Base model M1 24' iMac vs upgraded model, worth an extra $200 Performance & benchmarks!

The Performance Differences Between Apple's Mid-Tier iMac and Base Model: A Surprising Result

Whether or not this is true, but it's a little bit weird. All that being said, the most surprising result of this testing was the final cut pro render. The two iMacs were exactly tied. Pretty much suggesting that the optimization is very similar and the rendering is probably not maxing out the CPU. Remember that everything else about these two devices is standardized - they have the same chassis, the same cooling, as well as the same RAM and the same sized SSD, but they don't have the same M1 chip. So, these results are very interesting and I think it's indicative of the way you should think about the choice between these devices.

When the M1 MacBooks came out, there were plenty of comparisons between the M1 MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, and the difference was similar in terms of performance and pricing. The Air performs worse than the Pro and costs $300 less. Similarly, here, the base iMac performs slightly worse than the mid-tier iMac, and costs $200 less. It's almost a proportional difference in price and performance. So, if you're discouraged by the performance difference between these two, you can think back to the way the M1 MacBooks were covered. People said basically, "Why pay the extra for the MacBook Pro when you can get most of that performance for $300 less?" However, unlike the MacBook Air vs. Pro debate, there are more noticeable differences between the base and mid-tier iMacs. You get more USB ports, you get Ethernet, you get Touch ID, and you get a little bit more performance for your extra $200.

As a result of this, I would argue that the mid-tier iMac represents a more compelling package. Given that you get those extra amenities, it's hard to justify not going for the mid-tier one. However, I don't think you have to go for the mid-tier; the debate has seemed to suggest that paying the extra $2,200 was a no-brainer. But I'm not sure it's a foregone conclusion. Sure, I would like to have those two extra ports, Ethernet on the power brick, and the extra performance as well as Touch ID on the keyboard - all that would be nice. But I would also like to have $2,000, and I could do a lot with that savings. I could take the base model up to 16 gigabytes of RAM or 512 gigabytes of storage. I could also buy an external Thunderbolt hub and add far more than two USB-C ports in real-world tasks.

In real-world tasks, you're probably not going to notice the difference in performance between these two devices unless you have them side by side. All the M1 chips are very, very similar, and you can only really see the differences when you put them on an even playing field and really zoom in. If you're playing Tomb Raider at 23 FPS, are you really going to be sitting there thinking, "Oh man, I wish I was playing it at 25"? No, you probably won't play it at all because that's a terrible experience. It's 23 FPS maybe if you do Blender for a living, the mid-tier one might be a little bit more noticeable. We saved nearly two minutes on a single render - that's not insignificant.

However, there is something worth noting: both of these are running through Rosetta, so they're not exactly optimized for Blender in the first place. Maybe you'd be better off with a used Intel machine? There's a lot to keep in mind from this video. Number one, you do get better CPU performance and better all-round performance out of the mid-tier iMac. It's not just a GPU thing, and you also don't necessarily notice it in all cases like in Final Cut Pro where this kept up just fine.

So, the question at the top of this video was: is the mid-tier iMac worth the extra $200? I think it is. I think you get a lot of extra features for that $200 and it definitely makes sense. However, I don't think it's a no-brainer. I don't think it's the obvious choice with the base model being completely terrible and you shouldn't even consider it. The base model is still perfectly good, and Apple has been very meticulous in positioning these two machines so that they could both have valid use cases.

