too and I’m not hating, but the current gen M3 Pro and Max chips are significantly faster in every way.

I’m glad you are happy with your machine and it is getting done what you need it to, and again I’m using that machine too and even lower spec than yours, but it truly does not hold a candle to the current Apple Silicon Macs.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Same. I hated mine, because I first got the first maxed out 5500 model, but it kept overheating and couldn't handle an external display to save its life. I complained to Apple, and they took it back to Engineering & replaced the motherboard four times, until I was out of warranty and they told me it was all they could do and I should buy another one. When I installed bootycamp, the conflicting drivers torched the bluetooth modules firmware, so it's never had bluetooth ever since, no mouse, AirPods, nothing. Apple couldn't have cared less. So against my better judgement, I actually did buy another one, an also maxed out NOS 5600m model. Fired it up and the thing immediately overheated & shut down never to reboot. It still had a bit of applecare left, so I sent it back and got a new motherboard. Total cost so far, $7000, for no more than a couple hours of work performed on both. In the 5600m's absence, I got used to using a wacom instead of a bluetooth mouse on the 5500, accepted that it'd never plug into a display, and did the Korean gamers thermal mod with paste/pads plus a whopper row of heatsinks across the bottom plate, which actually handles the thermal load quite well. Now I minimize its workload by exclusively running Windows for Solidworks & Inventor (for which it is extremely powerful) since an iPad can do all the other light duty work that I used to use a mac for. My backup 5600m model sits brand new in a case, for just in case.

If I seem harshly critical of Apple, its bc I've been a fan, customer and investor in this company since 1986, and only since 2016 has every interaction with them become overwhelmingly negative and at higher & higher cost. How they handled the 2019/2020's (or rather didn't) burned up every last ounce of 30 years of goodwill Steve Jobs had built.

But now that at long last its many bugs have been ironed out, I actually very much enjoy the 2019 MBP. ...the final Mac, since massive professional CAD/Cam systems that took 50 years to create & are all bound up in decades of IP wrangling aren't coming to ARM just because it's the hot new thing in mobile consumer products.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

I have that machine too and I’m not hating, but the current gen M3 Pro and Max chips are significantly faster in every way.

I’m glad you are happy with your machine and it is getting done what you need it to, and again I’m using that machine too and even lower spec than yours, but it truly does not hold a candle to the current Apple Silicon Macs.

A cray supercomputer whips the shag out of your M3 Pro chips. Oh is that irrelevant because a Cray doesn't run the OS and apps you need to do your job, and has therefore no relevance in your life? Well I'm glad you are happy with your machine and it is getting done what you need it to, but it truly does not hold a candle to the current Cray supercomputer.

 

[wjdavis]

Same. I hated mine, because I first got the first maxed out 5500 model, but it kept overheating and couldn't handle an external display to save its life. I complained to Apple, and they took it back to Engineering & replaced the motherboard four times, until I was out of warranty and they told me it was all they could do and I should buy another one. When I installed bootycamp, it torched my 5500's bluetooth modules firmware, so it's never had bluetooth ever since, no mouse, airpods nothing. Apple couldn't have cared less. So against my better judgement, I actually did buy another one, an also maxed out NOS 5600m model. Fired it up, the thing immediately overheated, and shut down never to reboot. It still had a bit of applecare left, so I sent it back and got a new motherboard. Total cost so far, $7000, for no more than a couple hours of work performed total. In the 5600's absence, I got used to using a wacom instead of a bluetooth mouse on the 5500, accepted that it'd never plug into a display, and did the korean kids thermal mod with pads plus a whopper row of heatsinks across the bottom of it, which actually handles the thermal load very well. Now I minimize its workload by exclusively running windows for Solidworks & Inventor work, for which it is extremely powerful, since an iPad can do all the other light duty work that I used to use a mac for. My backup 5600m model sits brand new in a case, for just in case.

If I seem harshly critical of Apple, its bc I've been a fan, customer and investor in this company since 1984, and only since 2016 has every interaction with them become overwhelmingly negative and at a massively cost. how they handled the 2019/2020's, or rather didn't, burned up every last ounce of 30 years of goodwill Steve Jobs had built.

But now that at long last its many bugs have been ironed out, I actually very much enjoy the 2019 MBP. ...the final Mac I'll be able to use, since massive professional CAD/Cam systems that took 50 years to create & are all bound up in decades of IP wrangling aren't coming to ARM just because it's the hot new thing in mobile consumer products.

Sorry to hear of this experience--sounds horrible.

This sounds like my 2011. Overheated the GPU I think two weeks after the initial warranty and had to have the logic board replaced. Thankfully an authorized place where I was living--in China, believe it or not--did it for less than $15 instead of the full price of a board. But it blew again a few years later and I think I had to replace it again before I gave up.

