The danger in a simple question as headline is Betteridge’s law.

In this case, the headline is a fair question and the video embedded below an interesting exploration of the topic.

In a nutshell, while the M1 chip brought incredible performance to Apple’s laptops, the built-in GPU does not compete with desktop machines with high end external GPUs. Here’s a still frame from the video I posted this morning that gives you a sense of how big that performance difference is.

The Intel Mac Pro (as discussed in the video) is incredibly modular, let’s you plug in various high-end GPU cards for high-end performance. The M1 chip has a built-in GPU which inherently caps the graphics performance. So the headline question is a fair one.

If any of the above tweaks your interest, watch the video below.