Yeah, very different uses, environments, requiring different specs, but both are forced to get the same super expensive delicate embarrassingly giant laptop that does nothing very well.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Gurman: Apple Event on March 8, At Least Four M2 Macs to Launch Later This Year
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Microsoft Surface? ;-)
Personally, for professional use what I most need is a reliable computer that is easy to use and will allow me to focus on my job and not maintaining the machine or operating system.
Apple offers a reasonable range of computers with different capabilities and price points, plus several more portable devices. I'm pretty happy with the combination and MacBook Pro, Mac Mini and iPad Pro. I can't really see these 3 things being rolled into a single device effectively for my usage. I don't see that I'm having to compromise anything, except the cost of buying 3 machines....but then I also have 3 machines I use for different purposes, not a single one that I have to lug around everywhere.
Last edited:
Huh? Why does a lawyer or doctor need an "expensive delicate giant laptop", and what doesn't it do well?
Most professional "knowledge workers" don't require much computing power at all. The majority of work involves documents, office productivity software, communications apps and web-browsers.
Such professionals will be fine with even entry level Macs. If they want a larger screen they can use an external monitor or get an iMac.
I presume you are referring to the MBP16, and I really don't know what you think it doesn't do well. And why do you think it is delicate? It's built like a tank compared to other plastic computers. Perhaps you should expand upon your statement with some data.
It kind of sounds like you're just getting hung up on the word "Pro". It's just a name. They could call it the AppleNovel Paraprofessional and it wouldn't make a difference.
Most of the demands you're making on Pro vs. Non-pro are incredibly arbitrary, and many are downright silly.
...both excellent suggestions (I've done both) but not really a solution if what you want is a large-screen portable. In the past, the low-end 15" MacBook Pro circa 2010 was the sweet spot for many of my colleagues who were mainly working on (diagram and illustration-rich) documents - and while they were also provided with a large screen at work, the whole point of having a MacBook was that they could also work at home, in hotel rooms etc. But since then, both the absolute price (esp. after the switch to retina/SSD) and the price differential between 13" and 15/16" has crept up, which could be a pain when you were already having to justify the premium of a Mac over the bean counters' preferred HPDellnovo Cinderblock 2100TZ/h-b+2.
I think a 14, 15 or 16" M1 would be a perfectly credible machine for a lot of people - especially given that the M1 is a lot more powerful than the low-power Intel CPU/GPU combos it replaced.
If you want to find a good distinction between ranges - I'd look to the difference between the M1 and M1 Pro chips (fact: one has "pro" in the name, the other doesn't - Apple has foolishly rejected "M1 Dogcow", "M1 Rupert" and "M1-11/70"):
- More CPU cores - good news for FCPx/Logic - but the individual cores are not significantly faster, so it's not going to make your spreadsheet scroll any faster.
- More GPU cores - ditto.
- More RAM bandwidth - partly ditto - probably won't speed up Word, but it's going to help keep all those CPU and GPU cores busy when rendering video or folding proteins.
- More than 16GB RAM - Apple is nickel-and-diming customers with only 8GB on the M1 Macs, but if you don't know - from a modicum of research - that your workflow would benefit from more than 16GB there's a good chance that it won't. Yet again, part of the need is to keep all those CPU and GPU cores busy if and when they're being used.
- A third TB/USB4 port (...and maybe support for more, or more PCIe - Apple aren't saying) - again, not something everybody needs (there's a whole other can of worms about how I/O bandwidth should be allocated between USB4/TB4 and "legacy" single-use ports, but in terms of raw bandwidth the regular M1, given the right hubs and dongles, is pretty well endowed, as Linus found out ).
- Support for 3 or more displays. Again, some people need that but many will be perfectly served by a single external display on their M1 laptops.
That's actually a pretty good laundry list of what people doing more serious media creation or scientific computing (whether it is "professional" or just dabbling) need, but would be irrelevant to both home/casual users and "professional knowledge workers"... and with Apple Silicon-based machines, it largely comes down to what the SoC can do: the regular M1 can run in a tiny, passively cooled laptop and still deliver enough computing power for everything up to casual video editing, audio production, light development etc. while the M1 Pro and Max are still sufficiently low power to work in a small/medium laptop (anybody who thinks the 16" MBP is a large laptop has led a very sheltered life and should go look at the machines that Intel is claiming as better than the M1 Pro/Max)
Hence my contention that, going forward, the "Pro" monicker on Macs should follow the "Pro" or better processor branding (with the proviso that although "Pro" might not be the best phrase, the M1 Pro makes that a done deal).
