Image: Max Tech on YouTube
At its ‘Unleashed’ event last month, Apple unveiled new 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro models powered by next-generation M1 Pro and M1 Max chips.
In a recently published YouTube video, Max Tech pits a 16″ M1 Max MacBook Pro with a 10-core CPU and 32-core GPU against a decked out 15″ Razer Blade Advanced with an 11th Gen Intel i9 processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU — possibly the highest-specced consumer Windows laptop available right now.
The Razer Blade’s OLED display is arguably better for true blacks and dynamic viewing angles, and even supports touch input, but is a reflective mess.
While the 2021 MacBook Pro’s mini-LED screen does suffer from a bit of “blooming” in high contrast scenarios, it is stunning to look at, gets impressively bright, and has seamless HDR support.
As for audio, the MacBook Pro takes the cake with its hefty speakers that truly do justice to bass and native support for high-impedance headphones.
When it comes to performance, the M1 Max-equipped 2021 MacBook Pro blew the Razer Blade and its discrete RTX 3080 GPU right out of the water in most photo/video editing workflows, real-world applications, and synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench 5 (CPU) and SSD speed tests, maintaining a lead of anywhere between 10-30% in the closest ones.
The only areas the Razer Blade managed to best Apple’s newest MacBook Pro include gaming in general, Geekbench 5’s Metal & CUDA GPU benchmark, and heavily GPU-dependent rendering tasks in Blender.
What’s more, the MacBook Pro delivers almost identical performance on battery as it does while plugged in, whereas the Razer Blade (irreversibly) limits performance to 30-60% of its total capacity when running on battery. The MacBook Pro represents a completely new frontier in power efficiency for ‘professional’ notebooks.
Apple’s 2021 MacBook Pro also features a better thermal solution, with its M1 Max running a lot cooler than the Razer Blade’s CPU and GPU combo. As a result, the MacBook Pro almost never experienced any thermal throttling throughout Max Tech’s tests, whereas the Razer Blade did so regularly.
The few performance gains the Razer Blade does have to offer aren’t worth really the poor battery life and significantly heftier power draw. Not unless you’re gaming, in which case the Razer Blade is the way to go — new Apple Silicon has some solid potential for gaming, but most mainstream titles just aren’t optimized for macOS.
The tested M1 Max MacBook Pro configuration, with a 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 32 GB of Unified Memory, and a 1 TB SSD costs $4,399 CAD, whereas the tested Razer Blade Advanced configuration costs $4,349 CAD.
Click here to get your 2021 MacBook Pro today from Apple.ca.
Watch Max Tech’s full video comparison of the M1 Max MacBook Pro and the Razer Blade Advanced 15 above.
