Recently, Apple out of the blue decided to refresh the MacBook Pros. While they look identical on the outside, the internals have been significantly reworked. The new MacBooks come with a whole new slew of features which you may or may not care for including a True Tone display, Quieter Keyboards ( Yay if you were on of those people that wanted quieter keyboards), Better speakers and the all important RAM and processor upgrades. People have been asking for more RAM on the MacBooks for quite a while and they're justified in asking for more RAM as these are Pro devices and as any good video editor will tell you, Final Cut Pro will chew through 16 GigaBytes of RAM. The 32 Gigabytes of RAM would really go a long way in helping Pros deal with their pro tasks. But the most talked about upgrade are of the processors.
Much Ado About Processors
Up until 2017 the most processing power you could get out of a MacBook Pro was a quad core chip and for most people thats way more horsepower than they'll ever need but for the occasional video editor or the occasional audio engineer quad core just won't cut it. But all praises to the Apple gods you can now get a MacBook Pro with upto 6 Cores. This gives you way more processing power when compared to the 2017 MacBook Pros. benchmarks will show that while single core scores are fairly similar the two extra cores do provide a significant boost in performance allowing the laptop to have a significantly higher multicore score than it's predecessor. So that does it. It's settled the 6 core CPU is better than the 4 Core CPU.
4 or 6 Where Should You Splurge Your Money?
As with most things in tech, the answer comes down to you. There are instances when a 6 core CPU warrants the extra price. But in some cases a 4 core might serve you just as well. To under stand whats what lets look at the concept of multiple cores. Your CPU was classically a piece of silicon that could do one calculation at a time i.e a processing core. As time went on and our mastery over chip manufacturing grew we were able to fit more and more processing cores into a single CPU. Now we've come to a point where we have 6 cores on a single chip. Which allows for the simultaneous execution of 6 processes at once( Actually 12 thanks to multithreading but I won't get into that for the sake of simplicity). Now with these 6 cores you can either have butter smooth multitasking as the workload gets divided up between the cores or you could run a really taxing program significantly quicker. The latter comes with a few caveats that I'll get to later on.
So if you're a heavy multitasker and I'm not talking about having 12 safari tabs open while you stream songs on Spotify, I'd think that going for the 6 core model would be worth it for you. Thanks to the 6 cores the laptop should perform well under intense stress.
Next we get to the issue of the software you're going to run on the laptop. Turns out that most programs aren't capable of utilising more than a handful of processing cores, and some even can't utilise 2 cores just because of the way that they have been written. Apple's own Final Cut and Logic Pro has been updated to handle upto 18 Cores and they should benefit from the extra cores. You should check if the software you're planning on running is capable of handling 6 cores, if not you're not going to get much more performance from a 6 core than when compared to a 4 core.
Secondly opt for the 6 core only if you're doing processor intensive tasks frequently, like video rendering. It does not make sense to get a 6 core processor to save 3 minutes on a video that you render once in a blue moon. Thirdly if you're a coder or a data scientist focused on AI and machine learning the 6 cores could greatly benefit you as most math libraries out there are written to take full advantage of every single core available.
Sure both computers are extremely powerful and you really can't go wrong with either one but for those of you that need a little bit of extra juice the 6 Core MacBook is the way to go.
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