The Upgrade to Apple's New MacBook Pro 13-inch: A Closer Look

That got you basically the same spec but with an i7 instead, so let's upgrade to an i7, that's an extra two hundred pounds to go up to the 2.3 gigahertz i7. I've got that lovely fast 16 gigs of RAM and Apple won a whopping four hundred pounds for that additional 16 gig. So, I take back everything I said about Apple having reasonable ram upgrade prices. This is just the way it normally is with Apple, but you cannot upgrade the RAM yourself, it's soldered on to the board.

So, if you need 32 gigs, you've got a pony to go up 400 pounds and I would just bear in mind that obviously the 32 gigabyte model is going to hold its value. So, yeah, it's expensive at the outset, but when you come to move on the laptop in three years time or whenever you upgrade, you will get more money back, so it may be worth doing. We've got one terabyte of SSD storage which is no fantastic, we can jump up to 2 terabytes for another 400 pounds and that 4 terabyte option is going to cost us a whopping 1,000 pounds. So, that means that you can spend three thousand five hundred and ninety-nine pounds on a MacBook Pro 13-inch without discrete graphics.

I don't know how I feel about that, that's quite strange, that's a lot of money to pay for a laptop of that specification. I expect most people wouldn't spec up a 13-inch MacBook Pro like this. So, should you upgrade if you've got an earlier edition of the MacBook Pro? Should you be considering an upgrade well, I think if you've got the 2018 edition or the 2019 Edition then I'd say probably not unless you've got a very specific need for one of those new features. I suppose if you've got an entry-level model and you do a lot of typing, the magic keyboard is really important to you, it's conceivable that you might want to upgrade to have that better experience.

But, it's not worth it for the specifications because they haven't really changed that much. What about if you've got one of the higher specification models? So, I got the 2018 Edition and I actually bought this new only in January of this year. Every time Apple does an upgrade and changes the model number then you find that resellers who have loads of stock of the old models have to ship that stock out and they'll sell it off cheaper. And it just so happened that a big education supplier had a whole bunch of these top specification 2018 editions.

So, I got mine for less than eighteen hundred pounds whereas the 2019 model was two thousand seven hundred pounds for the same thing in fact, the only difference is the CPU was ever so slightly faster on the 2019 Edition but we're talking miniscule differences that you'd never notice. So, I managed to save myself almost a thousand pounds by buying a computer like that and I think the same thing might actually be true at the moment, you might be able to now start picking up the 2019 models a lot cheaper.

This particular update seems to be a bit of a halfway house. I expect next year they'll release the 14 inch MacBook Pro and at that point they might then bring the tenth generation CPUs to the lower specification models. So, if that's what you particularly want then perhaps hold off for another year or shop around for a bargain. Some people hold off buying Apple products because they're always conscious that there might be a newer and more exciting product just around the corner.

And, Apple are very good at keeping tight-lipped on announcements for their new products and then suddenly they arrive usually the week after you've caved in and bought the previous generation model. So, don't worry about that, don't sit around waiting if you need a computer just buy the one that you need and it's gonna work for you. I tend to think about a three-year upgrade cycle for my notebooks anyway. So, if you're working on that cycle then you know that in three years time you'll have a new and more exciting notebook.

So, with the new MacBook Pro 13-inch that they've put that new keyboard in, I don't think the base models hold much excitement for me. The more powerful models are a bit more interesting but I'm going to reserve my judgment until we start to see some benchmarks coming through for those processors and then perhaps we'll make another video. In the meantime, if you're not already subscribed to the channel please hit the button and tap that Bell icon if you want to be notified whenever I release new content.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso Apple have just announced a new 20/20 edition of the MacBook Pro 13-inch what's changed and if like me you've got one of the previous edition models is it worth upgrading to the new one let's find out now I'm filming today from my office which is in a very rural location and the Business Park is pretty much closed there's nobody here so you'd think it would be really quiet and you'd be wrong because there's just a constant stream of traffic going past the building and it's also raining today of course because it's England so it just makes the noise even worse so apologies for any audio interruptions now let's get to it with this MacBook Pro 13-inch I've always really loved the 13 inch form factor for a notebook like the portability I like the size but it's very difficult to get a lot of power into such a small computer if I said I've not been disappointed at all with the performance of my top spec 2018 model would I consider upgrading for the new one let's have a look at the Apple website and see what's changed so first of all Apple are advertising 10th generation processors with this up to 80 percent faster graphics performance I feel this is slightly misleading because only the top-end models have the 10th generation processors the entry-level model is still the 8th generation processor and nothing wrong with that of course you'll notice we can now go all the way up to 32 gigabytes of memory but again I think that only applies to the top specification notebooks and the other big change is the magic keyboard