How fast is base model M1 Mac compared to high-end Intel Mac Pro?

Computers used in this comparison:

M1 Max MacBook Pro: https://amzn.to/3FW81QX

M1 MacBook Air: https://amzn.to/40HPd1p

Intel Xeon Mac Pro: https://amzn.to/3MGuNQq

Intel i7 iMac: https://amzn.to/3u3YB35

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Fun fact. We’re using a 2013 Mac Pro, 2014 5K iMac and a couple of Apple Silicon laptops on a daily basis. The Mac Pro and iMac are amazing computers and still useful to this day even though they’re approximately ten years old. These used to be the top-of-the-line, high-end Apple computers that provided the most horsepower money could buy.

And then we have a couple of laptops, a base model MacBook Air with Apple’s M1 processor and a bit more high-end laptop, 16″ MacBook Pro with Apple’s M1 Max processor. The M1 is great and M1 Max is ridiculously fast. With all four of these computers sitting next to each other we got curious – what would a simple 4K video export between all four machines look like?

So why not run a quick export test to see how each computer handles a 4K video export. Here’s a side-by-side comparison between our 8-Core Mac Pro with Intel Xeon E5, Quad-Core i7 iMac, M1 MacBook Air and M1 Max MacBook Pro. Each computer was running nothing but Adobe Media Encoder and screen recording, all using the same export settings.

Unsurprisingly the M1 Max MacBook Pro beat all others cleanly finishing the export, one minute 4K video converted from ProRes MOV to H.264 Mp4 in one minute and 43 seconds.

The closest competition was between the base model MacBook Air and 8-core Mac Pro. The MacBook Air was slightly faster completing the export in four minutes and three seconds, while the Mac Pro took almost 50 seconds more to finish the same task. Our Quad-Core 4GHz iMac on the other had took way longer to finish the test export. It was expected that the iMac would take longest, but it took 13 minutes 12 seconds, more than 2x longer compared to the Mac Pro.

Are Intel Macs still worth it?

This is a question that gets asked a lot. From the test it’s clear that even base-model laptops with Apple Silicon chips beat high-end professional Intel Mac models, so if you’re looking into buying a new (or used) computer it probably doesn’t make sense to invest in an Intel-based model. As the resell value for Intel Macs suggest, they’re not the best investment right now.

But if you already have an existing Intel Mac, they absolutely can be good computers. The resell value isn’t great so it makes sense to keep them as a secondary or even primary computer, depending what type of work you do. Even the slowest computer in our test handles all basic tasks with ease, and it’s usable for photo and video editing as well, with certain limitations. Not to forget the iMac models have a gorgeous Retina display which alone is worth a lot of money.