Whereas the current entry-level 13" MBP is really just a minor improvement over the Air, with a slightly better screen, slightly better sound system and marginally better performance due to thermals...
TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
Suspended
Media creators and scientists constitute a small fraction of professionals.
Even within those categories, there’s a wide range of what people need. Not all scientists are folding proteins. Not all scientists who are folding proteins do it on their laptop. Not all media creators are rendering multiple streams of 4K video. Not all media creators who render multiples streams of 4K video do it on their laptop.
And that’s all many professionals need in a laptop. I don’t need any of the things on your laundry list. Not in a laptop, anyway. Some of them would be nice to have; others wouldn’t even benefit me. Why would I want to futz around hooking up three displays instead of using my desktop? I’m certainly not going to carry three displays around with me.
If naming is that important to you, you should email Tim Cook instead of haranguing us. Who knows? He might decide you’re right and change the name. It’s unlikely, but it’s certain that we can‘t do it for you.
It would make more sense to rebrand the 13" MBP to simply "MacBook" and drop the Pro branding if all it's going to have is the M2 option.
Back in the day I used to gravitate to the MacBook Pros not because of the CPU, but because of other features such as additional ports, backlit keyboard, improved screen, better trackpad, etc.
Some of those things may no longer be differentiators now, but some of them still are.
If you go to the Apple website and do a "compare" between the M1 MacBook Air and the M1 13" MBP you'll see that most have them have gone away, You're talking a slightly better screen and "low noise" speaker/microphones - and, maybe, a slight performance boost due to better firmware. Oh yes, and a touch bar, but (a) second prize: two touch bars and (b) the Air now has touch ID which used to be a touch bar feature.
So, for the moment, maybe those are worth another few hundred bucks - but now fast-forward to when the rumoured M2 Air (or whatever it gets called) comes out. The Air doesn't need to improve much to become all-round better than the current M1 MBP13 and while a new M2 MBP13 could regain its performance lead by also shifting to the M2, it's highly unlikely that Apple will keep the touch-bar, and not clear how the screen could be improved. The 13" MBP seems to have a shrinking niche.
...especially with the "good enough" factor - i.e. once you get to 17-20 hours battery life, that's "good enough" until you can make that 40+ hours and leave your charger at home on an overnight trip. Once you get "good enough" performance on a fanless machine, who wants a noisy fan for the sake of a slightly higher Geekbench?
Ok - who knows: maybe the M2 will support new, faster clock rates that only the larger 13" MBP can sustain, or maybe the 13" MBP will just be a name for the fully tricked out M2 Air. It seems to make more sense just to have a good/better/best (just) MacBook (now that the 12" MacBook has passed into history).
Then Apple should call the more powerful M1 variant the "M1 MC&S edition" or something. They've gone with "Pro" - and all we can do about that is stop pretending that "Pro" has anything to do with the vocational status of the intended customer. I'm trying to set out what it does mean in the context of Apple Silicon.
It's not my laundry list - those are the actual distinguishing features of the system-on-a-chip that Apple have decided to call the M1 Pro. That's a done deal, for better or worse, which makes it, for the moment, the only definition of "pro" that matters if you're buying a MacBook.
In the case of the current M1 13" MacBook Pro, that naming decision was made before the M1 Pro processor was announced, and was known internally as something like the "Jade Chop". Now there's a "M1 Pro" processor it would be ridiculous to release a new MacBook called the MacBook Pro that didn't have the Pro processor or better... but no more or less ridiculous than having a "M1 Royale" as well as a "MacBook Royale" with a lesser SoC. Apple could have chosen a different naming convention - maybe one where the the processor brands didn't overlap the computer brands - but they didn't.
So don't buy the computer with those features. Surely you're not saying that because you are a "professional" you have to buy the "Pro" computer, whatever the specs? The only problems would be if customers got confused by contradictory naming (like "pro" computers not having "pro" processors).
You’re the one who is pretending here. The idea that purchasers should be limited to some arbitrary set of professionals who you think are pros, excluding all others, is a bit nuts.
No one is going to decide which computer to buy purely on the basis of whether it has the word “pro” in the name. The name is the first thing a customer looks at, not the last.
I haven’t seen any indication that customers are confused by it. Only that you think customers are confused by it.