I wouldn't describe my own 2019 as unusable with an external display, although there are definitely times where turbo boost is causing excessive fan running--like when Zoom is running, or maybe Parallels. I actually noticed this more in my i7 than my i9. I didn't really think anything of the fans, because we have a mid-2015 MBP as well and that has REALLY crazy fans all the time--like watching YouTube videos on its retina display makes the thing go full force on its fans. So my 2019 has seemed pleasant compared to that, but I've definitely read of experiences closer to the one you described (though maybe not this negative).

 

[Jack Neill]

I always wanted one of those, I have a M3/18/1TB 14" now and I hope to use it for at least 4 years and then give to one of my kids.

 

[Tyler O'Bannon]

A cray supercomputer whips the shag out of your M3 Pro chips. Oh is that irrelevant because a Cray doesn't run the OS and apps you need to do your job, and has therefore no relevance in your life? Well I'm glad you are happy with your machine and it is getting done what you need it to, but it truly does not hold a candle to the current Cray supercomputer.

Sure but that’s not relevant to this conversation. We’re comparing the MBP of a couple years ago to now, taking into account the leap of Apple Silicon. At neither point was anyone considering purchasing a supercomputer.

 

[bill-p]

Hardly a "theory." I doubt if you are running the workflow described by the OP or like I was with my 16 GB MBP. I too still do mundane activities on the 16 GB MBP, but for the more substantive real work described by the OP additional RAM makes a very substantive difference.

Sorry to burst the bubble but even for the work the OP does (which is exactly what I do, but less than what I do), even a Macbook Air with 16GB RAM now will blaze past the 16" while sipping a lot less battery. Sure, if we were talking 8GB RAM, then from there to 16GB, there's a massive difference now, but from 16GB RAM onward, the performance saving just isn't there. The extra benefits of the new ARM Macbooks come not just from the chip but also from substantially faster storage.

For instance, this is really a 1st world problem but: if I were to cold-launch Word from a clean start, the 16" will take approximately 5-6 seconds to open Word to the "New Document" window. The Macbook Air M2 will just... open immediately. It has no delay. And if I were to quit Word cleanly at any point, then the 16" will again take an extra 5-6 seconds. This is with 24GB RAM on the Macbook Air and 32GB on the 16" Macbook Pro.

Now, the only kind of work that I do, that I know not everybody else does, that actually requires as much RAM as possible: is AI model training. 32GB was barely enough and it was red-lining my RAM usage. I won't even attempt it on the Macbook Air and I have resorted to a desktop with plenty of RAM (built myself a Linux box with 128GB RAM and a 64GB GPU for that purpose)

But outside of that, I don't think running multiple video streams, photo editing, video editing, etc... will be an issue that needs more RAM anymore. Having 32GB RAM doesn't help my old 16" Macbook against the 15" Macbook Air on anything at all, except for maybe AI training stuff.

In fact, I only "downgraded" to the 15" Air from 14" M1 Pro because for the vast majority of non-AI-related tasks, the 14" M1 Pro is massively overkill. Even the 15" Air is overkill because it's substantially faster than the 16" at pretty much everything. But I couldn't pass up on the "upgrade" because 2 things matter now to me:

1. I don't have to plug it in as much if I'm "pushing" the device with running multiple Docker containers while crunching through 1000+ photos in the background.

2. It barely gets warm while being pushed. The 16" Macbook will "scream" and then die within 2 hours with the same usage.

 

[Bungaree.Chubbins]

Sorry to burst the bubble but even for the work the OP does (which is exactly what I do, but less than what I do), even a Macbook Air with 16GB RAM now will blaze past the 16" while sipping a lot less battery. Sure, if we were talking 8GB RAM, then from there to 16GB, there's a massive difference now, but from 16GB RAM onward, the performance saving just isn't there. The extra benefits of the new ARM Macbooks come not just from the chip but also from substantially faster storage.

For instance, this is really a 1st world problem but: if I were to cold-launch Word from a clean start, the 16" will take approximately 5-6 seconds to open Word to the "New Document" window. The Macbook Air M2 will just... open immediately. It has no delay. And if I were to quit Word cleanly at any point, then the 16" will again take an extra 5-6 seconds. This is with 24GB RAM on the Macbook Air and 32GB on the 16" Macbook Pro.

Now, the only kind of work that I do, that I know not everybody else does, that actually requires as much RAM as possible: is AI model training. 32GB was barely enough and it was red-lining my RAM usage. I won't even attempt it on the Macbook Air and I have resorted to a desktop with plenty of RAM (built myself a Linux box with 128GB RAM and a 64GB GPU for that purpose)

But outside of that, I don't think running multiple video streams, photo editing, video editing, etc... will be an issue that needs more RAM anymore. Having 32GB RAM doesn't help my old 16" Macbook against the 15" Macbook Air on anything at all, except for maybe AI training stuff.

