Apple dumps Intel and shows Final Cut Pro on new Mac with Apple CPU !

[Tamerlin]

LOL. No. That's a comically inaccurate take. I've never seen a router run on a PowerPC chip. Just because Motorola made routers and the PowerPC chip doesn't mean they're the same thing. A company can have wildly-varying product lines.

That's probably just because the only routers you've seen are the ones on the shelves at Best Buy and such. Most of Motorola's G3 and G4 sales were to companies like Nortel and Ericsson and Cisco, not Apple. It was such a disparity that Motorola actually thought that Altivec was a waste of silicon until some of its developers ported the IP stack to use Altivec, since their customers didn't much care about vector computing, since they didn't need it.

PowerPC was a joint effort between Apple, IBM, and Motorola... the "AIM Alliance." Initially it went pretty well. Eventually, things went sour when no one really could create a unified desktop/server operating system that was compelling. Since no one was buying PReP machines, Apple was really the only desktop/server customer for those chips. They were also used in a LOT of game consoles... PS3, Xbox 360, GameCube, Wii...

I'm well aware of that. It did well initially because the 68K series was getting long in the tooth, and the market for personal computing was wide open. Yes, Apple was the only company using them in computers... but small potatoes next to the likes of Nortel.

That G5 was also not "obsolete within months"... those machines were supported with OS updates and software for years after the transition.

The G5 had already been lapped by x86 by the time it launched. IBM announced at ISSCC around three months after starting to ship it that it was shifting its focus for the PowerPC platform to embedded, because it couldn't compete with x86.

The Apple Silicon transition is a completely different ball of wax. Apple's in control of the design of the chips (and has that ability now, they didn't back in the PowerPC days) and is just outsourcing the manufacturing.

You finally started to make sense. I suspect that part of why Apple has been dragging its feet as far as keeping up with x86 progress has been due to putting its effort into its own processors. Even Intel is ahead of where Apple is currently, so it's not like Apple's computer mediocrity is entirely on Intel, because Apple has been for several years very slow to adopt Intel's latest, and we all know how thoroughly AMD is trouncing Intel lately.

While I'm a little skeptical they can scale the A-series chips to compete with the big iron in top-end iMacs, iMac Pros, and Mac Pros in a short timeframe I wouldn't take any insight on this transition from the AIM/PowerPC world. Entirely different.

During the PPC era, the mac was a miniscule seller, and frankly no one cared about it except Apple and its die hard fans. That miniscule sales volume definitely lead to a castoff mentality, but no one in their right mind was going to make a processor specifically FOR Apple; the return on investment was a non-existent. The enormous volume of iDevice sales changes that, because even though computers now comprise a relatively small portion of Apple's sales, its volume of iDevice sales give it access to enough economies of scale to make its own design viable... even if it dropped its computer line entirely, not that I expect that in the near future, unless its computer sales tank due to the switch, which I'd give even odds to at this point. And might even be part of the plan to replace its entire laptop line with various flavors of iPads, since all it would need at this stage is an OS update to address the file system limitations, and an extra TB3 port or two with eGPU support.

 

[JAMedia]

LOL. No. That's a comically inaccurate take. I've never seen a router run on a PowerPC chip. Just because Motorola made routers and the PowerPC chip doesn't mean they're the same thing. A company can have wildly-varying product lines.

You are thinking at the wrong level. PPC MCU's were used on SDH (SONET in the US) these are the routers and switches that connect telephone exchanges together and the internet backbone. In the 80's and 90's the internet was largely running on Motorola silicon. This continued into the corperate networking hardware. Devices on the edge, small office and domestic routers are trivial things in comparison.

Another big market for PPC was the Automotive market there was a PPC in most vehicles at one time, (now moved to TRICOR since NXP bailed on PPC) which was also huge. Then you have Aerospace.... Apples use of PPC was a very small percentage of PPC parts.

 

[Tamerlin]

You are thinking at the wrong level. PPC MCU's were used on SDH (SONET in the US) these are the routers and switches that connect telephone exchanges together and the internet backbone. In the 80's and 90's the internet was largely running on Motorola silicon. This continued into the corperate networking hardware. Devices on the edge, small office and domestic routers are trivial things in comparison.

