2018 Vega 20 MacBook Pro - Full Unboxing and Review

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone Aaron here for ZolloTech andthis is the late 2018 Vega 20 MacBookPro this is Apple's top-of-the-lineMacBook Pro although this one does nothave the 4 terabytes of storage it onlyhas one terabyte now in this video I'vebeen using this for about a month or sobut I also did the unboxing when I firstpicked it up and I just never publishedthe video so that's actually in thisvideo but if you don't want to see allof that you can just click the link inthe description where there's time codesand you can jump around or whateverwe're going to look at everything fromthe unboxing to benchmarks to editingand some other things as wellso check that out down there if you'dlike to see that and let's go ahead andunbox it now this is the top-of-the-lineexcept for storage when it comes to thenew 2015 MacBook Pro so let me flip itover here as you can see it's the 15.4inch Retina display it's got the 2.9gigahertz of core I 9 6 core 32gigabytes of RAM one terabyte of storageand the radiant pro vega card in it with4 gigabytes of RAM so this is probablythe most expensive macbook I've everpurchased this is four thousand twohundred and fifty dollars beforeAppleCare which is pretty absurd so itbetter perform much better than my 2017macbook that's equivalent now I did tryusing the Mac Mini but that just wasn'tgoing to do it for me because I like tobe portable and I have a monitor I liketo connect to up here and I had to usean e GPU just to get the performance andyou get out of it so let me go ahead andunbox this so I get some of this wrapperthere we gosince space grade just like the otherone and with this I don't think you geta whole lot other than the computeryou've got a little bit of documentationhere see what we've gotso we've got MacBook Pro kind of aQuickStart guide here and then we've gotApple stickers like you get witheverything but they're not Pro or SpaceGray they're just white and then we'vegot our wall adapter USB see there is noextension cable for it anymore just likethere has been for a couple years andthen USB CD USB C so let's set thisaside and set this up and of course wehave the newer third-generationbutterfly keys and it turns on as soonas you open it upwait for that just a moment now I'mgoing to set this up as new so I can useit as my main editing computer and we'llsee how it compares to what I've got nowand whether it's worth keeping orpicking up for yourself or gettingsomething different now being that thisis one of the newer Mac books it has thelatest Butterfly keyboard on it it worksfine for me I don't mind it at all butif you're someone that doesn't like thisit's going to be a pain for you and ifyou want to type something it can be alittle bit clicky and noisy but it'sdefinitely more quiet than before or atleast a different noise the trackpad isgreat it's just like any other MacBookand the touch bar is something I neveruse in fact I use it for that normalthing that you'd get with the currentMacBooks without the touch bar volumevolume up volume down keyboardbrightness screen brightness and that isit the fingerprint sensor is really niceit's definiteworth having and that's it I could goback to the regular one I have no reasonto use the touch bar even with Final CutPro or anything like thatnow the display is really nice and ifI'm going to do anything like edit videoor photos or anything like that I turnoff true tone and it's currently off butlet me show you what it does with thisbackground you'll see here if I turn ontrue tone it will try and make this lookmore paperwhite and I don't really wantthat when I'm going for color accuracyand then again if I turn on night shiftwhich is really nice for your eyes ifyou're looking at this at night and youwant to really want it to not botheryour eyes it's fine but when you'reactually trying to edit it's a bad ideabecause you'll see again it's kind ofmore yellow it takes the blue out of itand while that may be a little bitbetter for your eyes at night it's notgreat again if you're going for coloraccuracy so the display is great but ithas those added features now one of thegreat things is thermals are no longeran issue with this you'll see here thisis ISTAT menu we've got all thedifferent thermals and I'll show yousome shots of this where it's actuallyusing a lot of the processor and it'snot throttling same goes for the GPUwhen it's using that new Vega 20 GPU itjust doesn't throttle anymore and that'sa really great thing so let me show yousomething else that I thought was reallyimpressive as well and one of the thingsthat's really impressive is this isCanon Raw light recorded on this this isrecorded from a c200 camera on a C fastcard and it's plugged in directly to themacbook itself and you'll see these arethe files and these files are huge thisis ninety four point nine five gigabyteslet's go ahead and just create a newevent we'll just call it test event andwe'll leave the files in place we're notgoing to replace them or copy them tothe drive or anything like that let'sjust import those you'll see we've gotthe little beach ball there takes asecond and here's the file itself let'screate an event we'll just call it testevent and we'll leave the resolutionsalone we'll hit okay and then let's takethis file and we'll drag it down intothe timeline and you'll see this is myfile forthe pixel 3xl and we'll just play it inthe timeline it plays fine it's playingdirectly off this see fast part i'm notimporting it or anything i don't have towait for it to render or anything it'ssuper fast no problems there and I