**Unboxing and First Impressions**

I spent some time playing around with these new computers, obviously those Final Cut Pro results are I'm gonna say it surprising because yesterday when I tested the base model M2 Pro I noticed that it was faster than the M1 Pro that was good but the M1 Pro and the M1 Max are basically identical when it comes to these Final Cut renders now that's going to depend on the type of footage that you're rendering the codec the frame rate whatever but for this render test basically indistinguishable yet here the new M2 Max was not only faster than the M1 Max but also faster than the M2 Pro so that's good to see it looks like those extra video encoders are doing their job and this thing really is a screamer honestly I'm really happy with with the way the M2 Max is performing so far in every Benchmark that we've covered except for 3dmark there have been pretty noticeable pretty substantial performance gains.

**Benchmark Results**

In terms of benchmark results, I was pleased to see that the M2 Max performed extremely well. In Geekbench, it scored a respectable 2,100 single-core score and 7,300 multi-core score, outperforming the M1 Max by around 40% in both tests. Similarly, in 3DMark, it achieved an impressive 5,700 points on the Extreme test, outdoing the M1 Max by over 50%. However, when I ran some real-world benchmarks like Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, the M2 Max really shone, delivering frame rates of 114 FPS and 110 FPS at 1080p respectively. This is a significant improvement over the M1 Max, which struggled to hit 100 FPS in either test.

**Battery Life**

Another notable aspect of these new MacBooks is their battery life. I spent some time testing the battery life of both machines, starting from a 100% charge and monitoring them for several hours as they were used. The low battery notification came up at around 10% capacity on the M1 Max, while the M2 Max still had over 15% left in its battery. While this may not seem like a huge difference, it's worth noting that I was pushing these machines hard during my testing, running multiple resource-intensive tasks and recording video for extended periods of time. In a more realistic workflow, I think the M2 Max would be noticeably better in terms of battery life.

**Real-World Performance**

Overall, I'm extremely happy with the performance of the M2 Max in real-world use cases. Whether it's video editing, gaming, or general productivity, this machine truly is a screamer. The extra video encoders on the M2 Max seem to be doing their job, delivering faster performance and better results than expected. And while Apple has traditionally been a bit stingy with port options on its Macs, I'm thrilled to see the addition of an SD card slot and HDMI 2.1 Port on these new machines.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, I think it's safe to say that the M2 Max MacBook Pro is a significant improvement over last year's model. With its impressive performance, decent battery life, and plethora of ports, this machine has everything you need for demanding tasks like video editing and gaming. Of course, there are always trade-offs when it comes to power consumption, but I think Apple has found a sweet spot with the M2 Max that should satisfy even the most demanding users.

**A Word on Cooling**

One thing that did strike me during my testing was how well the M2 Max handled heat. In all honesty, I was a bit surprised by this – last year's M1 Pro and M1 Max were notorious for running hot under heavy load, but the M2 Max seems to be capable of cooling itself just fine even when pushed hard. Of course, it would still be nice if Apple could find a way to keep these machines from overheating completely, especially at high speeds, but this is a software choice that users can easily mitigate by adjusting fan settings or running resource-intensive tasks in less demanding modes.