So, which of these two machines should you buy? Well, honestly, it depends on what you need them for. If you want to save as much money as possible, you don't have to feel bad about going for the base model. But if you want the convenience of Touch ID, a little bit more performance, and all that comes with the mid-tier iMac, then don't feel bad spending the extra $2,200. It's all about what you need in terms of performance, features, and pricing.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin today's video we are going to have a face to face apples to apples comparison between the base model 1299 imac and the higher tier 1499 imac there's a difference of 200 but many other things besides so today we're going to be talking about livability and about performance and about money so sit back and buckle up and get subscribed and turn on notifications of course because you won't want to miss this one okay so the goal of today's video is quite simple to find out if this is worth 200 more than this pretty easy right the debate over this topic started pretty much immediately after the pricing was revealed soon after the april 20th event people were saying that the base model felt stripped out compared to the mid-tier one and there are basically four key differences for the extra two hundred dollars you get the full fat eight core gpu version of the m1 two additional type c non thunderbolt ports touch id on the keyboard and ethernet on the power adapter however it is worth noting that if ethernet is all you care about you can add that to the base model for 30 extra dollars so that's a pretty good idea if that's all you want you don't really care about the ports you don't care about the gpu you don't care about touch id that's a pretty cost effective way to do that without having to buy a dongle nobody wants a dongle i'm curious to know what you guys think do those four additional features make this imac worth an extra two hundred dollars or can you live without those things with an extra 200 in your pocket all things being equal i would probably take the 200 bucks and just type in my password but i think to be fair what we need to do is examine whether or not there are performance differences between these two devices because that could make a pretty key difference in deciding which one is worth it we've known for a while that this has the seven core gpu and this is the eight core gpu but how different are they really well this confusion ends today as i've set up a comparison between not just these two imacs but the mac mini and the macbook air as well so we can see how the two chips perform in different implementations and so now we're gonna run through some benchmarks on basically four different versions of the same thing we'll start with geekbench the least demanding test on the list which unsurprisingly reveals that they all score very similarly in fact the two imacs are just 12 points apart geekbench compute reveals a slightly different story however with the two m1s with seven chord gpus falling behind the eight core gpus and once again the higher tier imac is practically glued to the mac mini next up we'll go for a more demanding test cinebench r23 here the imacs should be very similar since they both have the same cpu layout but in reality the higher tier imac noticeably outperforms the base model even outscoring the mac mini this is a curious result and it continues to be curious when we move into blender in the bmw render the higher end imac finishes the render in 5 minutes and 42 seconds compared to 6 minutes and 23 seconds on the base model in the longer classroom test we see a proportionate difference with the base model taking nearly two full minutes longer than the upgraded one when we try some real world graphics tests we see a continuation of the mid-tier model outperforming the base but this time it makes sense because there's a difference in the gpu in shadow of the tomb raider the mid tier scores an average of 25 fps compared to the base's 23 and the mac mini beats both of them with 26. clearly the 7 chord gpu makes a difference although to be honest it's not a very big one in final cut pro however things get very weird the mid tier imac finished a 10 minute 10 bit 4k 60fps render 11 seconds slower than the base model this is well within a margin of error but the two machines were basically tied these results were honestly quite surprising i was not expecting the base model to lag behind in as many of the tests as it did considering that the cpu is theoretically the same they're both for performance cores and four efficiency cores in in theory the only difference should be the gpu but in tests like blender and cinebench r23 we could see that the differences were more than just one gpu core so basically here's what i think is happening here i think the seven core gpu variant of the m1 chip is a lower bend version which isn't able to sustain clock speeds as well as the higher bend eight core variant and so in addition to having one less gpu core on paper in the real world you do lose a little bit of cpu performance as well although to be clear the base imac does perform better than the base macbook air even though they have the same m1 variation because the macbook air is a tdp down configuration that's designed to be fanless another interesting thing that i noticed in these tests is that apple is not afraid to let these imacs get a little bit warm to the touch now in my extended two hours plus of testing with both of these machines the fans were audible at times but they are very very very quiet here's what it sounds like at full tilt i think apple is prioritizing sound over