so this is the new generation keyboard that already appears on the MacBook Pro 16 inch and they've now put that keyboard onto the MacBook Pro 13-inch it offers better key travel and a better typing experience there's a lot of hatred for apples butterfly keyboard I'm not a big fan of the typing experience either but like many people I've gotten used to it over time but there's also been a lot of reports of the fragility of these keyboards they seem to have a lot of problems they don't last long and they're not very easy to replace either but I have to say I've never experienced any issue and I was just thinking about how many of these laptops we've got in our web studio of this generation where there's a butterfly keyboard and I think it's about 15 of them and over the last what two years or so we've not had any staff complain of issues with their keyboard so your mileage may vary of course but the new magic keyboard is definitely a step up it is a much better typing experience if you do a lot of typing it may be important to you to have that newer keyboard apple here is advertising the notebook as being a portable powerhouse something you can take out with you and do some editing so they're talking about retouching and editing your work in affinity photo I have to say I use affinity photo and here at the web studio we switched over from Adobe to affinity about three years ago and we've never looked back it's a really great piece of software I do edit photos in affinity photo on my macbook pro 13 inch although most of the time when I'm doing it I'm plugged into an eg PU and the other example they give here is coding running virtual machines obviously more power more memory more virtual machines that's important coders and also the small form factor is always very popular with developers video editing I'm not sure how great the experience will be I have edited videos on my macbook pro 13 inch without having it plugged into the eg PU it's a pretty torturous experience with your legs getting cooked by the heat generated by the laptop but it is certainly possible so first the graphics performance would certainly be welcome for doing any kind of Final Cut Pro work I can definitely see musicians going after the 13-inch MacBook Pro as well it's a great thing particularly to use on stage but also for mobile recording as well and if you can now have up to 32 gigabytes of RAM that's a big plus Apple includes gaming here but does anybody really buy an Apple notebook to do gaming on I don't think so so they keep talking about more power in the cause of the CPU but again it's only those top models that get the tenth generation CPUs according to reports the top CPU the i7 quad-core built to order option in the 13-inch MacBook Pro is the i7 1068 ng7 this apparently runs at 2.3 gigahertz with a 4.1 gigahertz turbo this is a very new CPU so there aren't any published benchmarks for it yet and so I can't tell you what the performance is like compared to the previous quad core i7s my expectation is that it's probably not that different for CPU performance only it's the graphics performance where it will really push ahead of course on those top models the RAM is also running at a faster frequency so that will impact the overall performance of the computer now the new tenth generation CPUs feature iris plus graphics the latest generation whereas the older versions have the RS plus 655 in them now what they're saying here is for gaming performance it's 80% faster so that's a fairly significant upgrade if you are using your Mac for gaming I'll come across to the affinity photo comparison here and what you see is that they're suggesting there's 25% faster image processing but they're not specific about what that is so got a little number 9 there let's just scroll down to the bottom of the webpage and see if we can find what that means just says that affinity photo one point 8.3 tested using the built-in benchmark and Val Dorsey a sample image so that means nothing to me it maybe perhaps means something to you what's interesting here is the comparison they do for Final Cut Pro and that what they're saying is it's 60 percent faster I mean if you just glanced at that you'll go oh well brilliant 60 percent faster than the previous generation but then underneath it says for 3d title rendering I don't think I've ever rendered a 3d title in Final Cut Pro it's not the sort of thing that tends to feature on pro videos obviously rendering motion graphics you want your CPU to be as fast as possible with that background rendering you want to be as quick as possible as well and of course the final render and it would be really useful to have some kind of rendering performance comparison we could actually use that to make an assessment of whether this is actually a faster machine or not the idea that the new 2020 MacBook Pro 13 inch will be 60% faster in Final Cut Pro across-the-board is just nonsense that is never going to be the case I'm really frustrated at the moment with Final Cut Pro because the the rendering performance seems to be all over the place on my Mac Pro it can't seem to use both of the graphics cards properly if you plug in an a GPU it just completely ignores it quite often it tries to render on the CPU and then completely ignores the graphics cards same story on the MacBook Pro tried to render a video last night it started off rendering it on the EGP you and then partway through just stopped and started using the internal iris graphics and everything slowed down to a crawl I don't understand any of this I don't know what Apple is playing at but there's some significant problems with Final Cut Pro at the moment it seems to me that they're focusing on optimizing the performance for their new 20:19 Mac Pro and anyone who's on a different machine they don't really seem to care about so onto the SSD storage we can now have up to four terabytes of storage and Apple are saying that you get up to three gigabytes a second on speed let's just test the SSD in my 2018 edition