Apple iMac 2019 vs Tricked-Out Macbook Pro #Helpful Post

when we ordered the iMac 2019 for our

review we decided that it didn't really

matter which graphics card we configured

it with if we were willing to upgrade

later using Thunderbolt 3 which then got

us thinking this is after the review you

know the MacBook Pro has Thunderbolt 3

ports too which means that for better

for worse both of these machines

actually have similar upgrade paths so

maybe by evaluating the iMac solely as a

desktop we missed out on another viable

option I mean if you're giving up a lot

of the traditional benefits of a desktop

anyway given that both of these are

running high-end core i9 processors are

you better off with an iMac or a macbook

well there's only one way for us to find

out by sitting through this belabored

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so the first thing we'll need to give

little Mack here a fighting chance

against King Hippo is a graphics card

now unfortunately NVIDIA is still in

talks with Apple to get official GeForce

support under Mac OS but it's not all

bad news the Radeon 7 which we're gonna

connect up via a razor core v2 enclosure

is still significantly more powerful

than the top end GPU configurations for

either of these machines and armed with

the beta of Apple's Mac OS moment and

14.5 we and by we I of course mean

Anthony should be able to get it working

now while Anthony is setting that up I

want to answer the burning question that

I'm sure is on everyone's mind right now

these two computers here are

fundamentally very very different so why

compare them at all and that is a good

point except for a few things

one is that they're both actually aimed

at a really similar market segment

namely graphics artists and

professionals thanks to their high

resolution wide gamut dcpip 3 displays

number 2 in both cases our bang for the

buck recommended config includes a

dedicated AMD GPU a radio on pro 560 ex

in the case of the MacBook and a Radeon

Pro 580 X in our iMac finally number 3

they both suffer from thermal

constraints that affect their peak

performance in ways that you can't

easily read off of a spec sheet so what

we want to know then is if they have

similar purposes and design goals well

which one of them should we choose a

MacBook Pro with some upgrades and I

don't know maybe a secondary display or

something like that or an iMac which is

running faster dedicated graphics and of

course a larger monitor in the first

place furthermore how did the costs pan

out and is the mobile processor

bottleneck going to cause real

performance problems for professional

work

so what do you think well I think for

compute we're probably looking at a much

faster experience with the MacBook Pro

just as a result of the much faster

Radeon seven the imac has two more much

faster cores so depending on how they

thermal throttle it might be a wash or

it might be a win for either of them

really before we do that though we're

gonna do a quick Cinebench run to get a

baseline for the cpu performance it's

worth noting too though that our iMac

isn't equipped with the fastest GPU that

it could have had the thing though is

that paying for that upgrade to Vega 56

or something yeah I think I pro 56 yeah

paying for that upgrade would have

gotten us half of the way to a much

faster external Radeon 7ne way so we

just didn't think it made sense so I'm

looking at somewhere in the 4100 range

and whoof yeah 2340 on the MacBook Pro

okay so as expected more cores is more

better in a heavily multi-threaded

workload and furthermore our MacBook Pro

thermal throttled considerably harder

than our iMac which widened even our

anticipated performance difference but

of note is the fact that a single

threaded score between these two

machines isn't that far off and often

your single threaded performance is more

important for light tasks like web

browsing application launching and

generally use yeah on that subject

actually I also ran black magics disk

speed benchmark and while it's not a

great test since it only looks at

sequential speeds it appears that Apple

is using a similar class of SSD on both

of these machines which probably

contributes to the fact that I didn't

really notice any chugging between them

that being said the iMac is equipped

with a fusion drive which is spitting

rust along with the SSD meaning that

after a certain period of time the

caching stops and it becomes slow and

that's kind of the thing about Mac OS

isn't it for all its shortcomings it's

really well optimized and

most need a heavy load in order to tell

the difference between one decently

equipped Mac and another so with that in

mind we're gonna go full opposite end of

the spectrum and hit our machines with

lux mark a GPU dependent 3d rendering

benchmark and this is where things get

really interesting so right out of the

box with no upgrades to either machine

there is a clear performance advantage

