With the introduction of the 5th generation 2021 Apple MacBook Pro laptops with their M1 Pro and M1 Max chipsets on October of this year, Apple leaped personal computing performance forward many times over. Don’t believe me? I am about to show you.

Here is the hardware we are about to compare:

Spec 13” MacBook Pro 14” MacBook Pro
Model Year 2018 2021
CPU Intel Core i5 4-core M1 Pro 8-core
Graphics Intel Iris Plus 655 M1 Pro 14-core
RAM 8GB 16GB
Storage (SSD) 512GB 512GB
Wi-Fi 802.11ac 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6

As for what software I will be running to compare the performance of these two generations of MacBook Pros, it will be developer focused. Meaning, I will be running a number of software development commands, to mimic activities a software developer would do, and show the difference in real time that it took to execute said commands. Here we go…

Command 13” MacBook Pro 14” MacBook Pro
Install Ruby 3.0.2 346s 144s
Install Python 3.9.9 127s 54s
Build a Docker project 28s 12s

On average, the 2021 14” MacBook Pro was 2.3x faster! If that doesn’t catch your attention, or get you excited, not sure what will.

Think about it this way, in 2021, the Tesla Model 3 Long Range is rated at 0-60 mph in 4.2 seconds. The level of performance upgrade that the 2021 14” MacBook Pro brings is like if the 2022 Tesla Model 3 Long Range all of a sudden had a rating of 0-60 mph in 1.8 seconds!

Don’t believe me still? Well, read more about it here and here. Or, watch more about it here and here.