using black magic disk speed test so you see that I'm running about two and a half gigabytes a second there all right and just shy of that again on read performance so we're talking about a fairly reasonable upgrade to the performance of your SSD whether you'll actually see that performance difference in real-world tests that's another question entirely in fact once you SSD gets up of sort of 600 megabytes a second it's quite difficult to tell the difference in speed unless you're actually just copying huge files all the time which is not really representative of most people's workflow in any case it's great to have really fast performance and it's really good that you can get up to 4 terabytes in a moment we'll have a look at the purchasing page and see just how much it costs you to add 4 terabytes of storage I expect that won't be cheap here they're talking about that magic keyboard again you'll notice as well that the arrow keys have been changed back to the old design where you had the small left and right arrow keys and I think I prefer that the arrangement is on my 2018 edition some more marketing information about the touch bar I don't know about you guys but I don't really find the touch bar to be particularly useful I would really like it if Apple sold a MacBook Pro without the touch bar but with the 4 Thunderbolt ports that would be useful for a lot of people I probably spend half my time with my laptop plugged into a monitor and I might have the laptop on a stand out of reach anyway so the touch bar is fairly pointless for me and that is the setup that we have here in the web studio all our guys have either one or two external monitors and they have their laptop on a stand so as far as I'm aware none of us ever use the touch bar it's a bit of pointless technology something that can go wrong and it just doesn't need to be there just give us a notebook with function keys and a fingerprint reader that would be great of course you have the t2 security chip in all new Macs and the this is basically an arm CPU that takes care of the encryption and decryption of files on your hard drive so that that load isn't on the CPU that helps to speed up the system but they also use it to do some other things as well particularly encoding and decoding certain types of video and we've got some information about the display and the audio but as far as I'm aware these haven't changed at all since the previous generation and we still have the Thunderbolt 3 ports do you'll either get to on the lower specification or for on the higher specification machines and you do get a headphone jack as well which I think doubles up as a microphone jack you can charge the MacBook from any of those ports you get a USB C type charger doesn't matter which socket you use that'll work fine now you'll notice here that Apple are featuring the fact that you can connect this laptop up to an e GPU and Apple continually are advertising a GPU as a solution for their products particularly the Mac Mini and all of their notebooks that don't have discrete graphics cards and yet my experience with the GPU is that apple's app don't properly support it we've already spoken about Final Cut Pro that's all over the place with the GPU at the moment I think what I would say about a GPU is if you definitely need graphics performance all the time and you need it in Final Cut Pro a GPU is probably not the right solution for you I'm AK that's got graphics power built into it so that additional graphics power that we've got now allows you to connect to 6k display and that includes Apple's Pro XD our display if you want it to go down that route and now we're just talking about functions that are available with Catalina so we've got sidecar where you can use your iPad as it as a second screen and use the Apple pencil to mark up content and those kind of things it just gives us an overview of how Apple's trying to sell this notebook and for the uninitiated you could read this page and assume that across the board you've got sixty to eighty percent performance improvement over the previous generation and that's simply not going to be the case we'll have to wait until we can get some benchmarks done but I don't believe it's gonna be anywhere like sixty to eighty percent across the board I expect on some things it'll be a bit slower on other things it'll be a bit quicker it's the usual sort of story when you change a generation of CPU CPU performance isn't accelerating at the rate that it once did so these new generations often just improve power draw they might improve the thermal performance of the CPU so overall you do get better performance but it's not like night and day performance from one generation to the next so let's now just go through the purchasing process and have a look at some of the specifications and what they cost so as before we've got four off-the-shelf specifications which you can then customize so let's start with the very cheapest one so in this one we get a 1.4 gigahertz quad core i5 processor iris plus graphics 645 we've got 8 gigabytes of RAM and 2 5 6 gigabytes of storage that's gone up it used to be a hundred and twenty eight and you only get two Thunderbolt three ports with that particular model and in the UK that comes in at one thousand two hundred and ninety nine pounds now prices in different countries obviously will vary something you need to know in the UK is that includes our sales tax which we pay on pretty much everything of twenty percent so if a business is buying this and they're registered for v80 they'll get it for 20 percent less but consumers always pay that price including v80 so one thousand two hundred and ninety nine pounds so the next model that's on offer is basically the same machine but it has 512 gigabytes of storage then we go up to the models with for thunderbolt pause and you'll notice that there's a difference in the speed of the RAM here so first of all we've got the 10th generation processors a 10th generation quad core i5 you get the