In fact, I only "downgraded" to the 15" Air from 14" M1 Pro because for the vast majority of non-AI-related tasks, the 14" M1 Pro is massively overkill. Even the 15" Air is overkill because it's substantially faster than the 16" at pretty much everything. But I couldn't pass up on the "upgrade" because 2 things matter now to me:

1. I don't have to plug it in as much if I'm "pushing" the device with running multiple Docker containers while crunching through 1000+ photos in the background.

2. It barely gets warm while being pushed. The 16" Macbook will "scream" and then die within 2 hours with the same usage.

That's great and all, but Word taking a few seconds to cold start isn't sufficient cause for many of us to shell out several thousand dollars if our current machines are still comfortably doing what we ask of them. My 2012 i7 MacBook Air was getting too slow for running AutoCad every day. It wasn't the 20-30 second cold-load time that bothered me, it was the lagginess of general operation. The 1 second pause when you select some lines, the hesitation at running any and every command. A 2019 i9 still does a perfectly fine job for many people.

The all day (and some) battery life, and silent operation of my M3 Pro are amazing, but they're icing. I don't remember AutoCad ever running this smoothly and responsively. Operations that took minutes, now take seconds.

Side note: interestingly, I don't like the way Apple programs their fan speed curves. On my MacBook Air, and now on my Pro, I've programmed in my own fan speed curves, because by default, it runs the fan speed really low, then waits until a sensor gets close to 100ºC at which point the fans go ballistic. I use iStat Menu, so I've added trigger temps to raise the fan speed at smaller increments at different temperature ranges. More fan, earlier means it needs to spend less time flat out, in my experience, with my usage.

 

[cdames00]

I tried gaming on an M1 Max and didn't like it. I traded it for an upgraded M3 Air and a 2019 16" Pro. Both are plenty snappy for my needs. I game on the 16" using boot camp; my games all play pretty well. When I need modern performance/portability I go with the Air.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Sure but that’s not relevant to this conversation. We’re comparing the MBP of a couple years ago to now, taking into account the leap of Apple Silicon. At neither point was anyone considering purchasing a supercomputer.

Yes that was the point.

 

[Andrey84]

Thank you for this post!
It's great to know your Intel MBP is going strong and that you're not noticing any lags.
Core i9 + 64GB RAM is a killer combo, and I really hope the 2024 Mac OS will support the 2019 & 2020 Intel machines (my wife is running the 2020 iMac i9/128GB/2TB).

Knowing these forums, I'm surprised nobody has suggested that you should've rather posted in the "Early Intel Macs" thread

 

[Andrey84]

I have the i9 2.3 64GB 2TB 5500m 8GB.

Believe me, "isn't all that much slower" isn't really true.

I've replaced mine with an M3 Max 16" which cost 20% more than my i9 did in 2020. Huge difference, it "feels" much faster, and technically is by miles.

Also there's a massive difference in fan noise which shouldn't be understated.

By all means enjoy your intel, it's a cracking machine. But be realistic.

Are you actually more productive though? If yes, by how much?

 

[Andrey84]

As someone who upgraded from the i7 16" to the M3 Pro, trust me, your computer is much slower.

Are you actually more productive though? If yes, by how much?

 

[Andrey84]

Running for now the same Model with different spec only 16Gio ram and Radeon 5500m with 4Gio and I can see the limit of my computer when working on heavy PSB files, the Mac slow down very quickly and swap massively using the NVMe drive where I struggle to free some space when working.
due to low ram, Photoshop is using my hard drive and eat all my free space ending sometime with the message "not able to save due to "space limit reached in your hard drive" this is frustrating me.

Then I move to my old cMP with 6 time more rams -1To NVMe and no more issue :lol: and quieter in the long run.

I'm actually planning to migrate over a 16" m3 later this summer.

Cannot wait to see the difference in speed/efficiency and especially the noise

May I ask, why are you using "Gio" instead of "GB" for "gigabyte"?

 

[Infinity Vortex]

My 2016 MBP is positively ancient by comparison haha.

 

[AHDuke99]

Are you actually more productive though? If yes, by how much?

I don't use this laptop for work so it's strictly a personal machine. I could've stuck with my Intel mac for a while longer, but I wanted to take advantage of the discount Best Buy was offering ($200 off) and the trade in offer ($700) that would only go down the longer I waited.

I also assumed Apple would start only offering certain features on M series Macs as time passed. I ended up paying ~$1100 for the M3 Pro 14" MBP which isn't a bad deal at all.