**The Verdict**

Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the M2 Max MacBook Pro. It's clear that Apple has put a lot of thought into designing these machines to deliver exceptional performance and user experience. From the impressive benchmark results to the decent battery life, this machine checks all the boxes for users who need raw power and flexibility. And while there may be some trade-offs when it comes to port options or cooling, I think Apple has found a great balance between form and function with these new machines.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome welcome welcome it's time to step things up big time to the Top Dog the 38 core M2 Max 16 inch MacBook Pro this guy is gonna cost you and it's absolute cheapest 34.99 and that's what I paid this has 32 gigabytes of RAM and one terabyte of storage I didn't go for anything extra apart from that big boy GPU so the question for today is do the observations that we made about the M2 Pro hold true yesterday we looked at the 16 core GPU model and I was pleasantly surprised with the noticeable and regular performance gains but now the excuses are gone this is a 3500 machine it needs to do well and the question is will it well let's not beat around the bush let's jump straight in with cinebench R23 and see how the new 12 core CPU Stacks up against the old 10 core and as you might expect those extra cores are putting in some work we saw a new score of 14 701 up from 12 302 before and honestly that's uh that's a pretty significant gain those extra cores are putting in the work but how are they putting in that much work after all they only added two efficiency cores it shouldn't be that powerful well if you peek behind the curtain just a little bit you start to see why but before we get into a whole lot of curtain peeking on these machines I'll tell you one thing if you are planning on upgrading to one of the new M2 Max definitely check out today's video sponsor Best Buy and their new upgrade plus program upgrade plus is an affordable way to get your favorite Mac today pay for it over time and even upgrade to a new model after 36 months monthly payments are low for example the 14 inch M2 Pro starts at 43 dollars per month for 36 months with a 439 dollar final payment in month 37. now when you get to month 37 you have three options you can either make the payment to own the Mac outright you can skip the payment and return your Mac to the store or you can upgrade it also without having to make the final payment this allows you to own a brand new Mac every three years without having to make payment all up front and it prevents you from having to go through the hassle of selling your old Mac when you want to upgrade upgrade plus gives you an affordable way to own a Macbook so if you're interested in learning more check out the link in the description below a huge thanks to Best Buy for sponsoring this review of the new M2 Pro and Max MacBooks and now let's get back to it so yeah let's do a little bit of digging and figure out how Apple managed to get nearly 20 percent more CPU performance just by adding two efficiency cores and tweaking the architecture a little bit I'm kind of suspicious so I started running cinebench back to back to back and I opened up TG Pro which just got updated to support these new chips and something very interesting immediately jumped out at me why is the M2 Max running so hot they're both doing the same workload they both have the exact same cooling system but the M2 Max on average was running 5 to 10 degrees hotter across the board and the really interesting part is take a look at those efficiency cores those guys are really pumping up there we're up in the mid 90s on those e-cores whereas typically they're down in the 80s somewhere so this tells us two things number one apple is definitely pumping some more juice into this chip and number two a lot of that juice is go into the e chords they are really giving it their all this time around but I don't want to move on from the thermal discussion just yet because I want to explain what's going on here I'm sure you're going to see coverage on YouTube that will be raising alarm bells for these high temperatures and saying that apple is thermal throttling that is not What's Happening Here thermal throttling happens when a computer is running so hot that the only way for it to keep itself cool is reducing the performance of its components think of it as three sliding graphs on the top we have our performance output in the middle we have the temperatures and on the bottom we have the fans to keep it all in check when thermal throttling occurs your fans and your temperature are going to be absolutely pegged at the top and the only thing that can move is the performance that's got to decrease but take a look at our TG Pro output the fans are barely moving the M2 Max is shifting a little bit more air than the M1 Max but neither are really audible they're extremely quiet machines so thermal throttling is not going on here what's happening is Apple is making a conscious choice if we go back to our graphs here they want performance at the absolute Max but they're also willing to let their