new iris plus graphics notice that Ram now runs at three thousand seven hundred and thirty three megahertz and you get sixteen gigabytes as standard that always used to be eight gigabytes the 16 gigabyte was always a built to order option so that's a big improvement and also you get 512 gigabytes on your SSD as standard and that's coming in at 1799 pounds and the fourth model that they're offering is basically the same thing but with one terabyte of SSD storage so what we've really got is two models we've got one that has just two Thunderbolt three ports and the other has four Thunderbolt three ports with the base model you're getting an eighth generation Intel processor you're getting slower Ram and the improved model you're getting the 10th generation Intel processors with that improved graphics performance you're getting faster RAM and more of it so let's go back to the base model the very cheapest one and let's see what our upgrade options are so we've got an upgrade option of a 1.7 gigahertz quad-core eighth generation i7 which advertises a turbo boost of four and a half gigahertz I expect this is a lower wattage processor so that probably means better battery life in the lower model it also means that that turbo boost probably won't be active for as long before the CPU starts to thermal throttle so I don't know whether that's worth three hundred pounds as an upgrade you'll notice that we can go from eight gigabytes to sixteen gigabytes for a hundred pounds now that used to be 200 pounds so it's nice to see that that price has come down in fact 100 pounds for eight gigabytes of memory you know that's that's bordering on reasonable reasonable Ram pricing from Apple who'da thought it I would say that's a definite you need to do that if you're buying a computer with a pro label on it and put 16 gigabytes of RAM in it for goodness sake 256 gig of storage that's probably enough for many people depending on what you're doing if you're up storing all of your files on your hard drive then obviously you're gonna need possibly some more storage and the options go in 200 pound increments so to go up to 2 terabytes which is the maximum on that base model we're looking at an additional 800 pounds I wouldn't have said that's worth it at all I'll get an external SSD drive Samsung t5 probably for 200 pounds you can certainly get a one terabyte Samsung t5 and have a bunch of change and they run pretty rapidly about 500 megabytes a second which is plenty quick enough I actually use my Samsung T fives with my MacBook Pro even though I've got the one terabyte SSD I edit my video typically on a samsung t5 Drive that allows me to swap between my macbook pro and my Mac Pro and I've never noticed any performance issues with that I like having a terabyte onboard though because it enables me to copy files and use that as temporary storage and that's really useful but any files that are important to me I'm not going to keep them on my notebook all of that's in the cloud or it's on mine as drive system and it's all backed up I don't put anything that's important on my my notebook computer because if it gets lost or stolen or damaged you are stuffed particularly with these Mac books because the SSD is tied to the t2 chip so it's very difficult for you to retrieve your data if you damage your notebook let's go and have a look at the top model now and see what we can spec bad up to so if we take that top off the Shelf model we're at 1999 pounds and we're getting a quad core i5 16 gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage now the 2019 macbook pro 13 inch the very top specification you could buy was two thousand six hundred and ninety nine pounds and that got you basically the same spec but with a an i7 instead so let's upgrade to an i7 so that's an extra two hundred pounds to go up to the 2.3 gigahertz i7 i've got that lovely fast 3733 megahertz ram 16 gigs of it and Apple won a whopping four hundred pounds for that additional 16 gig so I take back everything I said about Apple having reasonable ram upgrade prices this is just the way it normally is with Apple but you cannot upgrade the RAM yourself it's soldered on to the board so if you need 32 gigs you've got a you got a pony up 400 pounds and I would just bear in mind though that obviously the 32 gigabyte model is going to hold its value so yeah it's expensive at the outset but when you come to the move on the laptop in three years time or whenever you you upgrade you will get you know more money back so it may be worth doing and we've got one terabyte of SSD storage which is no fantastic we can jump up to 2 terabytes for another 400 pounds and that 4 terabyte option is going to cost us a whopping 1,000 pounds so that means that you can spend three thousand five hundred and ninety-nine pounds on a MacBook Pro 13 inch without discrete graphics I don't know how I feel about that that's quite strange that's a lot of money to pay for a laptop of that specification I expect most people wouldn't spec up a 13-inch MacBook Pro like this so should you upgrade if you've got an earlier edition of the MacBook Pro should you be considering an upgrade well I think if you've got the 2018 edition or the 2019 Edition then I'd say probably not unless you've got a very specific need for one of those new features I suppose if you've got an entry-level model and you do a lot of typing the magic keyboard is really important to you it's conceivable that you might want to upgrade to have that better experience but it's not worth it for the specifications because they haven't really changed that much and what about if you've got one of the higher specification models so I got the 2018 Edition and I actually bought this new only in January of this year every time Apple does an upgrade and changes the model number then you find that resellers who have loads of stock of the old models have to ship that stock out and they'll sell it off cheaper and it just so happened that a big education supplier had a whole bunch of these top