for our desktop I mean we're talking

double the horses here and $400 cheaper

but that's not to say that if you ran

out and buy yourself a MacBook Pro you

are plumb out of luck if you can afford

the graphics card upgrade it can inject

a lot of fight into your portable

machine so with the Radeon seven in tow

our core i9 equipped model managed

anywhere from three to even four times

the performance of our all-in-one

desktop it's worth noting though when

our iMac is similarly kitted out with

the Radeon seven it actually does a much

better job of combining the power of

both the onboard and external graphics

which allows it to keep the performance

advantage I'll be it a much smaller one

next let's take a look at video editing

Adobe Premiere whether it's related to

the external nature of our graphics card

or the beta version of Mac OS that we're

running didn't actually benefit from our

Radeon 7gp you upgrade so we had to pull

it off which means that we're looking at

a twenty to twenty-five percent

performance difference in export times

with what I would describe as pretty

darn similar on timeline scrubbing

performance and this is with pretty

heavy footage but I think you can go a

little bit worse this is only twenty to

one footage if I recall correctly is

that right Brendan yeah

as for Final Cut let's go ahead and fire

that up this is a tricky one to

benchmark because Apple has a really

cool feature that pretty much renders

your video ahead of time in the

background while you are cutting it

together and this avoids the traditional

long way

times while your finished project

exports what we can do though is we can

cancel delete our rendering cache and

then start off the rendering process

manually as well as look at our timeline

performance while doing the render cuz

I've attached for looks to each of these

yeah so it should be pretty so yeah it's

it's smooth it's nothing over I'm

getting really quick previews what's

yours like I don't think I'm actually

faster than you that actually does look

a touch faster but I've got the fusion

drive and these are large files that's

true so that could be affecting me

they're interesting also interesting

when we actually did benchmark our

renders we found that the iMac was about

twice as fast as the MacBook Pro even

with the external GPU so this seems to

be pretty much purely dependent on

multi-threaded CPU performance finally

one more heavy thing that Macs are used

to are pretty often these days is for

programming work so I've taken the

liberty of downloading the Mozilla

Firefox source code onto both of these

machines so we can put them head-to-head

and see just how much of a practical

difference those two extra cores on the

iMac can make one thing that I had

wanted to do was gather results on

Windows for both machines but getting an

external GPU running under my hobby's

boot camp requires a quite a bit of

extra setup and I'm not even sure if

it'll work at all with at2 enabled Mac

like our MacBook Pro right so there's no

t2 in the new Mac yeah so that's a point

in the I max favor in my opinion you

lose the hardware encryption and secure

Enclave features that Apple touts as

benefits but you gain the ability to run

Linux and you stand a much better chance

of recovering your data in the event of

a hard drive or a logic board failure

it's kind of important when your machine

is constantly overheating so since we've

actually run this before and this is

just movie magic I guess we've got

enough data to draw our conclusion then

add a price difference of about $400

between our core i9 equipped MacBook Pro

over here and our eight core iMac 2019

it's clear you are definitely paying a

mobility tax with the laptop you get two

fewer and overall much slower course

you're getting a weaker include

GPU and obviously you're getting a

smaller display furthermore if you were

gonna buy the external GPU anyway the

extra spend of about $1,000 for a Radeon

seven plus an enclosure is less likely

to be bottlenecked by the more powerful

CPU in the iMac and at this time anyway

it also happens to team up more

cooperatively with the graphics cores it

already has but and it's a big but the

iMac isn't portable and if you need

something that is then from our testing

you're actually still getting a lot of

bang with our tricked-out macbook pro so

if you need a laptop anyway then

compared to the prospect of buying a

laptop and an additional desktop an

external GPU upgrade looks like a great

way to close the gap since it's a lot

cheaper than even the entry-level iMac

by the way guys just one last note we

did it but to be clear we're not

actually recommending running beta

versions of your operating system on a

machine that you use for professional

apps those crashes are going to get you

when you least expect it and for Anthony

this video was quite a lot of hassle to

get done what's not a lot of hassle

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