Haven't seen this thread before. I own these two models and use them both. It's really interesting from the standpoint that the 16" Pro was "the good Intel macbook" of the last batch. Less thermal throttle. No silly low quality keyboard. An actual GPU that could drive modern video productivity software well. It's not as clear-cut as when comparing a late Intel Macbook Air or 13" Pro.
In a pure "let's load it up with work and watch it compute"-scenario, the difference is mostly pretty small. They're both pretty mediocre as "render machines" compared to the pro laptops(/desktops) of today. My 10C M2 will win a "render-race" most if not all of the time, but it's not earth-shattering.
While interacting with the machine, the M2 has the upper hand. Its high per-core performance makes it "snappy" and the increased response times are subtly making an impact. Also, when something say a plugin or something else that is typically single-threaded is used, the M2 will usually just smoke the Intelbook. Though I've also noticed that some plugins in DaVinci Resolve seem to favor the Intel-macbook. If it's down to the AMD GPU or Intel CPU (say AVX-accelerated stuff perhaps) I can't say for sure. The margins are pretty slim, regardless.
What I miss the most from the Pro is having all that system memory. There is nothing magical that make ARM macs require less RAM than their Intel counterparts. I wish the 24GB config on offer had actually been 32GB at least.. The impact for me here is sometimes felt when doing true "I don't wanna close nuffin'" workflows with multiple heavy software being left open. However different workflows put entirely different requirements on memory, so YMMV.
The real win is indeed how much weight and size that is shaved off for a machine that can do pretty much the same things as the big one. And yeah.. one will likely be abandoned by software way sooner than the other.
In a pure "let's load it up with work and watch it compute"-scenario, the difference is mostly pretty small. They're both pretty mediocre as "render machines" compared to the pro laptops(/desktops) of today. My 10C M2 will win a "render-race" most if not all of the time, but it's not earth-shattering.
While interacting with the machine, the M2 has the upper hand. Its high per-core performance makes it "snappy" and the increased response times are subtly making an impact. Also, when something say a plugin or something else that is typically single-threaded is used, the M2 will usually just smoke the Intelbook. Though I've also noticed that some plugins in DaVinci Resolve seem to favor the Intel-macbook. If it's down to the AMD GPU or Intel CPU (say AVX-accelerated stuff perhaps) I can't say for sure. The margins are pretty slim, regardless.
What I miss the most from the Pro is having all that system memory. There is nothing magical that make ARM macs require less RAM than their Intel counterparts. I wish the 24GB config on offer had actually been 32GB at least.. The impact for me here is sometimes felt when doing true "I don't wanna close nuffin'" workflows with multiple heavy software being left open. However different workflows put entirely different requirements on memory, so YMMV.
The real win is indeed how much weight and size that is shaved off for a machine that can do pretty much the same things as the big one. And yeah.. one will likely be abandoned by software way sooner than the other.
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