temperatures sit right near the absolute Max because that way the fans don't have to be at their Max nobody likes the sound of a really loud laptop fan screaming away so apple is choosing to run these laptops super hot but look there could still be thermal throttling how do you know well we know because if you max out the fans just absolutely let her rip up to 5700 RPM there's no difference in the cinebench scores you can run these things back to back to back to back it does not matter whether you control the fans or you let the system control the fans the score is going to be the same and that means there's no thermal throttling now am I happy with the way Apple chose to go about this no I'd rather not have four of my cores sitting at over 100 degrees Celsius I would prefer if we go back to our graphs something a little bit more like this get the fans going halfway so that we can keep our temperatures in the 80s I get why Apple wanted a quiet machine I mean it's amazing when you don't have to listen to Fan noise all the time but they could have had the coolest running CPUs by far if you Max these things out you're at like 75 degrees on the soc that is ludicrous every other computer out there with Intel or AMD is going to be maxing the fans and in the 90 degree celsius range these guys don't have that problem right bit of a thermals rant would you like to see some more benchmarks I know I do so yesterday I sat down and ran a whole bunch foreign so one of the things that surprised me a lot when testing the base model M2 Pro is that it significantly improved our blender GPU performance even though we had the same number of cores so now we have a lot more cores let's see if that scales okay so far we're running at a pretty similar Pace the M2 Max estimates a remaining 20 seconds compared to over a minute on the M1 Max so it looks like the M2 Max is outperforming it by a very noticeable amount and we are done 49 seconds and the M1 Max is still going a minute and eight seconds with time remaining and we're done a minute and 26.9 seconds compared to 49 seconds that is that is seriously impressive gains it looks like the M2 series is absolutely smoking the M1 series when it comes to blender but seemingly only with blender let's run 3dmark Wildlife extreme and I'll show you what I mean all right we'll start them right at the exact same time here so take a look at this we've got 18 793 on the M1 Max and 19905 on the M2 Max and our FPS difference well that went from 112 to 119. so that's a pretty small difference and this is a test that has historically scaled pretty well with the number of GPU cores honestly I got nothing I don't know why we're seeing a 40 gain in blender but only a six percent gain in 3D Mark all right so let's see how these things Stack Up in Final Cut Pro so I've got a 31 minute 4K 60fps 10 bit clip here and we're just gonna go ahead and apply a little bit of a light color grade on it alright so now let's set Final Cut to render and away we go oh already the M2 Max is pulling out a little bit of a lead it's about a percent ahead and I think it's gaining all right this is like watching paint dry but we're at 40 and 32 so the lead is widening now to eight percentage points oh sorry I fell asleep there okay 95 we're almost done 75 so we have now got a 20 lead for the M2 Max that is pretty impressive given that the only real differences are two efficiency cores and six GPU cores additional come on come on you can do it 98 99 come on we're so close oh there it is 10 minutes and four seconds so that's more than two minutes faster not too shabby if I don't say so myself oh gee thanks yesterday Luke great reporting so a lot of interesting things to unpack with these new computers obviously those Final Cut Pro results are I'm gonna say it surprising because yesterday when I tested the base model M2 Pro I noticed that it was faster than the M1 Pro that was good but the M1 Pro and the M1 Max are basically identical when it comes to these Final Cut renders now that's going to depend on the type of footage that you're rendering the codec the frame rate whatever but for this render test basically indistinguishable yet here the new M2 Max was not only faster than the M1 Max but also faster than the M2 Pro so that's good to see it looks like those extra video encoders are doing their job and this thing really is a screamer honestly I'm really happy with with the way the M2 Max is performing so far in every Benchmark that we've covered except for 3dmark there have been pretty noticeable pretty substantial performance gains and in 3dmark like okay it's a little iPhone Benchmark that's not super indicative of real world performance if you actually fire up a game like Tomb Raider for example you'll notice that at 1080p on medium settings we're jumping from 97 FPS on the M1 Max to 114 on the M2 Max that is extremely noticeable that's 20 FPS different that's basically maxing out the pro motion display here so percentage-wise sure maybe 20 isn't that impressive but going from 97 to almost 120 FPS that is something that you would definitely notice I mean think about it this way if you go over to the PC side of YouTube and you look at