dofind that it works pretty well on the2017 macbook pro but sometimes ithiccups here even with an externaldisplay it doesn't seem to hiccup at allyou can go in here color grade it towhatever you'd like change that maybebump the saturation will mess with theexposure a little bit and just make itlook correct we'll make it fullscreenand we'll just play it back after thelots been applied everything's in placewe can just jump through the timelineand if you've had it ever edited cinemaRaw light using a C fast card its directoff the C fast card nothing specialgoing on here so that's prettyimpressive to me one thing that's reallyhelpful is the 32 gigabytes of RAM thatyou get with this now you can see theCPU is kind of doing some backgroundrendering in Final Cut Pro but even withFinal Cut Pro Open we have PixelmatorPro open we also have tweet bot messagesmail Chrome Safari the App Store iTunesand photos and if we take a look at howmuch memory we're using we're usingabout very little there's 20 gigabytesfree we're using about 8 to 19 or so andnot not very much we're using maybe 12gigabytes we're still under 16 gigabytesthat you'd use on the previous versionsof the MacBook Pros maxed out so it'sdoing really well managing all of thesethings at once often times I'll actuallyexport video using Final Cut Pro and atthe same time I'll be using PixelmatorPro and have some other things openmaybe a video playing in the backgroundthere's no issues although those fans dospin up quite a bit and then talkingabout external devices using it with ane GPU is not recommended at least in myexperience I find it to be far too buggyit would lock up on me at least once aday when using an e GPU and since theVega 20 is fast enough I don't reallyfind that I need it too much but thereis a downside to that withthe thermals is the fans get reallyreally loud and let me see if you canhear this I'll just turn them up so youcan hear them I've got a little fanmanagement thing here max fan controland if you want to turn them up theyspin up to 6000 rpm now we'll hit okayand I find that full processor use whenI'm really pushing this editing video orcompressing video it's quite loud sohere this for a second and to see whatyou think so here is my decibel meterit's just an app I don't know howaccurate it is but this gives you anidea this is me at my speaking volumecurrently I'm around 70 decibels let mestop talking so you can hear how loudthis is so wrong around 50 DB or so andit's it's fine for most things if you'reexporting you're not really needing itto be too quiet but just keep that inmind it is quite loud and it normallyspins up to the full 6000 rpm or justunder when you're editing so we'll justflip that back to auto it goes to silentbut if I'm editing c200 raw light orCanon raw light it definitely spinsthose up full speed while I'm editingthe entire time so it's not like one ofthe new Mac minis or even the iMac proso let's take a look at some of thebenchmarks and how they compared to someother Mac books as wellI ran Geekbench on three different Macsmy 2017 MacBook Pro it's a fully SPECTquad-core 3.1 gigahertz core i7 16 gigsof ram and radian pro 560 graphics wealso have the 2018 Mac Mini fully SPECTout with a 3.2 gigahertz six core i7 32gigabytes of RAM and it's Intel u HDgraphics 630 and then the 2018 MacBookPro with the Vega 20 graphics and you'llsee how they can compare and will do thesamedevices for each comparison so the firstthing is the 2018 macbook scored fivethousand six hundred and seventy fivethe Mac Mini was five thousand sixhundred and seventy and the 2017 MacBookPro was 4342 for the multi-core scoreswe have fifteen thousand six hundred andsixty nine for the MacBook Pro from 2017the 2018 Macscored twenty four thousand threehundred and forty three and the Vegatwenty MacBook Pro scored twenty fivethousand six hundred and fifty now theOpenCL test from Geekbench was a littlebit different with the 2017 macbook proscoring forty six thousand nine hundredthe 2018 Mac Mini scored of twenty threethousand two hundred and ninety one andthe Vega twenty MacBook Pro scoredseventy eight thousand fifty nine nowlet's move on to the metal test and youcan see it's very very similar fortyfour thousand seven hundred and sixtyseven for the 2017 macbook pro twentyfive thousand three hundred and fortyfour for the Mac Mini and for the Vegatwenty MacBook Pro seventy nine thousandnine hundred and thirty seven the nexttest I did involved exporting a 4k videousing Final Cut Pro 10 I exported it inh.264 and deleted the render files eachtime before exporting to make sure thatthese were accurate now as you can seethe Vega 20 macbook pro was the quickestwith 13 minutes and 23 seconds coming insecond was the 2017 macbook pro with 13minutes and 58 seconds so not that muchslower and then last is the 2018 MacMini with 15 minutes in 28 seconds now Iran the same test but exporting to h.265since the t2 encoder on the newer 2018MacBook Pros should speed this up a lotand it certainly did it exported inseven minutes in 14 seconds whereas the2017 MacBook Pro exported in 15 minutesand 32 seconds so it's a very bigdifference the next test is Cinebench solet me go ahead and open that up waitfor it to load here and we'll run thecpu test and also we'll see what the CPUis doing here as we're doing it itactually should spike when we're runningthe CPU test so let's go ahead and runthat and if you look up here at the verytop you'll see the CPU is kind of spikedand the temperature hits 100 degrees solet's see what it does and it's backdown to 87 or 90 so that's good it'skeeping itself pretty coolso the CPU test completed we've