coolness with these two imacs especially because they don't have to sit in your lap like a macbook pro so it's not super noticeable if it gets a little bit warm to the touch and to be clear it's nowhere near as warm as the old intel imax got when apple basically did the same thing they let them get really hot before they kicked the fans in to try and keep the operation as silent as possible but now it actually kind of works whereas before they were just running at 99c all the time what does surprise me a little bit is that the same is not true of the mac mini the mac mini never gets warm at all and i think that the reason this is the case is because the mac mini basically has the same thermal design as the old one it has a heat sink on top of the m1 and a fan that blows air through the heatsink pretty simple however with these imacs i don't think that's the case if you look on apple's website you can see that the fans don't appear to be connected to a heat sink and then heat pipe that directly removes heat from the cpu and exhausts it out the bottom of the device it seems like the fans are similar more to the outgoing macbook air where it was sort of near a heat sink and it wasn't directly cooling a heat pipe we'll have to wait for tear downs to confirm whether or not this is true but it's a little bit weird all that being said the most surprising result of this testing was the final cut pro render the two imacs were exactly tied pretty much suggesting that the optimization is very similar and the rendering is probably not maxing out the cpu remember that everything else about these two devices is standardized they have the same chassis the same cooling as well as the same ram and the same sized ssd but they don't have the same m1 chip so these results are very interesting and i think it's indicative of the way you should think about the choice between these devices when the m1 macbooks came out there were plenty of comparisons between the m1 macbook air and macbook pro and the difference was similar both in terms of performance and pricing the air performs worse than the pro and costs 300 less similarly here the base imac performs slightly worse than the mid-tier imac and costs 200 less it's almost a proportional difference in price and performance so if you're discouraged by the performance difference between these two you can think back to the way the m1 macbooks were covered people said basically why pay the extra for the macbook pro when you can get most of that performance for 300 less however unlike the macbook air versus pro debate there are more noticeable differences between the base and mid tier imacs you get more usb ports you get ethernet you get touch id and you get a little bit more performance for your extra 200 whereas going from the air to the pro you got a touch bar and a little bit more battery life and a little bit more performance as a result of this i would argue that the mid-tier imac represents a more compelling package given that you get those extra amenities however i don't think you have to go for the mid-tier the debate has seemed to suggest that paying the extra two 200 was a no-brainer but i'm not sure it's a foregone conclusion sure i would like to have those two extra ports the ethernet on the power brick the extra performance as well as touch id on the keyboard that would all be nice but i would also like to have 200 and i could do a lot with that savings i could take the base model up to 16 gigabytes of ram or 512 gigabytes of storage i could also buy an external thunderbolt hub and add far more than two usbc ports in real world tasks you're probably not going to notice the difference in performance between these two devices unless you have them side by side all the m1 chips are very very similar and you can only really see the differences when you put them on an even playing field and really zoom in if you're playing tomb raider at 23 fps are you really going to be sitting there going oh man i wish i was playing it at 25 no you're probably not going to play it at all because that's a terrible experience it's 23 fps maybe if you do blender for a living the mid tier one might be a little bit more noticeable we saved nearly two minutes on a single render so that's that's not insignificant however it is worth noting that both of these are running through rosetta so they're not exactly optimized for blender in the first place maybe you'd be better off with a used intel machine so there's a lot of interesting things to keep in mind from this video number one you do get better cpu performance and better all-round performance out of the mid tier it's not just a gpu thing and you also don't necessarily notice it in all cases like in final cut pro where this kept up just fine so the question at the top of this video was is the mid-tier imac worth the extra 200 and i think it is i think you get a lot of extra features for that 200 and it definitely makes sense however i don't think it's a no-brainer i don't think it's the obvious choice with the base model being completely terrible and you shouldn't even consider it i think the base model is still perfectly good and apple has been very meticulous in positioning these two machines so that they could both have valid use cases so which of these two machines should you buy well honestly it depends on what you need them for if you want to save as much money as possible you don't have to feel bad about going for the base model but if you want the convenience of touch id a little bit more performance also don't feel bad about spending the extra 200 bucks on the mid-tier one it all depends on what you need in terms of