I wish Apple hadn't chose the ambiguous and contentious qualifier "Pro" to name their machines. We used have "Power" and "Plus" modifiers, which I think more accurately conveyed the fact that those machines were more capable or highly specified.
If I were cynical, I would say the "pro" naming is a non-so-subtle attempt to up-sell people, because no-one wants to think of themselves as "an amateur" (which has also had its meaning co-opted over the years to imply inexperienced or inferior rather than merely un-paid).
I don't know how you managed to get that idea from my posts - and if you really don't care about product naming, why get embroiled in a discussion about product naming?
I've said half a dozen times that "pro" branding is a poor way of distinguishing models, because "professional" has so many possible meanings (most of which refer to employment status and qualifications rather than computing needs).
However, back in this reality, Apple released a processor called the "M1 Pro" just a few months ago - so we're stuck with it for a few years. The features that distinguish that from the regular M1 are primarily of use for media creation, scientific computing and other applications, and will have little or no benefit to other users, whatever definition of "professional" they might fit.
This isn't a matter of what people I think qualify as "pros" - it's about the only evidence we have of what Apple thinks "pro" means in 2022.
It's also not like the old days when a higher-end processor got you 50% higher clock speed, or was the only way to get more than one core - which could significantly speed up things across the board. The M1 already has excellent single-core performance. It has enough cores to give a smooth, responsive UI while crunching data, and the hardware acceleration for video codecs, neural engine etc. take care of media viewing, photography, video conferencing etc. which, in the bad old days, may have needed a hunkier processor. The extra power of the M1 Pro comes mainly from having more of the same CPU and GPU cores, which won't do anything to speed up applications that aren't optimised for multi-threading and/or GPU-based computing.
...and as for the "low-end" 13" MacBook Pro - well, if anybody thinks it makes sense to have a "M1 Pro" processor and a "M1 MacBook Pro" that doesn't have a "Pro" or better processor, there's no point trying to convince them otherwise with a rational argument... Plus, post-M1, there's no opportunity to mix'n'match processor models, GPUs, TB controllers, max RAM etc. so the features of a machine are very closely tied to the particular System-on-a-chip in use.
...but there's a specific, practical point in that the 'low-end 13" MacBook Pro' has been misnamed since 2016, evidenced by the need to refer to it as '13" MacBook Pro (no touch bar)', '13" MacBook Pro (2 port)' to distinguish it from the other 13" MBP. That's confusing... and now, with the M1, the differentiation between the 13" MBP and 13" MBA has become very narrow (go do a compare on the Apple site), and is likely to become even narrower when the new M2 MacBook (Air?) is released, so there's a question as to whether there will even be a need for a separate model at that price point - unless Apple come up with a new wrinkle (like a large-screened MacBook Air).
I'm still holding out for "MacBook Duo" and "Mac Quadra" products based on the rumoured Jade 2C/Jade 4C processors
…which is also not understood by many people. I had a discussion with someone who disagreed with my assertion that the Olympic games was until recently, dominantly the preserve of amateur athletes. His argument was “of course they are professionals - they’re at the top of their game!”.
Off topic but...
Many of those Olympic athletes are pros in the monetary sense anyway. Chinese darling (and American not-so-darling now) Eileen Gu has 20+ sponsorships, many likely worth a few million $ each.
Back on topic...
"Pro" is a marketing term, and that's fine by me. It mainly just indicates that it's got some advantages over the non-"Pro" devices. Whether a professional actually needs those advantages is up for that person to decide. Conversely non-professionals may benefit a lot from the "Pro" machines, depending on their needs and wants.
The creative pros I know that have desktops as their primary Macs actually have the iMac. Not iMac Pro (or Mac Pro), but iMac.
Last edited:
Like “pro” sneakers. The people who buy them are not necessarily using them to make a living. They just want a better sneaker.
No, but many have regular jobs, or are students. Some may have financial support from donors, or even sponsors, but are not part of professional teams, or have ever earned money for competing.
Some info here:
How Olympic Athletes Make a Living - Sports Management Degree Hub
Share this infographic on your site! <a href=”https://www.sportsmanagementdegreehub.com/olympic-athletes-salaries/”><img src=”https://www.sportsmanagementdegreehub.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/OlympicSalaries.jpg” alt=”Olympic Salaries” width=”500″ border=”0″ /></a><br />Source: <a...
www.sportsmanagementdegreehub.com
Last edited:
Absolutely. Initially I was reacting to people making ridiculous statements like "Pro should mean Pro" when there's no single right or wrong definition of what Pro means.
