Let me start this review by asking a question. What is it that you do and how much are you willing to spend on a laptop? Or rather, let me rephrase the question. Do you do something where the time saved on your project and work will also help you save or earn more money? If the answer is yes, you should take a serious look at the new Apple MacBook Pro. And I say this on the basis of my experience as I used and reviewed the new MacBook Pro 14.

On the other side of the spectrum, of course, are the users for whom it may not matter much if they are saving 10 minutes of rendering time in an application like Adobe Premiere Pro. For these users, I feel the MacBook Pro 13 and the MacBook Air remain fantastic options. In fact, these are the options that are better in some cases. Like design. And weight.

The new MacBook Pro 14 is an all-out machine for working professionals who are ever in need of more speed. And it is expensive. The base variant of the Macbook Pro 14 with 8-core CPU and 16GB RAM starts at Rs 1,94,900. If you want the full-fat M1 Pro chipset, you have to move to the next variant with the 10-core CPU and 16-core GPU. This one costs Rs 2,39,900. This is also the variant that we reviewed. If you want more performance, you can bump up the memory to 32GB, or move to a laptop with the M1 Max chipset that also unlocks the 64GB memory option. However, each box you tick adds to the price of the laptop and while for a lot of people the extra expense will make sense, for most working professionals the MacBook Pro 14 with full M1 Pro chipset and 32GB should be the sweet spot. Even this, though, costs a little over Rs 3 lakh.

In other words: the new MacBook Pro 14 and the MacBook Pro 16 are pricey laptops. They are also, in many instances, worth it.

Let’s start with the design.

MacBook Pro 14: New design, end of dongle raj

In the last few years, Apple has prioritised sleekness. With the new MacBook Pro 14, the company stops that trend. The new Apple laptops are all about functionality over form. These are the machines that address a lot of grumbling from working professionals, like video editors and programmers, who prefer their laptops to offer them the features they need. So, the new MacBook Pro 14 sports a new design. But it is also a design that many may not find appealing. Or like Steve Jobs would have said, “there is no sex in it.” At least not enough of it.

The MacBook Pro 14 moves away from the wedge-shaped design that we have seen on Apple laptops for the last several years. It’s more boxy and its edges, instead of thinning, are rounded. The lid is particularly thick — more on this in a while — and that makes the new MacBook Pro 14 look a little similar to the Pro laptops of the old days. Now, there could be many reasons why the new MacBook Pro is slightly thicker. But one of them surely has to do with the ports it has. With the new Pro, Apple brings back several — much loved and much used — ports back. The new MagSafe power connector is one of them. Then there is the HDMI port and you also get the SD card reader.

While having access to more ports means most people will no longer require a couple of dongles to go with their MacBook Pro, I feel that Apple could have done better. The HDMI port on the MacBook Pro 14 and MacBook Pro 16 (the two laptops are identical except their battery size and screen size) supports HDMI 2.0 and not HDMI 2.1. This means for 4K connectivity to an external display using the HDMI, the pro users will be limited to SDR and 60Hz refresh rate.

Similarly, the card slot supports UHS-II cards but not much faster UHS-III. Also, most working multimedia professionals are likely to use CFExpress or XQD cards which are now common in high-end cameras. In other words, an external card reader, or a dongle for high-fidelity video connectivity, may still be a requirement for most MacBook Pro users who frequently use storage cards.

That said, something is always better than nothing. In small ways sure but more ports help. The same can be said about the return of the MagSafe, which means no longer one of the laptop ports is occupied when the machine is on charging. Equally welcome is the return of physical function keys instead of the touch bar. People used to muscle memory will appreciate how much the physical keys score over the touch bar when it comes to getting things done.

Apart from the changed shape of the laptop, there is a slight change in the design on the bottom. The rubber feet are bigger in size, there is “MacBook Pro” inscribed on the underside, needlessly I must say, and the two slits on the left and right ensure that the laptop runs cool.

Overall, despite the 14-inch screen I find the MacBook Pro 14 fairly compact. It is difficult to overstate just how much Apple has packed into its compact frame. The webcam now supports FullHD 1080P resolution and it is noticeable in use. The two speaker grills on the left and right of the screen belie the fact that under them there is a six-speaker setup that is capable of roaring and rich sound. The touchpad, extremely large, remains true to the legendary Apple touchpad quality, and the keys have gained just a tiny tiny bit of more travel so that typing on the laptop is even more wholesome than usual.

Notch arrives on MacBook

Apart from the design change and Apple’s in-house next-gen M1 chipset, the other big deal about the new MacBook Pro is its screen. The Macbook Pro 14 uses a notched display, which makes it look a thorough part of the Apple family. Notch on a laptop screen could be divisive among users. Some will like it, some won’t. I don’t mind it. In fact, I don’t even bother with it. Irrespective of what I am doing on the laptop, whether working or playing a movie, I never found the notch to be an issue.

Instead, what I notice more is the quality of the screen that Apple is putting in the new MacBook Pro. Just like the screens on the iPad Pro, the new MacBook uses a screen with miniLEDs. This means there is better control on the display’s backlight. The result in practice is a brilliant screen that shows gorgeous colours, and makes the image pop, particularly when you have HDR content on it.

There is no doubt that the MacBook Pro 14 has one of the finest screens ever put in a laptop, although the downside of the miniLED I feel is increased thickness of the display. This, I also get an impression, is temporary. In a couple of years from now I believe Apple will move to OLED panels on its MacBook Pro, similar to how it moved to the OLED on the iPhone, and the display will again be wafer thin.

