Apple M1 Max MacBook Pro (2021) - Back with a Vengeance

 

All product photography by DL Cade.

By just about every metric you can come up with, Apple's transition to Apple Silicon on the Mac has been a success. The M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro put up performance and efficiency numbers that were hard to believe, at a price point that instantly placed Apple at the top of every "best entry-level creator laptop" list on the Internet.

But for many of the professional creatives in the audience – people whose livelihood depends on the performance and reliability of their computer – the M1 was just a taste.

With the release of the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros and the M1 Pro and M1 Max SOCs at their core, Apple has finally addressed our audience's needs by moving in two directions simultaneously: the company has undone the unpopular design decision that have plagued the MacBook Pro since 2016, while sending performance-per-watt into the stratosphere. We've been testing and benchmarking the M1 Max MacBook Pro for over a month, and all I have to say is buckle up: The superlatives in this review are about to get completely out of hand.

Key Specifications

For this first review of the new Apple Silicon Macs, we're testing out the flagship M1 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro – the most powerful laptop in Apple's current lineup. We hope to test some of the M1 Pro models in the coming months, but for now, this is what Apple sent over on launch day.

On the bright side, this gives us a chance to test the high water mark for performance for an Apple laptop. Any other Mac on the market should, in theory, perform worse than the computer we're testing today. On the not-so-bright side, this is one of the most expensive laptops money can buy, putting it out of reach for many prospective buyers.

As tested, our review unit with an M1 Max, 64GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage will set you back a wallet-searing $4,300. If you downgrade to 1TB of storage you can cut that down to $3,900, and the base model M1 Max with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage is $3,500, but no matter how you slice it this isn't a "bang-for-your-buck" or "entry-level" computer.

	As Tested	Less Storage	Base Model
CPU	M1 Max 10-core	M1 Max 10-core	M1 Max 10-core
GPU	M1 Max 32-core	M1 Max 32-core	M1 Max 32-core
RAM	64GB Unified Memory	64GB Unified Memory	32GB Unified Memory
Storage	2TB Integrated SSD	1TB Integrated SSD	1TB Integrated SSD
Display	Liquid Retina XDR Display 100% Display P3	Liquid Retina XDR Display 100% Display P3	Liquid Retina XDR Display 100% Display P3
Price	$4,300	$3,900	$3,500

As tested, our review unit with an M1 Max, 64GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage will set you back a wallet-searing $4,300.

That said, after running all of our benchmarks both on- and off-battery, and comparing the MacBook Pro against two of its closest competitors in both price and specifications, there is no question about it: you are getting what you paid for. The price is, dare I say it, justified. Not because there's an Apple logo on the back of the lid, but because this laptop can do things that no PC on the market can match.

Design, build and usability

The new 16-inch MacBook Pro is noticeably thicker than the last Intel model... and that's a good thing.

We spent some time on design, build and usability in our first impressions a few weeks ago, but let's recap some of the major changes.

First and foremost, the new 16-inch MacBook Pro is noticeably thicker than the last Intel model. It's also somewhat "retro" looking, replacing the sharp edges of the past few models with rounded corners for an aesthetic that harkens back to the old plastic MacBooks or the 17-inch MacBook Pro that was discontinued after 2011.

The added thickness also makes room for two of the most important upgrades on this machine: the miniLED display and the return of several ports that Apple removed in 2016. The left side of the device contains a headphone jack that can power high-impedance headphones, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, each with its own bus, and a shallow MagSafe 3 port that can fast-charge the laptop to 50% in just 30 minutes:

On the right, you get an HDMI 2.0 port, one more independent Thunderbolt 4 port, and an SD card slot:

The pros are obvious. We get HDMI and an SD card slot back while giving up only one Thunderbolt port compared to last year's Intel models.

The cons are less obvious: the HDMI port is only HDMI 2.0 and not the newer HDMI 2.1 standard, and the SD card slot is only UHS-II, not the faster UHS-III we've seen on some high-end laptops. The lack of a single USB Type-A port is also a downside for some, but personally, I see it as the better of two options. If it's a choice between two Thunderbolt 4 ports and a USB Type-A, or three Thunderbolt 4 ports, I'll choose the latter every time.

Another benefit of the larger size is the larger keyboard, which trades the Touch Bar for a row of full-height function keys and a full-sized Touch ID button. Not much else to say about the keyboard – it's otherwise identical to the excellent "Magic Keyboard" on all the most recent MacBooks. The same goes for the massive glass trackpad, which is still among the best on the market in any laptop.