specification 2018 editions so I got mine for less than eighteen hundred pounds whereas the 2019 model was two thousand seven hundred pounds for the same thing in fact the only difference is the CPU was ever so slightly faster on the 2019 Edition but we're talking miniscule differences that you'd never notice so I managed to save myself almost a thousand pounds by buying a computer like that and I think the same thing might actually be true at the moment you might be able to now start picking up the 2019 models a lot cheaper and that represents great value for money this particular update seems to be a bit of a halfway house I expect next year they'll release the 14 inch MacBook Pro and at that point they might then bring the tenth generation CPUs to the lower specification models so if that's what you particularly want then perhaps hold off for another year or shop around for a bargain and some people hold off buying Apple products because they're always conscious that there might be a newer and more exciting product just around the corner and Apple are very good at you know keeping tight-lipped on announcements for their new products and then suddenly they arrive usually the week after you've caved in and bought the previous generation model always seems to happen to me anyway but I would say don't worry about that don't sit around waiting if you need a computer just buy the one that you need and it's gonna work for you and I tend to think about a three-year upgrade cycle for my notebooks anyway so if you're working on that cycle then you know that in three years time you'll have a new and more exciting notebook so I think it's good with the new MacBook Pro 13 inch that they've put that new keyboard in I don't think the base models hold much excitement for me the more powerful models are a bit more interesting but I'm going to reserve my judgment until we start to see some benchmarks coming through for those processors and then perhaps we'll make another video and in the meantime if you're not already subscribed to the channel please hit the button and tap that Bell icon if you want to be notified whenever I release new content and maybe I earned a thumbs up in any case I'll see you next time for some more geekeryso Apple have just announced a new 20/20 edition of the MacBook Pro 13-inch what's changed and if like me you've got one of the previous edition models is it worth upgrading to the new one let's find out now I'm filming today from my office which is in a very rural location and the Business Park is pretty much closed there's nobody here so you'd think it would be really quiet and you'd be wrong because there's just a constant stream of traffic going past the building and it's also raining today of course because it's England so it just makes the noise even worse so apologies for any audio interruptions now let's get to it with this MacBook Pro 13-inch I've always really loved the 13 inch form factor for a notebook like the portability I like the size but it's very difficult to get a lot of power into such a small computer if I said I've not been disappointed at all with the performance of my top spec 2018 model would I consider upgrading for the new one let's have a look at the Apple website and see what's changed so first of all Apple are advertising 10th generation processors with this up to 80 percent faster graphics performance I feel this is slightly misleading because only the top-end models have the 10th generation processors the entry-level model is still the 8th generation processor and nothing wrong with that of course you'll notice we can now go all the way up to 32 gigabytes of memory but again I think that only applies to the top specification notebooks and the other big change is the magic keyboard so this is the new generation keyboard that already appears on the MacBook Pro 16 inch and they've now put that keyboard onto the MacBook Pro 13-inch it offers better key travel and a better typing experience there's a lot of hatred for apples butterfly keyboard I'm not a big fan of the typing experience either but like many people I've gotten used to it over time but there's also been a lot of reports of the fragility of these keyboards they seem to have a lot of problems they don't last long and they're not very easy to replace either but I have to say I've never experienced any issue and I was just thinking about how many of these laptops we've got in our web studio of this generation where there's a butterfly keyboard and I think it's about 15 of them and over the last what two years or so we've not had any staff complain of issues with their keyboard so your mileage may vary of course but the new magic keyboard is definitely a step up it is a much better typing experience if you do a lot of typing it may be important to you to have that newer keyboard apple here is advertising the notebook as being a portable powerhouse something you can take out with you and do some editing so they're talking about retouching and editing your work in affinity photo I have to say I use affinity photo and here at the web studio we switched over from Adobe to affinity about three years ago and we've never looked back it's a really great piece of software I do edit photos in affinity photo on my macbook pro 13 inch although most of the time when I'm doing it I'm plugged into an eg PU and the other example they give here is coding running virtual machines obviously more power more memory more virtual machines that's important coders and also the small form factor is always very popular with developers video editing I'm not sure how great the experience will be I have edited videos on my macbook pro 13 inch without having it plugged into the eg PU it's a pretty torturous experience with your legs getting cooked by the heat generated by the laptop but it is certainly possible so first the graphics performance would certainly be welcome for doing any kind of Final Cut Pro work I can definitely see musicians going after the 13-inch MacBook