Another big market for PPC was the Automotive market there was a PPC in most vehicles at one time, (now moved to TRICOR since NXP bailed on PPC) which was also huge. Then you have Aerospace.... Apples use of PPC was a very small percentage of PPC parts.

I remember reading a financial report summary that showed Apple as accounting for something on the order of 1/1000th the volume... of each of Motorola's three largest customers.

 

[JAMedia]

I remember reading a financial report summary that showed Apple as accounting for something on the order of 1/1000th the volume... of each of Motorola's three largest customers.

That sounds about right. This was before the iP**** revolution and Mac's becoming fashionable. I seem to recall they had about 4% of the personal computer market at the time.

 

[Tamerlin]

That sounds about right. This was before the iP**** revolution and Mac's becoming fashionable. I seem to recall they had about 4% of the personal computer market at the time.

That sounds about right also. Apple was losing its high end customers, due to the combination of not being even in the ballpark of competitive performance, and trying to use hostage tactics like buying eMagic and Nothing Real and immediately discontinuing Logic and Shake on Windows.

The G5 was a last ditch effort to regain the professional market, and it tanked... because IBM can't do volume to save its life.

The ARM marketplace is getting interesting... and if nVidia's ARM purchase goes through, it's going to be even MORE interesting, since nVidia apparently wants to use it to grow its datacenter market.

 

[Greg_E]

Avid being agile in their coding is a pretty good laugh... They just finally got h.264 MP4 export working in the 2020.9 version of MC (version 2020.10 is current), spent a bunch of time testing it today for consideration of rolling it out to our classroom. I was incredibly surprised that not only did it work and look decent, it was fast. Still single pass, but looks a lot better than many other compressed exports that they have "provided" for the past many years. up to this point we were having students export to DNxHD or XDCam and transcode with Handbrake because it was faster by a large amount, and better quality.

 

[Tamerlin]

Agreed... and in fact one of the things that got Avid off of its booty was, in addition to the inevitable threat of Black Magic who, unlike Adobe, is already in like Flynn with the majority of the Avid world, Avid. A *lot* of Avid users weren't upgrading... because there wasn't any reason to. It did its job, and they weren't seeing anything new in newer versions that would make their lives easier, and in many cases would have made their lives harder due to missing features like Script Sync (IIRC Avid got the license back, but for a version or two of MC it wasn't in there).

So Avid's biggest threat was Avid, even though Resolve was making inroads. Small inroads, but that's not a ferret you want in YOUR garden. The Adobe ferret wanders around like and old man, while the Black Magic ferret searches your house, finds the good stuff, and tells its friends out to get to it without having to do all the work.

But even so, Resolve's inroads in editing haven't been that big in Avid's space yet. Adobe is the one worried about Black Magic.

There's an up side to being a software developer in software developer land. I mean, Seattle. Where there's an Adobe office... and have had co-workers who escaped from Adobe.

 

[JAMedia]

The G5 was a last ditch effort to regain the professional market, and it tanked... because IBM can't do volume to save its life. .

The Trash Can Mac Pro id not help..... they seemed to be chasing the hipsters where it is more looking pretty over functionality. And the latest MAc Pro hasn't helped. The low to mid range market for that has died. A PC running Windows or Linux is a far better bet.

So apart from a few high end Mac Pro users Apple seem to be going after the trendy market where the iPhone, iPad , Mac book Air , mac Book all share the same CPU and software. As their movie SW, FCPX, is huge everywhere except the traditional centres of LA and London perhaps they are less interested in that traditional video/media market?

You can shoot video on an iPhone, edit on an Mac Air and upload to YouTunbe as 10's of thousands of YouTubers, Instergramers etc do This is the new market. (well not so new) There are a lot of good video channels on YouTube that that are shot well on phones and Go -Pro's. This is a far bigger market for Apple than the traditional film world.

 

[Greg_E]

FYI, back to Avid, They still don't have decent export from MC | First working. They are still using the QT based exports in First, even though they use the exact same installer. They are actually hurting the free users who might upgrade to a paid version. Nothing puts a new user off more than waiting 6 hours for an export, and finding out it is a huge file, and looks like garbage!

