It’s no secret that the new M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros are impressive machines. We’ve covered their impressive performance multiple times already, and new reports continue to emerge emphasizing it. Now, CNET has published a new report showcasing the power of the M1 Max MacBook Pro for photo editing.
The CNET piece focuses on comparing the new 16-inch MacBook Pro with the 10-core M1 Max chip and 32GB of RAM to the 2019 Intel i7 MacBook Pro. The results, as you might expect, are impressive.
Merging six 30-megapixel shots into a panorama was 4.8x faster on the new MacBook Pro, taking an average of 14 seconds vs. 67 for the Intel machine. That was the biggest speedup in my tests. The smallest was merging three 30-megapixel shots into an HDR photo, which took 22 seconds on the Intel machine and 12 seconds on the M1 Max, a 1.9x speedup.
Lightroom still struggles to accommodate Phase One’s enormous 151-megapixel raw files, but the new Mac handled it much better than my older machine. A panorama merge of two shots took an excruciating 109 seconds on the Intel Mac; it was 3.2x faster on the M1 Max MacBook Pro at 34 seconds. Interpreting the raw files to generate full-resolution previews — the most common delay I experience in Lightroom — was 2.5x faster on the new machine.
And here’s a chart showing these improvements visually:
The full report at CNET goes more in-depth on what to expect when using the new MacBook Pro with Lightroom and it’s well worth a read if you’re in the market.
More on the new MacBook Pros:
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