One Professional’s Look at the New MacBook Pro

Thomas Grove Carter:

I’ve been using the new 15” MacBook Pro (with Touch Bar) for the last week or so for actual work, so here’s my “Professional” opinion.

I’m an editor at Trim Editing in London, where we cut high end commercials, music videos and films. We’re a small company and choose individually what we want to edit with. I happen to use Final Cut Pro X (If you’d like to debate with me endlessly about the Pro’ness of FCP X, you can do that here) So I’m in a good position to try out the new devices and see what they are/aren’t capable of.

First off, It’s really fast. I’ve been using the MacBook Pro with the new version of FCP X and cutting 5k ProRes material all week, it’s buttery smooth. No matter what you think the specs say, the fact is the software and hardware are so well integrated it tears strips off “superior spec’d” Windows counterparts in the real world. This has always been true of Macs. If you’re running software with old code which doesn’t utilise the hardware well, you’re not going to get great performance (as pointed out here). I understand people need to use programs from other developers, but at some point they need to play catch up. Otherwise it’s akin to asking for a more powerful engine because you like to buy tire-less wheels for your car. For all the kinds of work I do it’s been excellent.

It actually surprised me that editing 5K footage is “buttery smooth”. Now I’m curious as to how the 13″ model will do…

I just wish it had quad-core CPUs too.

To clarify: Thomas is using the 15″ model with a 2.7 GHz i7, 16 GB RAM, and AMD Radeon Pro 455.