I’ve always been a PC guy, even when other content creators raised their hands around. I’ll say up front that I don’t play games, so everything I do on my laptop revolves around video editing. To get around this I use a high end desktop Windows machine at home and until recently laptop for video editing on the go.
Then the Aero 15X died. The keyboard stopped working and the Lightning port failed. I didn’t even mourn the loss – it was always noisy and hot. Battery life has never been great and I had to pair it with a comically large and heavy power brick to do any serious video work.
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Apple’s MacBook Pro M3 Pro is a great content creation machine.
It was time for a new laptop, but I had no intention of reliving my Gigabyte experience. Instead, I wanted a cool computer that was lightweight, powerful, and had a long battery life. I need to edit 4K video in DaVinci Resolve while doing color correction and also adding effects and titles. I also do RAW photo editing, so I use Photoshop and Lightroom regularly.
I browsed a , but I thought it would be too expensive. After checking, I was surprised that there is a difference in price and a Windows laptop with similar performance has been less so since Apple started using its own Silicon.
So I took the plunge 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, this would be enough to handle difficult edits. I paid $3,100 in Canada including taxes, the same car sells for about $200 less in the US.
When I was in Vancouver doing a video review of the Nikon Z8, I fired up my new MacBook right away. I then edited a review of the Fujifilm X100 VI in London and shot a hands-on video for Panasonic’s S9 camera from Japan. These projects gave me a good feel for the MacBook’s performance, battery life, and usability on the go.
It was interesting to compare the MacBook with my desktop computer when I got home. While not state-of-the-art, the latter still packs an impressive spec with 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 that output 6K 10-bit 4:2:2 Log H.264 or H.265 Quicktime files. These formats usually tax the computer’s processor and GPU, so I wasn’t expecting real-time playback.
However, I noted that I could comfortably play those video files in DaVinci Resolve on my MacBook Pro without requiring any rendering or conversion. I can’t do it on my well-equipped desktop, so what was going on?
It turns out that even the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs can’t decode many of the most commonly used real-time formats, according to system integrator and benchmark expert Puget Systems. recently. This can be done with some formats (not H.264) on newer Intel CPUs with Quick Sync technology in DaVinci Resolve 18 Studio or later.
The ability to edit these files directly out of camera was a major quality of life improvement, as it eliminated the waste of time and memory.
I also saw real-time playback on the Mac. This includes sequences with 6K and 8K video, color correction on most clips, titles, multiple layers, optical flow time shifting and stabilization.
In contrast, my high-end desktop not only requires me to convert my video files, but also requires me to enable graphics rendering, especially with 6K or 8K video. Both of these are time-consuming and can consume hundreds of gigabytes of disk space.
While the MacBook felt fast, I also wanted to see how it fared more objectively compared to my Windows machine. I used the PugetBench Creator benchmark suite, which compares performance between machines in commonly used creative programs such as Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Davinci Resolve.
I was surprised by the results, considering my computer isn’t all that great for video editing. The MacBook Pro M3 came out on top in the Photoshop tests, scoring a total of 10,076, compared to 7,599 for my desktop. This is mainly due to the superior M3 processor.
However, my PC outperformed the MacBook Pro for video editing by a pretty wide margin thanks to its faster GPU. The Apple machine scored a total of 4,754 on the Premiere Pro PugetBench tests in high power mode, while my PC scored 8,763.
There are still no public PugetBench tests for DaVinci Resolve, however show that high-end PCs easily outperform high-end MacBook Pro models in that application. The PC is generally better when handling RAW formats and easily beats the MacBook Pro for GPU effects, AI features, and encoding to H.264 and H.265 formats.
These results show that benchmarks do not paint the full picture. The relative power of the computer depends on what you do with it, and in my case, the ability to edit certain video formats without rendering at high speeds. However, people who use more effects or work with ProRes or RAW formats may be better off with a powerful PC.
All that said, a lot of the things I hated about my Windows laptop 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 unusable trackpad.
Since I bought the MacBook Pro 16, I’ve never felt it overheat, and the fans rarely kick on, even when editing video. Conversely, there isn’t a PC I’ve heard of from a Windows creator that doesn’t generate excessive heat and fan noise under intense loads.
Another major bonus of the MacBook is that it offers the same performance whether it’s plugged in or not, but the same can’t be said for most computers. Many throttle when disconnected from electricity, significantly reducing performance.
If you need to edit on the go and don’t have access to AC power, the MacBook wins here, too. When editing in DaVinci Resolve, it can run for three to four hours on battery alone, which is triple what my Gigabyte laptop can do. And it takes about 1.5 hours to fully charge the MacBook Pro For Dell XPS 17 9730. It also charges much faster.
It also weighs less than the Aero and bends less compared to the Charger being very light. Finally, the trackpad is much better, so much so that I can even edit videos without a mouse, something I could never say with the Aero or any other PC laptop I’ve owned.
It’s not perfect because I don’t like the webcam notch, but otherwise the MacBook Pro 16 M3 is perfect. As it stands now, Windows laptops using Intel and AMD silicon can match this in terms of performance, but they lag far behind in terms of efficiency. This may change this year or NVIDIA’s upcoming 5000-series GPUs, but for now, Apple’s products are hard to beat for traveling content creators like myself.