However, it can have a more precise meaning in a particular context. In the case of the Olympics there's probably many pages of legalese defining what
Given that Apple are determined to use "Pro" as a product denominator it does make sense to look at what Apple are using it to mean - and that is pretty clearly "work that benefits from multi-threading and GPU-based computing" which tends to boil down to "more demanding video, 3D and audio production, scientific computing etc.".
The original Unique Selling Point of the iMac Pro over the regular iMac was Xeon processors, ECC RAM and "workstation class" GPUs - i.e. they were for "work that benefits from multi-threading and GPU-based computing" and offered little advantage to other types of user. After that, the iMac Pro got pretty much abandoned while the regular iMac ended up with 10 core i9 processors and improved GPUs that could beat the iMP in a sprint, so it really turned into "will you pay a $2000 premium for 2 extra TB3 ports, a quieter fan and a space grey case?" - but the "Pro" name was consistent, by Apple's definition, when it launched in 2017.
Of course, "Pro" always meant something slightly different on a desktop, a laptop or an iPad but generally it meant "more suitable for serious media creation c.f. the non-pro version". What's changed now is that not only have Apple attached the "Pro" name to a particular system-on-a-chip, but they are moving towards their entire Mac range (and some iPads) being based around the same system-on-a-chip range.
I think most people "got" that the i7 in an MacBook Air was very different from the i7 in a 16" MBP which was itself different from the i7 in a 5k iMac (although that was always a bit obtuse it was not within Apple's remit) - but, now, we're seeing the same M1 in the Air, the 13" MBP, the Mini, the iPad Pro, the 24" iMac... and we'll probably get the same M1 Pro/Max choice in the Mini and the 27" iMac replacement as the 14/16" MacBook Pro. It looks like even the replacements for the Mac Pro and (if it happens) the iMac Pro are basically going to be multiple M1-based dies rather than something completely new. So, given that the "M1 Pro" name exists, it would make the most sense if future Mac model names follow the SoC names. That logic applies whether they're called "Pro", "Max", "Ultra", "Quadra" or "Kevin".
The creative pros I know are mostly web designers (not web programmers), and not video editors. In this context the CPU is essentially irrelevant. M1 speed would be more than fast enough. Much more important are good quality large screens, colour accuracy (to a point - doesn't have to be perfect), a decent amount of memory (and this is where M1 falls down as 32 GB would be preferred), and a good number of ports. Aesthetics also matter to many. They would be more likely to spend $$$ on an iMac with matte screen upgrade than a CPU upgrade. I do know some who work in the film industry, some even in film production (documentaries), but usually that's not their only jobs for the people I know.
In that context the web designers I know are much more "pro" than those I know in the film industry, and are probably much more "pro" than most people in this thread, in that they derive all their income from their design work, and it's work that gets wide exposure in the real world. BTW, if you were in Canada, I guarantee you would have seen some of their work already just surfing the net. Despite this, they don't need M1 Pro or M1 Max speed at all. A much slower M2 but with 32 GB RAM would be more than sufficient.
tl;dr:
I don't know why people are getting their panties in a bunch about the marketing term "Pro" in Mac hardware. Real pros doing well respected work in their industries usually can decide for themselves what they need. They don't care if the name of a Mac has the word "Pro" in it or not, and they certainly don't need MacRumors nerds arguing Mac nomenclature on their behalf.
In that context the web designers I know are much more "pro" than those I know in the film industry, and are probably much more "pro" than most people in this thread, in that they derive all their income from their design work, and it's work that gets wide exposure in the real world. BTW, if you were in Canada, I guarantee you would have seen some of their work already just surfing the net. Despite this, they don't need M1 Pro or M1 Max speed at all. A much slower M2 but with 32 GB RAM would be more than sufficient.
tl;dr:
I don't know why people are getting their panties in a bunch about the marketing term "Pro" in Mac hardware. Real pros doing well respected work in their industries usually can decide for themselves what they need. They don't care if the name of a Mac has the word "Pro" in it or not, and they certainly don't need MacRumors nerds arguing Mac nomenclature on their behalf.
Last edited:
Olympic athletes are not only paid for winning medals, they are also exempt from the income taxes which ordinary Americans pay.
Here's how much winning a gold medal is worth
For winners at the Winter Olympic, victory means gold — plus tax-exempt money and potential endorsement deals.
www.businessinsider.com