I tried this specifically to see if First had been brought up to current times, this after testing the "new" export option in the paid version. And as predicted, they can't be bothered.

They have also back peddled on the statement that paid MC will be able to open First projects, they now say this will never happen. So the new user starts off with First, really gets going on a project and decides they are happy with the software and decides to buy it. Then finds out that all their hard work leading up to this point is now wasted and they need to jump through hoops to try and get i working in the paid version, or go back and start from scratch.

Hopefully someone from Avid will find me badmouthing them again and fix this nonsense, otherwise making their code work on Apple Arm might not matter.

I haven't paid attention to Lightworks in years, when they changed purchase models I kind of fell out of favor with it. Still think many things are way easier on Lightworks than MC or Resolve, you just have to get over the different way of working. Since they have Linux, Mac, and Windows, I expect them to be pretty quick on this new Apple Arm hardware if the hardware is really up to the task of video editing. That said, I don't know why it wouldn't be up to the task, Arm is a pretty mature architecture and has a lot of choices for optional processing that you can put on the same silicon waffers. Licensing makes it easier to design, and lots of foundries can make them due to the proliferation of phones using the same architecture.

 

[puredrifting]

Back in the day when I was at a production company that was all Avid, it was the standard and much more stable than FCP at the time. Premiere then was a toy for hobbyists and Resolve didn't exist.
Avid has always been stable and relatively simple but I never liked that you could pretty much only do operations in one way, it was very modal where I could find half a dozen ways to accomplish the
same operation in FCP.

My how things have changed. I'm glad Avid has hung on, but it seems just barely, they have been so close to going bankrupt for a lot of the past decade. Adobe is the evil mothership, I really don't like
Adobe as a company and will never bow down to paying them a monthly extortion fee just to use their bloatware filled, clunky Premiere, unless clients require me to. Apple has been slowly and steadily
improving FCP X and it's a pretty good tool now, not to mention the fastest editing tool on the market and the one with the most metadata capability and of course Resolve is the hot new editing program, I really like it too.

 

[Tamerlin]

The Trash Can Mac Pro id not help..... they seemed to be chasing the hipsters where it is more looking pretty over functionality.

The trash can mac was an obvious design failure even before it launched. It was pretty much designed to fail to serve the needs of its market, and probably only sold at all because the rest of the mac lineup was so anemic that the pro users had no choice.

And the latest MAc Pro hasn't helped. The low to mid range market for that has died. A PC running Windows or Linux is a far better bet.

It was very late to market, due most likely to Apple's obsession with making it proprietary, so it launched using a generation of processors and chipsets that were in sunset mode -- it's exactly what happened to SGI's x86 workstation; it had some promise, but by the time it shipped a year late, it was a generation behind and more expensive than its competitors, but due to being proprietary, not upgradable. It ended up being SGI's Bob.

My theory on the latest mac pro is that it was a bone to throw at users just to convince them to wait around for a while longer, because when I priced it out I found that at the same price, an HP Z8 blew it a way... and a maxed out Z8 has 2 CPUs, 2x the memory, and supports
multiple Quadro RTX GPUs...

It's priced and styled like a Ferrari, but the engine was an afterthought.

And the claims that Apple made about the new monitor ended up being very unwise... they just made even the most die hard fans skeptical of Apple's awareness of what "pro" means.

So apart from a few high end Mac Pro users Apple seem to be going after the trendy market where the iPhone, iPad , Mac book Air , mac Book all share the same CPU and software. As their movie SW, FCPX, is huge everywhere except the traditional centres of LA and London perhaps they are less interested in that traditional video/media market?

That does seem to be where Apple is headed. If the mac pro's sales catch the bean counters' attention in the wrong way, "We only sold how many? Well, the pros must not be interested then. Sell them more iPads," that might well be the future.

Financially it's a no-brainer, Apple would likely sell 1000 iPad Pros for every mac pro it sells, and that's probable even if the next iPad Pro update is a minor tweak. If it's the more likely and highly anticipated upgrade to A14x with the new monitor, then... 1000 of those per mac pro is probably conservative. Plus an iPad Pro is likely to sell in the same volume range to the same people with an update in a year, while the mac pro buyers will hang onto their purchases for years, updating them mostly with 3rd party parts that don't profit Apple in any way, so by the time they get around to thinking about buying new computers, that would be more like tens of thousands of iPad Pros per mac pro...