a review of a graphics card that is 20 franc frames per second faster than its predecessor that is substantial Gamers will notice that and so when you talk about adding 20 FPS subtracting two minutes off of your final cut render having your blender render those are meaningful impactful results even the SSD is faster in this machine compared to last year these are both one terabyte MacBooks and yet the new one is clocking over six gigabytes per second read speeds wow that's substantial and in a one terabyte MacBook Pro that's actually going to be useful I said this yesterday and it might be a little controversial but I believe that if you're buying a 512 gigabyte SSD you are probably going to be limited more by the size of it than the speed all I'm saying is if you're someone who's really going to notice and need six gigabytes per second you probably need more than half a terabyte so yeah the M2 is looking like a really well-rounded machine oh and by the way I forgot to tell you that I was running a secret battery life test this whole time whoa it has been a long two days of testing so from both of them starting at a hundred percent by the time all was said and done with about six to eight hours of using and recording and testing these things the low battery notification came up 10 on the M1 Max the M2 Max still at 15. not a huge difference I know but keep in mind that I was basically pushing these machines as hard as they could go for quite a bit of those six to eight hours so in a more realistic workflow I think the M2 Max would be noticeably better so what's not to like about the M2 Max honestly we've got 40 percent GPU Improvement in some cases 20 CPU Improvement we've got decent battery life Improvement and we've got an 8K HDMI 2.1 Port that's a big weak spot that bothered me last year and now that's been fixed and it does all this without really changing the experience of the MacBook we still have a cooling system that is more than capable of cooling this thing even if Apple decides to let it get really really hot and of course that fantastic keyboard the promotion display the plethora of ports including the SD card slot that I just love so very much yeah this is a great machine I know there's probably going to be reviews out there that take the negative stance and yeah I sure would like it if Apple would not run these things at over 100 degrees Celsius but that's a software choice and you can easily get around it by just setting your fans to like 40 speed and then it literally will never overheat so that is my extremely long and hopefully comprehensive and in-depth review of the 16 inch M2 Max MacBook Pro this thing surprised me I was not expecting it to be as good as it is and I'm very pleased I'm curious to hear what you guys think about this machine in the comments below so definitely let me know and with that I will see you in the next video ohwelcome welcome welcome it's time to step things up big time to the Top Dog the 38 core M2 Max 16 inch MacBook Pro this guy is gonna cost you and it's absolute cheapest 34.99 and that's what I paid this has 32 gigabytes of RAM and one terabyte of storage I didn't go for anything extra apart from that big boy GPU so the question for today is do the observations that we made about the M2 Pro hold true yesterday we looked at the 16 core GPU model and I was pleasantly surprised with the noticeable and regular performance gains but now the excuses are gone this is a 3500 machine it needs to do well and the question is will it well let's not beat around the bush let's jump straight in with cinebench R23 and see how the new 12 core CPU Stacks up against the old 10 core and as you might expect those extra cores are putting in some work we saw a new score of 14 701 up from 12 302 before and honestly that's uh that's a pretty significant gain those extra cores are putting in the work but how are they putting in that much work after all they only added two efficiency cores it shouldn't be that powerful well if you peek behind the curtain just a little bit you start to see why but before we get into a whole lot of curtain peeking on these machines I'll tell you one thing if you are planning on upgrading to one of the new M2 Max definitely check out today's video sponsor Best Buy and their new upgrade plus program upgrade plus is an affordable way to get your favorite Mac today pay for it over time and even upgrade to a new model after 36 months monthly payments are low for example the 14 inch M2 Pro starts at 43 dollars per month for 36 months with a 439 dollar final payment in month 37. now when you get to month 37 you have three options you can either make the payment to own the Mac outright you can skip the payment and return your Mac to the store or you can upgrade it also without having to make the final payment this allows you to own a brand new Mac every three years without having to make payment all up front and it prevents you from having to go through the hassle of selling your old Mac when you want to upgrade upgrade plus gives you an affordable way to own a Macbook so if you're interested in learning more check out the link in the description below a huge thanks to Best Buy