Neither of these has changed over the past few years, and they really don't need to. The only noticeable change is the black keyboard deck.

The controversial Touch Bar has been replaced by a full-height function row and a full-sized TouchID sensor.

Two more important design and usability touches worth mentioning are the Full HD camera and the exceptional speakers.

The previous 16-inch MacBook Pro already had arguably the best sounding speakers of any laptop on the market, and this model only improves on that. Whatever Apple's engineers are doing to get such a full sound profile out of laptop speakers, it's light years ahead of the competition. Every other set of laptop speakers sound tinny and small next to the MacBook Pro, including otherwise excellent speakers like the ones in the Dell XPS 17.

As for the camera, Apple combines Full HD resolution with some AI trickery to produce surprisingly good image quality for your Zoom meetings. It's not quite ready to replace your dedicated 4K webcam, and Apple's AI algorithms do a bit more skin smoothing than I personally prefer, but it's a huge step up from the 720p cameras in the vast majority of laptops on the market.

Finally, we can't talk about the camera without at least mentioning the notch. I addressed this in my first impressions, but I don't find the notch to be a very big deal. Weird early software quirks have mostly been fixed, and I appreciate the fact that there's a full 16:10 display underneath the notch. If Apple had chopped off a bit of my 16:10 display, I'd be annoyed. As it stands, they essentially added some room for the menu bar.

Of course, your mileage (and level of annoyance) may vary, so if it really bothers you there are a couple of solutions. Apple already lets you display the menu underneath the notch in full-screen mode on a per-app basis, and if you want to get rid of it all the time there are free utilities like Top Notch that will essentially extend the bezel down to the bottom of the notch, sacrificing that little bit of screen in order to hide it entirely.

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miniLED display

We have a lot of ground to cover with this display, but here's the TL;DR: this display's combination of 120Hz refresh rate, exceptional HDR performance, phenomenal color accuracy, and brilliant integration of all of the above into a seamless user experience makes the "Liquid Retina XDR" technology inside the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros the best option on the market for anyone who regularly switches between HDR and SDR workflows.

HDR performance

Similar to the display used in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, the monitor in the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros is made up of a color-accurate IPS LCD panel that sits in front of a special backlight made up of 10,000+ miniLEDs arranged into over 2,500 individually controlled local dimming zones. This allows the screen to hit an incredibly bright 1000 nits typical brightness across the whole display and 1600 nits peak brightness on smaller patches for a limited time.

The "Liquid Retina XDR" display inside the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros is the best display on the market for anyone who switches between HDR and SDR workflows.

Already we're in uncharted territory. Before this display, the most dimming zones we'd seen in any computer monitor was the 2,000 miniLEDs in Dell's UP3221Q – a 2.5-inch thick 32-inch desktop display. The only other laptop with a miniLED display, the MSI Creator 17, has a paltry 250 dimming zones. Apple had to invent a whole new breed of miniLED backlight in order to make this display possible.

This exploded view shows the miniLED backlight, diffusion layers, and LCD panel that make up the Liquid Retina XDR display inside the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Photo courtesy of Apple

However, it's not just the technology that makes this display so impressive. What really puts it over the top is how seamlessly Apple has managed to integrate HDR performance into the standard SDR experience you get when viewing most content. Unlike using an external HDR display in either Mac or Windows, there's no need to check an HDR box or turn an HDR switch to "On" in the Display settings. HDR content simply... works.

When you pull up HDR content, the backlight automatically brightens to DisplayHDR 1000 levels, but only under the content you're viewing. If you have a video up on only part of the screen, the rest of your desktop remains locked at the SDR maximum brightness of 500 nits. The result is a seamless integration of HDR into an SDR experience, which finally makes HDR usable for day-to-day content viewing because you don't have to pick one or the other.

The only other laptop with a miniLED display, the MSI Creator 17, has a paltry 250 dimming zones – one tenth what Apple offers.

The combination of industry-leading HDR performance and seamless integration makes the laptop a no-brainer for anyone who spends time working on HDR content. Nothing in a laptop even comes close, and I'm including OLED displays simply because they can't get bright enough. You will get some very slight blooming around sharp-edged bright objects, but with so many dimming zones and such an intense max brightness I'd still pick this display over an OLED with pixel-perfect contrast.