got onethousand 113 let's go ahead and run theOpenGL test with OpenGL we got a hundredand nine point nine five frames persecond so it did pretty good there soagain CPU was 1113 now when it comes togamesI don't really game on this I addedvideo on this most of the time so ifit'll video 4k video Canon raw lightit'll do pretty much anything else buthere's some fun games I play of courseit's gonna play those with no problemswhatsoever and run them at decent framerates but if you really want a gamingmachine this is not the one to buy thisis too expensive for that and we'll talkmore about that in a moment but let'stake a look at the heaven benchmark soyou can see what that's like so we'llopen the heaven benchmark and let's justset it to extreme to see how it does andlet's click run and we'll see what we'vegot so up here is the processor speedand you'll see different things likememory and things like that well waitfor it here and it didn't go fullscreenbut it's running at a solid 29 framesper second right now in extreme sothat's pretty good and much better thanthe previous generation or 2018 MacBookPro and again you'll see it's not reallyusing much of the CPU but rather the GPUat this time so you can see everythingwired and what's running here but it'srunning pretty well frames per second54.3 right now it's at 60 so that'spretty solid that's probably the bestI've seen on any MacBook Pro ever soit's doing a great job as far as thatgoes so you'll see it's nice and smoothno problems there and that's an extremeso let's do one more thing here we'llchange the settings it's not in fullresolution so that wasn't the standardand then let's see if we can hitfullscreen click okay let's change it tofull resolution and see what we get andthere we go I expected it to hiccup alittle bit more so we'll click close andnow we're down to 27 frames per secondin full screen and at full resolutionwhich you would expect you would expectit to drop quite a bit so we're at 33frames per second it's doing pretty wellespecially for a MacBookso let's go ahead and quit this and so Ithink you'll see that the benchmarksthemselves are very impressivenothing really slows this down too muchand it's really made for editing videoand music and doing really heavyapplications and hopefully with a littlebit better GPU support I was using itwith an RX 580 it works fine but itlocks up for me regularly with Final CutPro and that's even using it there's away you can force it to use the e GPUand that's what I was doing and it stilldoesn't seem to work really well for meall the time let's talk about batterylife for a little bit the battery lifeon this is just like any other MacBookPro if you're editing it's going to godown to a couple hours if you're doingjust browsing the web it'll last youseven hours or so maybe a little bitlonger maybe a little bit less dependingon what you're doing I never let it getdown to that point where I don't justplug it in because I'm usually editingcontent now after using the 20 18MacBook Pro for a month it's definitelyfast it's great at multitasking but Inever used over about 16 gigabytes ofRAM so the 2017 models with 16 gigabytesof RAM seem to be ok even though that 32is great to have is kind of a bufferoverhead I never used it at least withFinal Cut Pro anyway and having multipleapplications open now as far as theprice the price is four thousand twohundred and fifty dollars plus 375 forApple care plus tax and that puts itaround five thousand dollars or I MacPro territory or 5k iMac and MacBook Proterritory you could get both of thosethings for the price of this and usingthat is just it's great to use but whenit's five thousand dollars for a laptopand you can get an equivalent Windowslaptop for about twenty five hundreddollars with the same specs from Razeror something like that maybe even lessmaybe a little bit more depending whatwe're looking at it's kind of a lot ofmoney for what it is and using it withthings like an external display this LGback here it has a lot of issues wakingup from sleep and I found that to betrue across multiple displays and a lotof people have told me the same thing infact some friends on YouTube have hadthe same experienceand one of them decided to get an iMacPro because of it they just couldn'tdeal with the MacBook Pro and itsdisplay issues from time to time sothere's definitely some issues there andthen the e GPU in my opinion as much asI want to like it is useless for FinalCut Pro because it locks up every singleday every time I use it I have an issuewith it locking upit completely freezes I'll unplug itwith Thunderbolt and it seems to workagain so for whatever reason it's just aproblem over and over and over and it'sreally driving me crazy because it's notsomething that I expect from Apple it'snot an aftermarket one it's actually thedeveloper box I'm using but I know ofother people that have different onesand have the same experience so there'ssomething there that is causing problemsnot just with final cut but otherapplications as well and then finallythere's the issue of people that boughtthe mid 2018 MacBook Pro are out of luckfor getting this one in an upgrade ifyou paid four thousand dollars for thatone you can't just go trade it in andget this one in them and then have themupgrade you for a little bit of extramoney they just won't do itand that's unfortunate but that's it andthat's my thoughts and experience withthis if you have any other questions orcomments I'd love to hear what you haveto say in the comments below if youhaven't subscribed already pleasesubscribe and like as always thanks forwatching I'll see you next time\n"