Pro as well it's a great thing particularly to use on stage but also for mobile recording as well and if you can now have up to 32 gigabytes of RAM that's a big plus Apple includes gaming here but does anybody really buy an Apple notebook to do gaming on I don't think so so they keep talking about more power in the cause of the CPU but again it's only those top models that get the tenth generation CPUs according to reports the top CPU the i7 quad-core built to order option in the 13-inch MacBook Pro is the i7 1068 ng7 this apparently runs at 2.3 gigahertz with a 4.1 gigahertz turbo this is a very new CPU so there aren't any published benchmarks for it yet and so I can't tell you what the performance is like compared to the previous quad core i7s my expectation is that it's probably not that different for CPU performance only it's the graphics performance where it will really push ahead of course on those top models the RAM is also running at a faster frequency so that will impact the overall performance of the computer now the new tenth generation CPUs feature iris plus graphics the latest generation whereas the older versions have the RS plus 655 in them now what they're saying here is for gaming performance it's 80% faster so that's a fairly significant upgrade if you are using your Mac for gaming I'll come across to the affinity photo comparison here and what you see is that they're suggesting there's 25% faster image processing but they're not specific about what that is so got a little number 9 there let's just scroll down to the bottom of the webpage and see if we can find what that means just says that affinity photo one point 8.3 tested using the built-in benchmark and Val Dorsey a sample image so that means nothing to me it maybe perhaps means something to you what's interesting here is the comparison they do for Final Cut Pro and that what they're saying is it's 60 percent faster I mean if you just glanced at that you'll go oh well brilliant 60 percent faster than the previous generation but then underneath it says for 3d title rendering I don't think I've ever rendered a 3d title in Final Cut Pro it's not the sort of thing that tends to feature on pro videos obviously rendering motion graphics you want your CPU to be as fast as possible with that background rendering you want to be as quick as possible as well and of course the final render and it would be really useful to have some kind of rendering performance comparison we could actually use that to make an assessment of whether this is actually a faster machine or not the idea that the new 2020 MacBook Pro 13 inch will be 60% faster in Final Cut Pro across-the-board is just nonsense that is never going to be the case I'm really frustrated at the moment with Final Cut Pro because the the rendering performance seems to be all over the place on my Mac Pro it can't seem to use both of the graphics cards properly if you plug in an a GPU it just completely ignores it quite often it tries to render on the CPU and then completely ignores the graphics cards same story on the MacBook Pro tried to render a video last night it started off rendering it on the EGP you and then partway through just stopped and started using the internal iris graphics and everything slowed down to a crawl I don't understand any of this I don't know what Apple is playing at but there's some significant problems with Final Cut Pro at the moment it seems to me that they're focusing on optimizing the performance for their new 20:19 Mac Pro and anyone who's on a different machine they don't really seem to care about so onto the SSD storage we can now have up to four terabytes of storage and Apple are saying that you get up to three gigabytes a second on speed let's just test the SSD in my 2018 edition using black magic disk speed test so you see that I'm running about two and a half gigabytes a second there all right and just shy of that again on read performance so we're talking about a fairly reasonable upgrade to the performance of your SSD whether you'll actually see that performance difference in real-world tests that's another question entirely in fact once you SSD gets up of sort of 600 megabytes a second it's quite difficult to tell the difference in speed unless you're actually just copying huge files all the time which is not really representative of most people's workflow in any case it's great to have really fast performance and it's really good that you can get up to 4 terabytes in a moment we'll have a look at the purchasing page and see just how much it costs you to add 4 terabytes of storage I expect that won't be cheap here they're talking about that magic keyboard again you'll notice as well that the arrow keys have been changed back to the old design where you had the small left and right arrow keys and I think I prefer that the arrangement is on my 2018 edition some more marketing information about the touch bar I don't know about you guys but I don't really find the touch bar to be particularly useful I would really like it if Apple sold a MacBook Pro without the touch bar but with the 4 Thunderbolt ports that would be useful for a lot of people I probably spend half my time with my laptop plugged into a monitor and I might have the laptop on a stand out of reach anyway so the touch bar is fairly pointless for me and that is the setup that we have here in the web studio all our guys have either one or two external monitors and they have their laptop on a stand so as far as I'm aware none of us ever use the touch bar it's a bit of pointless technology something that can go wrong and it just doesn't need to be there just give us a notebook with function keys and a fingerprint reader that would be great of course you have the t2 security chip in all new Macs and the this is basically an arm CPU that takes care of the encryption and decryption of files on your hard drive so that that load isn't on the CPU that helps to speed up the system but they also use it to do some other things as well