MacPro vs MacBook Pro

If you are open to using a laptop, and you edit/export in the formats the M1 has hardware acceleration for as Andy 1968 described, the M1 Pro and M1 Max are great choices. They edit video much faster, cooler, and quieter than any Intel Mac laptop ever made, with better battery life, and that is true even when compared to most PC laptops (so far…an interesting new wave of Intel chips is about to hit).

If you want to stick with a desktop, this is not a good time to buy an iMac or Mac Pro desktop. Apple has not yet completed their transition from Intel to Apple Silicon, so while the Mac laptop line is pretty well filled out with fast, efficient M1 models from top to bottom, on the Mac desktop side the M1 is available only on the bottom models — the Mac mini and the 24" iMac. The next Mac Pro, almost sure to be Apple Silicon, is only at the rumor stage.

For Apple to complete their Apple Silicon transition as promised, they will need to release the Apple Silicon versions of midrange and high-end Macs (the larger iMacs and the Mac Pro) by November, 10 months from now. Of course they could release those models well before then, but no one really knows how long you’ll actually have to wait. Until then, the current midrange and high-end desktop Macs you can buy now are still Intel-based.

On the desktop side right now, many video editors are doing OK with the M1 Mac mini or iMac, but they are limited to 16GB of unified memory (used for both system and graphics). Lots of people are waiting for the Mac mini to be upgraded to the M1 Pro/Max chip, with its higher CPU/GPU core counts and up to 64GB of unified memory. That will probably come relatively soon, but if you want Apple Silicon with the expandability of a Mac Pro desktop you will probably have to wait a bit longer for that.

The M1 chip has dedicated hardware to playback H.264/265. An Apple laptop with the M1 chip can playback certain variations of H.264/265 better than a Mac Pro but the Mac Pro will be a better option for R3D files and BRAW. Keep in mind a mediocre 6 core Intel Coffee Lake CPU can outperform a 12 core AMD CPU when editing H.264/265 if Quick Sync is enabled. The new M1 Max and M1 Pro chips are rumored to have dedicated hardware for playing back Pro Res. The M1 chips might be your best bet depending on what video codec you will be editing.  

Moved to hardware forum.