16-inch MacBook Pro or 27-inch iMac? 10-Core vs 8-Core Showdown!


covering 

a question that i get all the time which is do i imac or do i macbook pro . specifically this is the fastest 16-inch macbook pro you can pick up head-to-head against the fastest 5k imac that apple just dropped recently should you go for the portability of a macbook pro . or the power and size of an imac i'm going to cover the pros and cons of each and ultimately . help you decide which is the best option for you before i do that though i want to give a quick shout out to today's  sponsor clean my mac x so clean my mac x is anall-in-one utility that not only cleans your mac but optimizes it so it feels a little more like it did when you got it new with mac os big sur right around the corner a lot of people tend to just dive . 


right in and upgrade without getting rid of the old junk .

obviously a clean fresh install is the best way to go about things but then you got to back up all your files pray that you didn't delete anything important install the os reinstall all your apps and the reality is most people don't have time for that so clean my mac x is the next best thing it's clean it's super simple to not only navigate but operate as well smart scan is something that can get your mac feeling faster in literally .


seconds by finding and getting rid of old log files and cache you can see your battery life and then apps that are potentially draining it if you left something in your trash can and there's some helpful things like quickly uninstalling an app or stopping those annoying apps that always start at login even when you tell them not to it's apple approved you can check clean my mac x out for free which i will drop a link to down below appreciate you guys supporting the channel so it's actually pretty interesting if you spec these two out side by side and then max out the respective processor video card and then line up the ram and storage the price point is nearly identical with the macbook pro coming in at a hundred dollars more a really simple way to look at these two is with the macbook  pro .


you're sacrificing some power for portability whereas with the imac you're getting more power and a giant 27 inch 5k display that right there i think is something that is often overlooked with the imac yes there's that chin yes there are apple powered macs in the near future but a monitor of this caliber of this resolution will run you at least a thousand dollars so definitely keep that in mind when pricing these two out now as far as why more screen real estate might be advantageous to your workflow here's final cut pro 10 with a 4k video playing at full resolution with some room to spare we are absolutely cutting things close here but for contrast on the macbook pro we're actually only able to get that up to 77of the entire video here if we bump that up to 100 we see those sides and the Video gets cropped offso if you're not mobile or not moving .


around a lot the bigger screen on the iam can definitely be an advantage aside from screen real estate and size though there are some interesting trade-offs with the display on the macbook pro and the imac for example the imac now has a nano texture anti-glare option which is only available on this and the pro display xdr i covered that in depth in my full review which you guys can check out if you missed but i would love love love to see that option come to a macbook pro now kind of a hidden advantage on the macbook pro that only it and the pro display xdr share so you can see we're kind of trading off features here is the ability to adjust the refresh rate on your display these are absolutely video specific refresh rates so for example if you're working in 24 frames per second you could match the refresh rate to the project you're working in i definitely would have loved to have seen that on the imac but it's super helpful that it's there on the macbook pro . 

so i covered the new webcam in the 2020 imac in my full review which if you missed i'll drop a link to down below but there's definitely an advantage here right now it's pretty harsh as far as the light environment goes when we hop over to the macbook pro that is when you will see the huge difference where it really starts to struggle i myself am actuallycurious to see .


