The main reason I justified buying a $3,500 laptop, which came to $2,150 with a $1,350 rebate for trading in my previous Intel-powered machine, was because glowing reviews indicated the new MacBook Pro would be better at heavy-duty tasks like photo editing. Each result is the average of three tests I clocked with a stopwatch.

My new MacBook Pro with Apple's M1 Max processor handily outpaced the two-year-old Intel-based machine on a variety of common computing chores in my Lightroom photo editing. Everything was refreshingly snappy.Īnd for a collection of Lightroom tests I ran, clocking common operations by stopwatch, the speedup factor on a collection of tests I ran is between 2x and 5x. Loading websites, scrolling and unlocking with Touch ID were all noticeably faster. But they aren't meant to be definitive.įrom the moment I set up the machine, the performance boost was obvious. So the speed tests are relevant to me and likely anyone else wondering whether to shell out $3,000 or more. To be clear: I was trying to decide whether my upgrade was justified, not evaluate how the latest Intel-based machines measure up. ( Lightroom is happy to grab as much of that memory as it can.) The extra memory is a $400 addition, but I judged it worthwhile to accommodate photo and video editing plus my usual burden of a few dozen browser tabs. My photography labor of loveįor the record, my new MacBook Pro sports 32GB of memory, a midrange configuration for the 16-inch models and twice what's in my two-year-old MacBook Pro using a six-core Intel Core i7 processor. The chips are made for Apple by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The chips balance power with battery life by combining high-speed and high-efficiency cores, resulting in more hours of use per charge. The water's fine.Īmong the advantages the M1 Max and its similar but less graphically powerful M1 Pro sibling deliver: built-in circuitry for artificial intelligence tasks, a unified memory architecture, and a beefy built-in graphics processing unit. If you're leery about the switch, come on in. The chips are beefier cousins to the A-series chips in Apple's iPhones and iPads. Apple is halfway through a two-year process of replacing Intel processors with its own M-series designs. The improvements, validated with by testing some common Lightroom chores that caused my older Intel-powered Mac to crawl, are thanks to Apple's new chip and Adobe optimization to take advantage of it. And it's great having an SD card reader back for importing photos and videos from my cameras. The battery life was similarly impressive. The speed of the new MacBook Pro knocked my socks off. After spending hours using Adobe's Lightroom photo editing and cataloging software, boy, am I glad I did. I didn't really need to upgrade to an M1 Max-powered MacBook Pro.

Lightroom macbook air 2020