Compared to the display in the MacBook Pro 13, the one in the MacBook Pro 14 is punchier. It has just that extra bit of oomph, although in brightness I don’t find much of a difference during normal use. But when the laptop is dealing with HDR content, the brightness of the panel goes up. This happens automatically through a display profile called APPLE XDR DISPLAY (P3-1600 nits). What it essentially means is this: The MacBook Pro 14 display is rated for 1600 nits peak brightness (higher than the display of the MacBook Pro 13) but this extra brightness is offered only when it is required, which is when HDR content is played. On other occasions, the brightness of the panel is more or less similar to the brightness on the MacBook Pro 13.

Irrespective of the profile, HDR or SDR, content looks great on the MacBook Pro 14. While reviewing the device I watched some of the Dolby Vision content (When The World Stopped, Foundation, Greyhound) on it using Apple TV+ and the experience was mesmerising. The quality of speakers too played a role here. Off topic: Among all the streaming services in India, Apple TV+ I believe offers the best streaming quality with its high bit-rate. Some of the content on the service, for example Fireball, a documentary narrated by Werner Herzog, is lusciously colourful.

M1 Pro chipset and pro work

The big deal with the MacBook Pro 14 and the MacBook Pro 16 is their chipset. This is the Gen2 of the M1 chipset that Apple announced last year. But Gen2 doesn’t mean that the core is changed. If

the M1 was a revolution — and it was — the M1 Pro and the M1 Max are the evolution. And they are the kind of evolution that professionals will love to experience.When it comes to the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, the numbers are all huge. Both chipsets come with up to 10-core CPU. Of these 8 are performance cores and 2 are efficiency cores. The M1 Pro comes with up to 16-core GPU and up to 32GB unified memory. The memory bandwidth, likely to help with demanding tasks, is staggering 200GB/s. The M1 Max comes with up to 32-core GPU and other-worldly 400GB/s of bandwidth.

Essentially the difference between the M1 Pro and the M1 Max is in GPU. I asked Apple about how much of a difference does the beefier GPU in M1 Max make in real-world usage. The answer I received is that it depends. For people who use programs like Cinema 4D and DaVinci Resolve, there are real benefits in going with the M1 Max. But for most users, the M1 Pro should do fine.

The laptop I reviewed had the M1 Pro with 16GB RAM and 1TB storage. Needless to say, anything I could do as a journalist on it was no sweat for it. The MacBook Pro 14, with my use, even when I decided to edit some 100-megapixel raw photos from Fujifilm GFX100 — each photo was about 200MB — ran cool, fast and without hiccups.

Hear it from a pro

To get a better measure of the MacBook Pro 14, I loaned it to Rahul Gupta, the creative head for India Today Group Digital, for a few days. He used the laptop with his usual suite of tools, including Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, and came away impressed. Here is Rahul’s input on MacBook Pro 14:

— Compared to the MacBook Pro 16-inch (Intel) that Rahul uses, in most workloads the new MacBook Pro 14 cut down time taken for a task by almost 50 per cent.

— A render in After Effect that would take around 30 minutes in his existing MacBook Pro, took only around 12 to 15 minutes in the MacBook Pro 14.

— Some of the After Effect projects that wouldn’t even load on Rahul’s existing MacBook Pro after “not responding error” can be opened and worked upon in the new MacBook Pro 14.

— Consistent and demanding use — After Effects and Premiere Pro projects — does heat up the MacBook Pro 14 in the way similar to the Rahul’s existing Intel-powered MacBook Pro. But in regular use the new MacBook Pro ran more silent and cooler.

— The Pro Motion (120Hz) displays is lovely in use.

— Increased key height in keyboard is immediately noticeable and welcome. So is the return of the physical function keys.

On my part, I ran some benchmarks: Geekbench, Cinebench 23 and a couple of more. All benchmarks indicate that the M1 Pro (and consequently the M1 Pro Max) are the fastest chips ever put in a laptop. In fact, these are so fast that they are truly desktop class as indicated by the Cinebench 23 score where the MacBook Pro 14 gets 12304 points in multi-core rendering, not that

far from 16315 points of an AMD Threadripper that is a workstation class CPU with 16 cores and 32 threads.

While the performance of the MacBook Pro 14 is impressive, a more amazeworthy fact about it is that it is offering this performance with great battery life. I consistently got 13 to 14 hours of battery life from the laptop, while Rahul, working with his pro projects, managed about 7 to 8 hours of use that is nothing sort of magic considering how much work can be done on the MacBook Pro 14.

Talking of battery, there is something to note: The entry-level MacBook Pro 14 comes with a 67W charger. Bumping up specs also gets you a faster 96W charger, whereas the MacBook Pro 16 is bundled with a 140W charger.

Worth the high price

In every way, I find the MacBook Pro 14 an impressive laptop. In fact, you can say that the new MacBook Pro Duo (14 and 16) are unique. They offer performance in a laptop that has never been seen before. Yet, I must add one line of caution: these are not the laptops you should buy if all that you do on your laptop is browse web, send emails and edit some photos or videos in Adobe software. For all this, you should look at the MacBook Pro 13 or the MacBook Air. While as great the M1 Pro and the M1 Max are, the M1 is no slouch and is more than good enough for the needs of 95 per cent of users. In fact, you may even find the sleeker and lighter MacBook Pro 13 more appealing compared to the MacBook Pro 14.

The remaining 5 per cent of you, those who earn money by developing software, or creating games, or building new virtual worlds through 3D and 4D modelling, or by editing professional videos will benefit immensely from the MacBook Pro 14. But here too, you must careful take a look at the configuration options. In many instances, it is possible that you may not benefit from the extra GPU grunt in the M1 Max. The M1 Pro might be more than enough for your needs.

As far as MacBook Pro 14 vs the MacBook Pro 16 is concerned, my preference is the smaller MacBook Pro 14. It is compact and the screen is large enough. The 16 incher would be suitable more for people doing hardcore multimedia work, those who require as much screen as possible in their backpack.