Video editors looking to take their craft out of the house have a glut of choices when it comes to stylish, slim laptops. Apple’s MacBook Pro is a perennial favorite, but recent changes to its connectivity and battery life has hurt its reputation among the power users who relied on the system. Razer’s Blade has been revised a few times, and packs in the latest gaming hardware — a good look for video editing. Finally, Microsoft’s Surface Book with Performance Base has splashed onto the scene, offering up competitive performance and a versatile form factor.
But the question remains, which is the best for video editing and encoding? To find out, David from The Unlockr faced them off in a test that replicated his real-world working conditions. He took 4K footage, did some light color correction, and then times the process to encode to both 4K and 1080p for YouTube.
Of course, video encoding is an incredibly demanding process that stresses basically every component in your system. The processor and RAM are working overtime, and even your drives are going to be sweating trying to keep up. In order to help leverage the extra computing power in the GPU, Nvidia users can use CUDA acceleration to help speed up the process. As a result, the more powerful GTX 1060 and high-wattage, quad-core, eight-thread CPU in the Blade pushes it to a strong lead over both the Surface Book with Performance Base and MacBook Pro 15 with Touch Bar.
Of course, encoding performance isn’t the only factor when it comes to video editing, as the video mentions. The Macbook’s amazing display and Touch Bar may be a good fit for people already used to the MacOS ecosystem. Likewise, the Surface Book’s 3:2 aspect ratio is a great layout for video editing, and the sensitive touch screen could allow for easy touch-up work.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.