Ok, so just finished a side by side between the 15” 2016, 2.9ghz i7, 16gb ram, 1tb and the 13” 2020, 2ghz i5, 16gb ram, 1tb.
So two interesting things here, but first something really important for anyone with a Mac with dedicated graphics card. Unless you tell your Mac to use the dedicated graphics card, it will not be invoked by any of the tests I’ve done below. But, if you force the graphics card to be used, the performance is notably better. So if you have a dedicated graphics card, you must go to system preferences, then energy saver and make sure ‘Automatic graphic switching’ is turned off. What I would actually recommend you do is go to
https://gfx.io and download gfxCardStatus V2.3 which adds a menu bar item to let you fast switch between dedicated (discrete) and integrated graphics on the fly. It’ll also notify you as and when it is changed (you can also enable dynamic here so it’ll change when needed- but as per the above, this is useless in captureone). And before anyone asks, yes I did have hardware acceleration enabled for both.
So, now on with the side by side, with the 15” set to use the dedicated graphics card, the Radeon pro 460 in my case. The two interesting findings being...
1) very little performance difference in capture one. Both load up previews at similar speeds. The only difference is that the 15” exports faster (probably 15-25% faster than the 13”)
2) with round trip to helicon focus, the 15” exports the image faster (as already mentioned above), but then processing by helicon focus takes identical time, but 15” is faster on the first pass (I think when helicon focus identifies the focus areas) and then slower on the second pass (I think where it decides which details to take from which pic)
I’m still a bit surprised by this. Yes, the 4 year old 15” I have is the top spec model, but so is the 13”. I would have expected - even bearing in mind the smaller form factor - that four years on would deliver a better performance.
The ONLY redeeming factor of the 2020 13” is the keyboard. I can’t get over how noisy the infamous butterfly keyboard is on the 2016 15” whereas the 13” is a joy to use. It is also nice having a dedicated escape key and the arrows in the inverted T just feels more natural. Plus I bought it with 3 years apple care.
But all said and done, I think it’s the 15” that I’ll keep and take the money on the 13”. It’s close though, so in fact they may both go up for sale and I’ll just keep the one that doesn’t sell first! Anyone want a new mbp?