performance features and pricing and i hope that this video has helped you arrive at a conclusion if you found it useful make sure to leave a like down below and don't forget to subscribe for more videos and as usual i will see you guys in the next one youin today's video we are going to have a face to face apples to apples comparison between the base model 1299 imac and the higher tier 1499 imac there's a difference of 200 but many other things besides so today we're going to be talking about livability and about performance and about money so sit back and buckle up and get subscribed and turn on notifications of course because you won't want to miss this one okay so the goal of today's video is quite simple to find out if this is worth 200 more than this pretty easy right the debate over this topic started pretty much immediately after the pricing was revealed soon after the april 20th event people were saying that the base model felt stripped out compared to the mid-tier one and there are basically four key differences for the extra two hundred dollars you get the full fat eight core gpu version of the m1 two additional type c non thunderbolt ports touch id on the keyboard and ethernet on the power adapter however it is worth noting that if ethernet is all you care about you can add that to the base model for 30 extra dollars so that's a pretty good idea if that's all you want you don't really care about the ports you don't care about the gpu you don't care about touch id that's a pretty cost effective way to do that without having to buy a dongle nobody wants a dongle i'm curious to know what you guys think do those four additional features make this imac worth an extra two hundred dollars or can you live without those things with an extra 200 in your pocket all things being equal i would probably take the 200 bucks and just type in my password but i think to be fair what we need to do is examine whether or not there are performance differences between these two devices because that could make a pretty key difference in deciding which one is worth it we've known for a while that this has the seven core gpu and this is the eight core gpu but how different are they really well this confusion ends today as i've set up a comparison between not just these two imacs but the mac mini and the macbook air as well so we can see how the two chips perform in different implementations and so now we're gonna run through some benchmarks on basically four different versions of the same thing we'll start with geekbench the least demanding test on the list which unsurprisingly reveals that they all score very similarly in fact the two imacs are just 12 points apart geekbench compute reveals a slightly different story however with the two m1s with seven chord gpus falling behind the eight core gpus and once again the higher tier imac is practically glued to the mac mini next up we'll go for a more demanding test cinebench r23 here the imacs should be very similar since they both have the same cpu layout but in reality the higher tier imac noticeably outperforms the base model even outscoring the mac mini this is a curious result and it continues to be curious when we move into blender in the bmw render the higher end imac finishes the render in 5 minutes and 42 seconds compared to 6 minutes and 23 seconds on the base model in the longer classroom test we see a proportionate difference with the base model taking nearly two full minutes longer than the upgraded one when we try some real world graphics tests we see a continuation of the mid-tier model outperforming the base but this time it makes sense because there's a difference in the gpu in shadow of the tomb raider the mid tier scores an average of 25 fps compared to the base's 23 and the mac mini beats both of them with 26. clearly the 7 chord gpu makes a difference although to be honest it's not a very big one in final cut pro however things get very weird the mid tier imac finished a 10 minute 10 bit 4k 60fps render 11 seconds slower than the base model this is well within a margin of error but the two machines were basically tied these results were honestly quite surprising i was not expecting the base model to lag behind in as many of the tests as it did considering that the cpu is theoretically the same they're both for performance cores and four efficiency cores in in theory the only difference should be the gpu but in tests like blender and cinebench r23 we could see that the differences were more than just one gpu core so basically here's what i think is happening here i think the seven core gpu variant of the m1 chip is a lower bend version which isn't able to sustain clock speeds as well as the higher bend eight core variant and so in addition to having one less gpu core on paper in the real world you do lose a little bit of cpu performance as well although to be clear the base imac does perform better than the base macbook air even though they have the same m1 variation because the macbook air is a tdp down configuration that's designed to be fanless another interesting thing that i noticed in these tests is that apple is not afraid to let these imacs get a little bit warm to the touch now in my extended two hours plus of testing with both of these machines the fans were audible at times but they are very very very quiet here's what it sounds like at full tilt i think apple is prioritizing sound over coolness with these two imacs especially because they don't have to sit in your lap like a macbook pro so it's not super noticeable if it gets a little bit warm to the touch and to be clear it's nowhere near as warm as the old intel imax got when apple