for sponsoring this review of the new M2 Pro and Max MacBooks and now let's get back to it so yeah let's do a little bit of digging and figure out how Apple managed to get nearly 20 percent more CPU performance just by adding two efficiency cores and tweaking the architecture a little bit I'm kind of suspicious so I started running cinebench back to back to back and I opened up TG Pro which just got updated to support these new chips and something very interesting immediately jumped out at me why is the M2 Max running so hot they're both doing the same workload they both have the exact same cooling system but the M2 Max on average was running 5 to 10 degrees hotter across the board and the really interesting part is take a look at those efficiency cores those guys are really pumping up there we're up in the mid 90s on those e-cores whereas typically they're down in the 80s somewhere so this tells us two things number one apple is definitely pumping some more juice into this chip and number two a lot of that juice is go into the e chords they are really giving it their all this time around but I don't want to move on from the thermal discussion just yet because I want to explain what's going on here I'm sure you're going to see coverage on YouTube that will be raising alarm bells for these high temperatures and saying that apple is thermal throttling that is not What's Happening Here thermal throttling happens when a computer is running so hot that the only way for it to keep itself cool is reducing the performance of its components think of it as three sliding graphs on the top we have our performance output in the middle we have the temperatures and on the bottom we have the fans to keep it all in check when thermal throttling occurs your fans and your temperature are going to be absolutely pegged at the top and the only thing that can move is the performance that's got to decrease but take a look at our TG Pro output the fans are barely moving the M2 Max is shifting a little bit more air than the M1 Max but neither are really audible they're extremely quiet machines so thermal throttling is not going on here what's happening is Apple is making a conscious choice if we go back to our graphs here they want performance at the absolute Max but they're also willing to let their temperatures sit right near the absolute Max because that way the fans don't have to be at their Max nobody likes the sound of a really loud laptop fan screaming away so apple is choosing to run these laptops super hot but look there could still be thermal throttling how do you know well we know because if you max out the fans just absolutely let her rip up to 5700 RPM there's no difference in the cinebench scores you can run these things back to back to back to back it does not matter whether you control the fans or you let the system control the fans the score is going to be the same and that means there's no thermal throttling now am I happy with the way Apple chose to go about this no I'd rather not have four of my cores sitting at over 100 degrees Celsius I would prefer if we go back to our graphs something a little bit more like this get the fans going halfway so that we can keep our temperatures in the 80s I get why Apple wanted a quiet machine I mean it's amazing when you don't have to listen to Fan noise all the time but they could have had the coolest running CPUs by far if you Max these things out you're at like 75 degrees on the soc that is ludicrous every other computer out there with Intel or AMD is going to be maxing the fans and in the 90 degree celsius range these guys don't have that problem right bit of a thermals rant would you like to see some more benchmarks I know I do so yesterday I sat down and ran a whole bunch foreign so one of the things that surprised me a lot when testing the base model M2 Pro is that it significantly improved our blender GPU performance even though we had the same number of cores so now we have a lot more cores let's see if that scales okay so far we're running at a pretty similar Pace the M2 Max estimates a remaining 20 seconds compared to over a minute on the M1 Max so it looks like the M2 Max is outperforming it by a very noticeable amount and we are done 49 seconds and the M1 Max is still going a minute and eight seconds with time remaining and we're done a minute and 26.9 seconds compared to 49 seconds that is that is seriously impressive gains it looks like the M2 series is absolutely smoking the M1 series when it comes to blender but seemingly only with blender let's run 3dmark Wildlife extreme and I'll show you what I mean all right we'll start them right at the exact same time here so take a look at this we've got 18 793 on the M1 Max and 19905 on the M2 Max and our FPS difference well that went from 112 to 119. so that's a pretty small difference and this is a test that has historically scaled pretty well with the number of GPU cores honestly I got nothing I don't know why we're seeing a 40 gain in blender but only a six percent gain in 3D Mark all right so let's see how these things Stack Up in Final Cut Pro so I've got a 31 minute 4K 60fps 10 bit clip here and we're just gonna go ahead and apply