particularly encoding and decoding certain types of video and we've got some information about the display and the audio but as far as I'm aware these haven't changed at all since the previous generation and we still have the Thunderbolt 3 ports do you'll either get to on the lower specification or for on the higher specification machines and you do get a headphone jack as well which I think doubles up as a microphone jack you can charge the MacBook from any of those ports you get a USB C type charger doesn't matter which socket you use that'll work fine now you'll notice here that Apple are featuring the fact that you can connect this laptop up to an e GPU and Apple continually are advertising a GPU as a solution for their products particularly the Mac Mini and all of their notebooks that don't have discrete graphics cards and yet my experience with the GPU is that apple's app don't properly support it we've already spoken about Final Cut Pro that's all over the place with the GPU at the moment I think what I would say about a GPU is if you definitely need graphics performance all the time and you need it in Final Cut Pro a GPU is probably not the right solution for you I'm AK that's got graphics power built into it so that additional graphics power that we've got now allows you to connect to 6k display and that includes Apple's Pro XD our display if you want it to go down that route and now we're just talking about functions that are available with Catalina so we've got sidecar where you can use your iPad as it as a second screen and use the Apple pencil to mark up content and those kind of things it just gives us an overview of how Apple's trying to sell this notebook and for the uninitiated you could read this page and assume that across the board you've got sixty to eighty percent performance improvement over the previous generation and that's simply not going to be the case we'll have to wait until we can get some benchmarks done but I don't believe it's gonna be anywhere like sixty to eighty percent across the board I expect on some things it'll be a bit slower on other things it'll be a bit quicker it's the usual sort of story when you change a generation of CPU CPU performance isn't accelerating at the rate that it once did so these new generations often just improve power draw they might improve the thermal performance of the CPU so overall you do get better performance but it's not like night and day performance from one generation to the next so let's now just go through the purchasing process and have a look at some of the specifications and what they cost so as before we've got four off-the-shelf specifications which you can then customize so let's start with the very cheapest one so in this one we get a 1.4 gigahertz quad core i5 processor iris plus graphics 645 we've got 8 gigabytes of RAM and 2 5 6 gigabytes of storage that's gone up it used to be a hundred and twenty eight and you only get two Thunderbolt three ports with that particular model and in the UK that comes in at one thousand two hundred and ninety nine pounds now prices in different countries obviously will vary something you need to know in the UK is that includes our sales tax which we pay on pretty much everything of twenty percent so if a business is buying this and they're registered for v80 they'll get it for 20 percent less but consumers always pay that price including v80 so one thousand two hundred and ninety nine pounds so the next model that's on offer is basically the same machine but it has 512 gigabytes of storage then we go up to the models with for thunderbolt pause and you'll notice that there's a difference in the speed of the RAM here so first of all we've got the 10th generation processors a 10th generation quad core i5 you get the new iris plus graphics notice that Ram now runs at three thousand seven hundred and thirty three megahertz and you get sixteen gigabytes as standard that always used to be eight gigabytes the 16 gigabyte was always a built to order option so that's a big improvement and also you get 512 gigabytes on your SSD as standard and that's coming in at 1799 pounds and the fourth model that they're offering is basically the same thing but with one terabyte of SSD storage so what we've really got is two models we've got one that has just two Thunderbolt three ports and the other has four Thunderbolt three ports with the base model you're getting an eighth generation Intel processor you're getting slower Ram and the improved model you're getting the 10th generation Intel processors with that improved graphics performance you're getting faster RAM and more of it so let's go back to the base model the very cheapest one and let's see what our upgrade options are so we've got an upgrade option of a 1.7 gigahertz quad-core eighth generation i7 which advertises a turbo boost of four and a half gigahertz I expect this is a lower wattage processor so that probably means better battery life in the lower model it also means that that turbo boost probably won't be active for as long before the CPU starts to thermal throttle so I don't know whether that's worth three hundred pounds as an upgrade you'll notice that we can go from eight gigabytes to sixteen gigabytes for a hundred pounds now that used to be 200 pounds so it's nice to see that that price has come down in fact 100 pounds for eight gigabytes of memory you know that's that's bordering on reasonable reasonable Ram pricing from Apple who'da thought it I would say that's a definite you need to do that if you're buying a computer with a pro label on it and put 16 gigabytes of RAM in it for goodness sake 256 gig of storage that's probably enough for many people depending on what you're doing if you're up storing all of your files on your hard drive then obviously you're gonna need possibly some more storage and the options go in 200 pound increments so to go up to 2 terabytes which is the maximum on that base model we're looking at an additional 800 pounds I wouldn't have said that's worth