basically did the same thing they let them get really hot before they kicked the fans in to try and keep the operation as silent as possible but now it actually kind of works whereas before they were just running at 99c all the time what does surprise me a little bit is that the same is not true of the mac mini the mac mini never gets warm at all and i think that the reason this is the case is because the mac mini basically has the same thermal design as the old one it has a heat sink on top of the m1 and a fan that blows air through the heatsink pretty simple however with these imacs i don't think that's the case if you look on apple's website you can see that the fans don't appear to be connected to a heat sink and then heat pipe that directly removes heat from the cpu and exhausts it out the bottom of the device it seems like the fans are similar more to the outgoing macbook air where it was sort of near a heat sink and it wasn't directly cooling a heat pipe we'll have to wait for tear downs to confirm whether or not this is true but it's a little bit weird all that being said the most surprising result of this testing was the final cut pro render the two imacs were exactly tied pretty much suggesting that the optimization is very similar and the rendering is probably not maxing out the cpu remember that everything else about these two devices is standardized they have the same chassis the same cooling as well as the same ram and the same sized ssd but they don't have the same m1 chip so these results are very interesting and i think it's indicative of the way you should think about the choice between these devices when the m1 macbooks came out there were plenty of comparisons between the m1 macbook air and macbook pro and the difference was similar both in terms of performance and pricing the air performs worse than the pro and costs 300 less similarly here the base imac performs slightly worse than the mid-tier imac and costs 200 less it's almost a proportional difference in price and performance so if you're discouraged by the performance difference between these two you can think back to the way the m1 macbooks were covered people said basically why pay the extra for the macbook pro when you can get most of that performance for 300 less however unlike the macbook air versus pro debate there are more noticeable differences between the base and mid tier imacs you get more usb ports you get ethernet you get touch id and you get a little bit more performance for your extra 200 whereas going from the air to the pro you got a touch bar and a little bit more battery life and a little bit more performance as a result of this i would argue that the mid-tier imac represents a more compelling package given that you get those extra amenities however i don't think you have to go for the mid-tier the debate has seemed to suggest that paying the extra two 200 was a no-brainer but i'm not sure it's a foregone conclusion sure i would like to have those two extra ports the ethernet on the power brick the extra performance as well as touch id on the keyboard that would all be nice but i would also like to have 200 and i could do a lot with that savings i could take the base model up to 16 gigabytes of ram or 512 gigabytes of storage i could also buy an external thunderbolt hub and add far more than two usbc ports in real world tasks you're probably not going to notice the difference in performance between these two devices unless you have them side by side all the m1 chips are very very similar and you can only really see the differences when you put them on an even playing field and really zoom in if you're playing tomb raider at 23 fps are you really going to be sitting there going oh man i wish i was playing it at 25 no you're probably not going to play it at all because that's a terrible experience it's 23 fps maybe if you do blender for a living the mid tier one might be a little bit more noticeable we saved nearly two minutes on a single render so that's that's not insignificant however it is worth noting that both of these are running through rosetta so they're not exactly optimized for blender in the first place maybe you'd be better off with a used intel machine so there's a lot of interesting things to keep in mind from this video number one you do get better cpu performance and better all-round performance out of the mid tier it's not just a gpu thing and you also don't necessarily notice it in all cases like in final cut pro where this kept up just fine so the question at the top of this video was is the mid-tier imac worth the extra 200 and i think it is i think you get a lot of extra features for that 200 and it definitely makes sense however i don't think it's a no-brainer i don't think it's the obvious choice with the base model being completely terrible and you shouldn't even consider it i think the base model is still perfectly good and apple has been very meticulous in positioning these two machines so that they could both have valid use cases so which of these two machines should you buy well honestly it depends on what you need them for if you want to save as much money as possible you don't have to feel bad about going for the base model but if you want the convenience of touch id a little bit more performance also don't feel bad about spending the extra 200 bucks on the mid-tier one it all depends on what you need in terms of performance features and pricing and i hope that this video has helped you arrive at a conclusion if you found it useful make sure to leave a like down below and don't forget to subscribe for more videos and as usual i will see you guys in the next one you\n"