One of the many minor feature additions Apple made to its new MacBook Pro lineup this week is introducing High Power mode with the updated 16-inch version of the already wildly powerful laptop. The new mode, which was first tipped in the beta version of macOS Monterey, resulted in a lot of speculation.
Would High Power mode coax even more juice from the already formidable M1 Max processor that is an optional upgrade on both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros? Would it speed up every task, or just extremely processor-intensive workflows? What about increased fan noise?
Apple has now published a support document that lends a bit more insight into exactly what High Power mode does. We’ve also conducted additional performance tests on the 16-inch MacBook Pro to see if there’s any improvement over the baseline tests we used for the review.
What Apple Says High Power Mode Is Good For
As it turns out, High Power mode isn’t actually about power at all, at least not directly. Instead, activating this mode in the System Preferences app on the 16-inch MacBook Pro gives the cooling system a boost. Here’s how Apple describes it: “On the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max, High Power Mode allows the fans to run at higher speeds. The additional cooling capacity may allow the system to deliver higher performance in very intensive workloads.”
This makes the new power setting sound quite similar to the fan-boosting settings that have been available on gaming laptops and other high-powered Windows notebooks for many years. But does it work for every kind of high-demand task? What exactly is a “very intensive workload?”
According to Apple, the additional cooling capacity is designed mainly for improving performance on graphics-intensive workflows. That makes sense, since High Power mode is exclusive to M1 Max-equipped 16-inch MacBook Pros, which are expressly designed for GPU-accelerated work. The high-end M1 Max configuration that we tested has a whopping 32 graphics cores, double the number in the high-end M1 Pro configuration.
Apple specifically calls out color-grading 8K ProRes 4444 and 8K DNxHR video as examples where High Power mode can make a dent in processing times. The company also notes that the mode can be used either when your laptop is plugged into a power outlet, or when it’s running off of battery power.
To activate High Power mode, open the System Preferences app, navigate to the Battery section, then change the Energy Mode pop-up menu from Automatic to High Power. As mentioned earlier, this option will only be present if you have a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Max processor.
What Our Benchmark Tests Suggest About High Power Mode
We performed these steps to turn on the High Power mode, then ran our suite of benchmark tests a second time. The tests include rendering a 3D image using Maxon’s Cinebench R23, converting a 4K video to 1080p using the open-source Handbrake 1.4 app, an image editing simulation using Adobe Photoshop (employing Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop extension), testing gaming graphics using GFXBench, and measuring CPU power with the cross-platform Geekbench 5.4 Pro testing tool.
Not one of these tasks resulted in any difference beyond the margin of error compared with running them in Automatic power mode. What’s more, I noticed no additional fan noise from the MacBook Pro’s cooling system while performing the tests. On both test runs in both modes, the laptop’s fans were barely audible. Now, most of these tests are CPU-centric; Geekbench, HandBrake, and Cinebench hit all of the available CPU cores, and don’t lean on the GPU; this suggests that High Power mode won’t help much with pure CPU-crunching trials.
So there you have it: even on many resource-intensive workflows, High Power mode doesn’t make a performance difference. The tasks we tested with our benchmarks simply don’t tax the additional graphics cores in the M1 Max to their fullest, which likely explains why we saw no benefit.
This testing reinforces a point we made in our original review of the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max. Unless you know your workflow can, well, max out the M1 Max’s graphics cores and additional memory bandwidth, you should probably stick with the M1 Pro version of the 16-inch MacBook Pro. Meanwhile, if you don’t need a large screen, we found that the 14-inch MacBook Pro is actually the better choice for most creative power users.
