Even when other content creators were rocking MacBooks, I’ve always loved PCs. I don’t play games, so everything I do on my laptop revolves around video editing. To handle this, I use a high-end desktop Windows computer at home and, until recently, a Gigabyte Aero 15X laptop for video editing on the go.
Then the Aero 15X died. My keyboard stopped working and my Lightning port failed. I didn’t even mourn the loss. It was always noisy and hot. The battery life was never very long, and any serious video work required plugging it into a comically large and heavy power supply.
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Apple 2023 MacBook Pro laptop (M3 Pro chip)
It was time to buy a new laptop, but I had no intention of reliving my Gigabyte experience. Instead, I wanted a lightweight, powerful, and nice-looking computer with long battery life. Editing 4K video in DaVinci Resolve required color correction as well as adding effects and titles. Since I also edit RAW photos, I will also be using Photoshop and Lightroom regularly.
I opened my eyes MacBook Pro M3, but I thought it was too expensive. When I checked, I was surprised to see that the price gap between a new MacBook Pro and a similarly capable Windows laptop has narrowed since Apple started using its own silicon.
So I took the leap and bought a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro chip (12-core CPU and 18-core GPU), 36GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. From what I’ve read, that should be enough to handle difficult edits. I paid $3,100 in Canada including tax, the same machine sells for about $200 cheaper in the US.
While I was in Vancouver, I put my new MacBook to work as soon as I wrote my video review of the Nikon Z8. I later edited a review of the Fujifilm X100 VI in London and produced a hands-on video for Panasonic’s S9 camera in Japan. These projects gave me a good feel for the MacBook’s performance, battery life, and usability on the go.
When I got home, I wanted to compare my MacBook to my desktop PC. Although not cutting-edge, the latter has impressive specs featuring an AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-core CPU, NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti GPU, and 64GB of RAM.
I use mirrorless cameras like the Canon EOS R6 II and Panasonic’s S5 II, which output up to 6K 10-bit 4:2:2 Log H.264 or H.265 Quicktime files. These formats are typically taxing on computer processors and GPUs, so real-time playback was not expected.
However, I found that I could play those video files smoothly in DaVinci Resolve on my MacBook Pro without any rendering or conversion. You can’t do that on a decent desktop PC, so what happened?
Systems integrator and benchmark expert Puget Systems has found that even the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs are unable to decode many commonly used formats in real time. exposed Recently. Some formats (not H.264) are available in DaVinci Resolve 18 Studio and later on newer Intel CPUs using Quick Sync technology.
The ability to edit these files right in the camera has greatly improved my quality of life by eliminating steps that waste time and storage space.
We also saw real-time playback on the Mac without rendering in most situations. This includes color correction of 6K and 8K video sequences, most clips, titles, multiple layers, optical flow time warping and stabilization.
In contrast, on my high-end desktop PC, I not only need to convert video files, but I also need to enable timeline rendering, especially for 6K or 8K video. Both of these take time and can consume hundreds of gigabytes of disk space.
Meanwhile, MacBook felt Because it’s fast, I wanted to compare it more objectively to a Windows computer. I used the PugetBench Creator benchmark suite, which compares cross-machine performance of commonly used creator apps such as Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Davinci Resolve.
Considering my PC wasn’t very capable of video editing, the results surprised me. The MacBook Pro M3 topped the Photoshop test with an overall score of 10,076 points, compared to the desktop PC’s 7,599 points. This is mainly thanks to the excellent M3 processor.
However, my PC was far ahead of my MacBook Pro in terms of video editing, thanks to its faster GPU. The Apple computer scored an overall score of 4,754 on the Premiere Pro PugetBench test in high-power mode, while my PC scored 8,763.
There are no public PugetBench tests for DaVinci Resolve yet, but Puget Systems Own Score The app shows that high-end PCs significantly outperform high-end MacBook Pro models. A PC is generally better when working with RAW formats, and easily surpasses the MacBook Pro when it comes to GPU effects, AI features, and encoding to H.264 and H.265 formats.
These results show that benchmarks don’t paint the whole picture. The relative power of a computer depends on what you do with it, and in my case the ability to edit certain video formats without rendering outweighed the sheer speed. However, those who use more effects or work with ProRes or RAW formats may be better off with a powerful PC.
That said, many of the things I disliked about Windows laptops had nothing to do with performance. I was often annoyed by the Aero 15X’s weight (if you include the power brick), heat, noise, build quality, and relatively useless trackpad.
Since purchasing my MacBook Pro 16, I’ve never felt it overheating or the fans barely running, even while editing video. In contrast, I’ve never heard of a single Windows Creator PC that doesn’t generate excessive heat and fan noise under intensive loads.
Another major advantage of the MacBook is that it offers the same performance regardless of whether it is connected or not, but the same cannot be said for most PCs. When you unplug it, it mostly slows down and reduces performance significantly.
If you need to edit on the go and don’t have access to AC power, a MacBook is also a good choice. While editing with DaVinci Resolve, I can work for about 3-4 hours on battery power alone, which is three times the time of my Gigabyte laptop. And your MacBook Pro takes just 1.5 hours to fully charge. at least 2 hours For Dell’s XPS 17 9730. The charging speed is also quite fast.
It’s also lighter and the charger is much lighter, so it’s less of a drag than the Aero. Lastly, the trackpad is much better, allowing you to edit videos without a mouse. This is something I can never say about the Aero or any other PC laptop I own.
Not everything is perfect because I hate the webcam notch, but other than that the MacBook Pro 16 M3 is perfect. For now, Windows laptops using Intel and AMD silicon can keep up in performance, but fall far behind in efficiency. That may change with new Qualcomm laptops or NVIDIA’s upcoming 5000 series GPUs, but for now, Apple’s products aren’t the best for on-the-go content creators like me.