a little bit of a light color grade on it alright so now let's set Final Cut to render and away we go oh already the M2 Max is pulling out a little bit of a lead it's about a percent ahead and I think it's gaining all right this is like watching paint dry but we're at 40 and 32 so the lead is widening now to eight percentage points oh sorry I fell asleep there okay 95 we're almost done 75 so we have now got a 20 lead for the M2 Max that is pretty impressive given that the only real differences are two efficiency cores and six GPU cores additional come on come on you can do it 98 99 come on we're so close oh there it is 10 minutes and four seconds so that's more than two minutes faster not too shabby if I don't say so myself oh gee thanks yesterday Luke great reporting so a lot of interesting things to unpack with these new computers obviously those Final Cut Pro results are I'm gonna say it surprising because yesterday when I tested the base model M2 Pro I noticed that it was faster than the M1 Pro that was good but the M1 Pro and the M1 Max are basically identical when it comes to these Final Cut renders now that's going to depend on the type of footage that you're rendering the codec the frame rate whatever but for this render test basically indistinguishable yet here the new M2 Max was not only faster than the M1 Max but also faster than the M2 Pro so that's good to see it looks like those extra video encoders are doing their job and this thing really is a screamer honestly I'm really happy with with the way the M2 Max is performing so far in every Benchmark that we've covered except for 3dmark there have been pretty noticeable pretty substantial performance gains and in 3dmark like okay it's a little iPhone Benchmark that's not super indicative of real world performance if you actually fire up a game like Tomb Raider for example you'll notice that at 1080p on medium settings we're jumping from 97 FPS on the M1 Max to 114 on the M2 Max that is extremely noticeable that's 20 FPS different that's basically maxing out the pro motion display here so percentage-wise sure maybe 20 isn't that impressive but going from 97 to almost 120 FPS that is something that you would definitely notice I mean think about it this way if you go over to the PC side of YouTube and you look at a review of a graphics card that is 20 franc frames per second faster than its predecessor that is substantial Gamers will notice that and so when you talk about adding 20 FPS subtracting two minutes off of your final cut render having your blender render those are meaningful impactful results even the SSD is faster in this machine compared to last year these are both one terabyte MacBooks and yet the new one is clocking over six gigabytes per second read speeds wow that's substantial and in a one terabyte MacBook Pro that's actually going to be useful I said this yesterday and it might be a little controversial but I believe that if you're buying a 512 gigabyte SSD you are probably going to be limited more by the size of it than the speed all I'm saying is if you're someone who's really going to notice and need six gigabytes per second you probably need more than half a terabyte so yeah the M2 is looking like a really well-rounded machine oh and by the way I forgot to tell you that I was running a secret battery life test this whole time whoa it has been a long two days of testing so from both of them starting at a hundred percent by the time all was said and done with about six to eight hours of using and recording and testing these things the low battery notification came up 10 on the M1 Max the M2 Max still at 15. not a huge difference I know but keep in mind that I was basically pushing these machines as hard as they could go for quite a bit of those six to eight hours so in a more realistic workflow I think the M2 Max would be noticeably better so what's not to like about the M2 Max honestly we've got 40 percent GPU Improvement in some cases 20 CPU Improvement we've got decent battery life Improvement and we've got an 8K HDMI 2.1 Port that's a big weak spot that bothered me last year and now that's been fixed and it does all this without really changing the experience of the MacBook we still have a cooling system that is more than capable of cooling this thing even if Apple decides to let it get really really hot and of course that fantastic keyboard the promotion display the plethora of ports including the SD card slot that I just love so very much yeah this is a great machine I know there's probably going to be reviews out there that take the negative stance and yeah I sure would like it if Apple would not run these things at over 100 degrees Celsius but that's a software choice and you can easily get around it by just setting your fans to like 40 speed and then it literally will never overheat so that is my extremely long and hopefully comprehensive and in-depth review of the 16 inch M2 Max MacBook Pro this thing surprised me I was not expecting it to be as good as it is and I'm very pleased I'm curious to hear what you guys think about this machine in the comments below so definitely let me know and with that I will see you in the next video oh\n"