The microphone quality because these were improved when apple updated the 16 inch macbook pro so it should actually be on par with this imac but at the very least you'll get decent mics out of both the advantage to the webcam definitely goes to the imac though from there in terms of power again while you are sacrificing some of it with the macbook pro it hangs surprisingly well with this maxed out imac with the macbook pro you have the option to go up to eight cores 16 threads whereas with the imac you can now configure it with up to 10 cores and 20 threats it is really easy to get lost in the clock speed and the turbo boost and all the gigahertz but throughout this video i really want to showcase how these two perform side by side making things as opposed to solely benchmarks for example that intro shot was recorded on the new sony a7s3 and one of its coolest features is the ability to work in conjunction with sony's catalyst stabilization software which is literal witchcraft i will definitely drop a more in-depth video explaining that tech down below but in a nutshell there's gyroscopic data being recorded on the camera that can then talk to the software and results in some mind-blowing image stabe shout out to camera conspiracies the actual clip itself was 28 seconds long and to export the stabilized shot the imac was 10 seconds faster so i the stook that stabilized shot brought it into final cut pro 10 added some motion vfx text tracking reversed it and there you go so with the catalyst software it's definitely using both the processor and the video card to crunch that task if we were looking at solely just cpu performance in a blender benchmark for example here is how the imac stacks up side by side against the macbook pro and you can see those extra two cores and four threads definitely make a difference with that said if we're talking just cpu driven tasks on the imac and macbook pro the performance difference isn't as crazy as one might expect but in terms of graphics power the imac is leaps and bounds ahead 16 monstrous gigs of video memory on the imac versus 8 on the macbook pro and jumping into shadow of the tomb raider you can definitely see the jump in performance here so with applications that take advantage of the gpu that are metal accelerated you will definitely see gains with the imac over the macbook pro but with that said there are applications that don't take advantage of all that graphics power like audio so this is isotope rx8 and much like sony's catalyst software this is equally mind-blowing in literal witchcraft it's incredible for dialogue and voice over for repairing and processing audio but one of its craziest features is the ability to take a stereo mix down music file and somehow extract items it's kind of like if you baked a cake and then somehow were able to extract the eggs and sugar separately after the fact so here is the original file shout out to lauv and then somehow it extracts the vocals .



happening in this instance the imac was able to extract everything around 16 seconds faster than the macbook pro so definitely an advantage but it also showcases performance on the macbook pro is no joke i will say one giant advantage with the imac over the macbook pro is the noise and fans yes while the imac can definitely get hot and those fans can rev up the macbook pro is on a different level and not a good way if you're editing video or basically not recording audio it's not the biggest deal in the world but if you're into audio production and are recording live audio anywhere near the macbook it can absolutely get in the way from there i thought it'd be fun to take those stems really just the vocals and the bass and then ditch everything else bring that into logic pro record some acoustic guitar recreate the track and then test performance there this by no means was an intense session there was a handful of tracks a couple samples a decent amount of plug-ins but you can see there is miles and miles of headroom on both the imac and the macbook pro again the big advantage with the imac in terms of audio production is it's not as loud as the macbook pro i actually dropped that entire track on a new channel which i will link to down below you guys can check it out and subscribe if you're more into the music side of things but bouncing that final project in logic pro into three different formats aiff mp3 and apple lossless at the same time there is about a 10 second advantage with the imac over the macbook pro so again performance difference between these two is close but consistent from there continuing the theme of making things recorded the video to that track using the sony a7s 3 in their highest quality 10-bit 4k codec which can definitely be taxing depending on your machine whipped up a multi-cam edit in final cut pro 10. chopped it up in a little secret behind the video i took loud's live acoustic version of the song which is completely different than time stretch the audio to fit every time i think i love somebody and now it looks like he's singing along from there rendering out the timeline because that is really where you will test performance in final cut pro 10 .


it is heavily gpu accelerated metal optimized so the more graphics power you have the better and with that you can definitely see a bigger jump here with the imac over the macbook pro from there in a heavier more time consuming task i took all that a7s 3 footage which totaled to be just under 24 minutes and then transcoded that 10-bit footage into prores which is much easier to edit this is definitely where you see the graphics power flexing in the imac over the macbook pro because this was the biggest jump in performance we've gotten so far from there it's the smaller things like ports with the macbook pro you have four usbc slash thunderbolt 3 ports that's it whereas with the imac you get sd card slot the ability to have 10 gig ethernet built right in you can of course always add those to the macbook with an adapter but you have to add them ,



you also have the ability to upgrade ram something you can't do on the macbook pro all in all i have thoroughly enjoyed both of these machines and i think it's pretty simple if you need the portability the macbook pro is a stellar option but if you're not planning on traveling or being mobile the imac is more powerful and definitely the better option when you factor in that giant 5k display aside from that though recently jumped into the pc side of things with the rtx 3080 so potentially if you want to see a comparison with this versus the imac let me know if you guys missed that video i will drop a link down below thank you so much for watching this is jonathan and i will catch you guys later ,