it at all I'll get an external SSD drive Samsung t5 probably for 200 pounds you can certainly get a one terabyte Samsung t5 and have a bunch of change and they run pretty rapidly about 500 megabytes a second which is plenty quick enough I actually use my Samsung T fives with my MacBook Pro even though I've got the one terabyte SSD I edit my video typically on a samsung t5 Drive that allows me to swap between my macbook pro and my Mac Pro and I've never noticed any performance issues with that I like having a terabyte onboard though because it enables me to copy files and use that as temporary storage and that's really useful but any files that are important to me I'm not going to keep them on my notebook all of that's in the cloud or it's on mine as drive system and it's all backed up I don't put anything that's important on my my notebook computer because if it gets lost or stolen or damaged you are stuffed particularly with these Mac books because the SSD is tied to the t2 chip so it's very difficult for you to retrieve your data if you damage your notebook let's go and have a look at the top model now and see what we can spec bad up to so if we take that top off the Shelf model we're at 1999 pounds and we're getting a quad core i5 16 gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage now the 2019 macbook pro 13 inch the very top specification you could buy was two thousand six hundred and ninety nine pounds and that got you basically the same spec but with a an i7 instead so let's upgrade to an i7 so that's an extra two hundred pounds to go up to the 2.3 gigahertz i7 i've got that lovely fast 3733 megahertz ram 16 gigs of it and Apple won a whopping four hundred pounds for that additional 16 gig so I take back everything I said about Apple having reasonable ram upgrade prices this is just the way it normally is with Apple but you cannot upgrade the RAM yourself it's soldered on to the board so if you need 32 gigs you've got a you got a pony up 400 pounds and I would just bear in mind though that obviously the 32 gigabyte model is going to hold its value so yeah it's expensive at the outset but when you come to the move on the laptop in three years time or whenever you you upgrade you will get you know more money back so it may be worth doing and we've got one terabyte of SSD storage which is no fantastic we can jump up to 2 terabytes for another 400 pounds and that 4 terabyte option is going to cost us a whopping 1,000 pounds so that means that you can spend three thousand five hundred and ninety-nine pounds on a MacBook Pro 13 inch without discrete graphics I don't know how I feel about that that's quite strange that's a lot of money to pay for a laptop of that specification I expect most people wouldn't spec up a 13-inch MacBook Pro like this so should you upgrade if you've got an earlier edition of the MacBook Pro should you be considering an upgrade well I think if you've got the 2018 edition or the 2019 Edition then I'd say probably not unless you've got a very specific need for one of those new features I suppose if you've got an entry-level model and you do a lot of typing the magic keyboard is really important to you it's conceivable that you might want to upgrade to have that better experience but it's not worth it for the specifications because they haven't really changed that much and what about if you've got one of the higher specification models so I got the 2018 Edition and I actually bought this new only in January of this year every time Apple does an upgrade and changes the model number then you find that resellers who have loads of stock of the old models have to ship that stock out and they'll sell it off cheaper and it just so happened that a big education supplier had a whole bunch of these top specification 2018 editions so I got mine for less than eighteen hundred pounds whereas the 2019 model was two thousand seven hundred pounds for the same thing in fact the only difference is the CPU was ever so slightly faster on the 2019 Edition but we're talking miniscule differences that you'd never notice so I managed to save myself almost a thousand pounds by buying a computer like that and I think the same thing might actually be true at the moment you might be able to now start picking up the 2019 models a lot cheaper and that represents great value for money this particular update seems to be a bit of a halfway house I expect next year they'll release the 14 inch MacBook Pro and at that point they might then bring the tenth generation CPUs to the lower specification models so if that's what you particularly want then perhaps hold off for another year or shop around for a bargain and some people hold off buying Apple products because they're always conscious that there might be a newer and more exciting product just around the corner and Apple are very good at you know keeping tight-lipped on announcements for their new products and then suddenly they arrive usually the week after you've caved in and bought the previous generation model always seems to happen to me anyway but I would say don't worry about that don't sit around waiting if you need a computer just buy the one that you need and it's gonna work for you and I tend to think about a three-year upgrade cycle for my notebooks anyway so if you're working on that cycle then you know that in three years time you'll have a new and more exciting notebook so I think it's good with the new MacBook Pro 13 inch that they've put that new keyboard in I don't think the base models hold much excitement for me the more powerful models are a bit more interesting but I'm going to reserve my judgment until we start to see some benchmarks coming through for those processors and then perhaps we'll make another video and in the meantime if you're not already subscribed to the channel please hit the button and tap that Bell icon if you want to be notified whenever I release new content and maybe I earned a thumbs up in any case I'll see you next time for some more geekery\n"