Showdown of the fastest multimedia laptops - Apple MacBook Pro 16 M4 Max vs. Asus ProArt P16 RTX 5090

Both models use high-quality metal cases with sufficient ports and fast SD-card readers. The footprint is virtually identical, but the ProArt P16 is slightly thicker yet at the same time around 200 grams lighter. This weight advantage is gone when you include the charger, though. The maintenance options are better on the Asus, but the memory is soldered on both models.

There is a noticeable difference in terms of typing experience. Even though the keyboard of the MacBook Pro is very precise, the key travel is quite shallow. The ProArt P16 offers more generous key travel and the overall typing experience is more comfortable. If you type a lot and are not happy with the MacBook input so far, we recommend you test the ProArt. The sound systems of both models are excellent and among the best on the market.

Apple continues to equip its MacBook Pro models with Mini-LED panels, which support P3 color gamut and 120 Hz. In terms of brightness, rivals with OLED panels could not keep up until recently and this only changes with the latest tandem OLED screens, where two illumination layers are sitting on top of each other. Asus' ProArt P16 is one of the first laptop models with the new panel technology.

In terms of brightness, both panels reach up to 1,600 nits in HDR mode, but Apple has the advantage in SDR mode, where the Mini-LED panel can reach up to 1,000 nits when the ambient light sensor is active. Without the sensor, it reaches around 600 nits, which is comparable to the Asus. When it comes to HDR handling, there is no denying that Apple's macOS still have a huge advantage over Windows. The operating system simply recognizes when HDR contents are displayed and simply increases the brightness accordingly (either in a window or fullscreen), and the color profiles keep working. With Windows on the other hand, you always have to activate HDR mode manually, which will also ignore color profiles. The only annoying aspect on the Macbook is that the brightness is limited in sRGB mode.

There are obviously general differences between the two display technologies. The Mini-LED screen is basically just a regular IPS panel, but with a different illumination. The Mini-LED illumination creates zones, which can be illuminated separately, but this also results in blooming effects for high-contrast contents. The black value is 0 just like on OLED screens, which results in high contrast ratios. The Mini-LED illumination flickers constantly at a high frequency, which makes it very hard to determine accurate response times. During daily use and in combination with 120 Hz, however, there are no visible ghosting issues. Apple also offers a matte variant, which only has a small impact on the image quality. 

The OLED panel in the Asus does not suffer from blooming issues and impresses with very fast response times as well as rich colors. However, you also have to live with PWM flickering at a lower frequency. Asus also uses a touchscreen, which is obviously a huge advantage if you want to use a stylus (picture editing, for example). The Lumina Pro panel also offers the 4K resolution. We expect Apple will switch to a tandem OLED screen for the MacBook Pro series in the near future as well (already available on the iPad Pro, for example).

We compare the high-end versions of the Apple MacBook Pro 16 with the M4 Max and the Asus ProArt P16 with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 as well as the RTX 5090 Laptop. Apple has the upper hand in terms of memory, because the ProArt is only available with 64 GB, while the MacBook Pro can be configured with up to 128 GB.

A look at the raw CPU performance clearly shows that the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 does not stand a chance against the M4 Max or even the M4 Pro. It is still impressive how much performance Apple's own silicon offers and the new M5 SoC once again raises the bar with the fastest single-core performance and already indicates what we can expect from the upcoming M5 Pro/Max SoCs. You will need an Intel HX or AMD FireRange processor to beat the M4 Max, at least in multi-core scenarios.

The raw GPU performance of the M4 Max GPU on the other hand is clearly lower than the mobile GeForce RTX 5090 and the biggest M4 Max GPU is around 30 % slower in the synthetic 3DMark tests. if you also want to play games on your multimedia machine, the advantage for the ProArt P16 gets even bigger. Apart from the much more limited selection of games, the M4 Max is around 40 % slower compared to the combination of Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and mobile GeForce RTX 5090.

The raw graphics and gaming performance is one thing, but pictured and video editing is a different topic. The mobile GeForce RTX 5090 with 24 GB VRAM is already a good step above the old RTX 4090 Laptop with 16 GB VRAM, for example, but Apple's M4 Max GPU can use the system memory. The PugetBench benchmarks for Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro show an advantage for the MacBook. The mobile RTX 5090 on the other hand is ahead when you use things like CGI or areas where Nvidia's CUDA cores are supported well. If you render an image in Blender 4.3, for example, the MacBook Pro is noticeably slower (58 vs. 82 seconds).

This one is easy and the clear winner is the Apple MacBook Pro. It has a much more defensive fan curve ensures that the laptop is much quieter in everyday scenarios. The Asus ProArt P16 also gets much louder under maximum load (around 10 dB(A)).

The clear winner in this section is the MacBook Pro, and the performance (CPU & GPU) is not reduced on battery power, either. At the maximum panel brightness, the difference is around 1.5 hours in our Wi-Fi test, but the MacBook lasts more than twice as long as the ProArt at 150 nits (18 vs. 8.5 hours).