... so it's going to boil down to how much influence the hipster bean counters have in the product development planning, most likely.

You can shoot video on an iPhone, edit on an Mac Air and upload to YouTunbe as 10's of thousands of YouTubers, Instergramers etc do This is the new market. (well not so new) There are a lot of good video channels on YouTube that that are shot well on phones and Go -Pro's. This is a far bigger market for Apple than the traditional film world.

That's an understatement. That market is growing, unsurprisingly. Not being able to socialize is only helping to grow that market, and I don't think that it's going to go away when socializing starts becoming a thing again. It's not like people are going to ditch their phones and TVs just because they're suddenly able to go hang out in bars again, since they're not going to leave their phones at home when that happens

 

[Run&Gun]

The trash can mac was an obvious design failure even before it launched. It was pretty much designed to fail to serve the needs of its market, and probably only sold at all because the rest of the mac lineup was so anemic that the pro users had no choice.



It was very late to market, due most likely to Apple's obsession with making it proprietary, so it launched using a generation of processors and chipsets that were in sunset mode -- it's exactly what happened to SGI's x86 workstation; it had some promise, but by the time it shipped a year late, it was a generation behind and more expensive than its competitors, but due to being proprietary, not upgradable. It ended up being SGI's Bob.

My theory on the latest mac pro is that it was a bone to throw at users just to convince them to wait around for a while longer, because when I priced it out I found that at the same price, an HP Z8 blew it a way... and a maxed out Z8 has 2 CPUs, 2x the memory, and supports
multiple Quadro RTX GPUs...

It's priced and styled like a Ferrari, but the engine was an afterthought.

And the claims that Apple made about the new monitor ended up being very unwise... they just made even the most die hard fans skeptical of Apple's awareness of what "pro" means.



That does seem to be where Apple is headed. If the mac pro's sales catch the bean counters' attention in the wrong way, "We only sold how many? Well, the pros must not be interested then. Sell them more iPads," that might well be the future.

Financially it's a no-brainer, Apple would likely sell 1000 iPad Pros for every mac pro it sells, and that's probable even if the next iPad Pro update is a minor tweak. If it's the more likely and highly anticipated upgrade to A14x with the new monitor, then... 1000 of those per mac pro is probably conservative. Plus an iPad Pro is likely to sell in the same volume range to the same people with an update in a year, while the mac pro buyers will hang onto their purchases for years, updating them mostly with 3rd party parts that don't profit Apple in any way, so by the time they get around to thinking about buying new computers, that would be more like tens of thousands of iPad Pros per mac pro...

... so it's going to boil down to how much influence the hipster bean counters have in the product development planning, most likely.



That's an understatement. That market is growing, unsurprisingly. Not being able to socialize is only helping to grow that market, and I don't think that it's going to go away when socializing starts becoming a thing again. It's not like people are going to ditch their phones and TVs just because they're suddenly able to go hang out in bars again, since they're not going to leave their phones at home when that happens

I really like Apple and I've spent countless thousands of dollars over the years on iPod's, iPad's, iPhone's and computers, but some of what they do is infuriating and I agree that they do not get the true "pro market". But from where I sit and what I do, I'll take a half-assed Mac over the slickest Windows machine any day.

One of the worst mistakes I ever made was buying my Mom a windows laptop, because it was a fraction of the cost of a MB, about four years ago, so she could have a computer to use over at my Grandmothers house when she went over there to sit with her(she had an iMac at her house that I bought her for Christmas years ago). She then started using it for everything at work after her windows desktop there died. She has constant problems with that little POS. Whereas her iMac is probably 9-10 years old and still going strong. As well as the MBP I bought my GF the same year. And I want a new 16" MBP, but my 2012 RMBP just keeps on trucking, too(hell, my 17" 2009 MBP still works).



Exactly. Heck, even before the pandemic, all you had to do was walk into almost any restaurant, bar, etc. and everyone was on their phone. I've got a picture from just a few years ago, buried on my phone somewhere, that I took at a "nice" burger joint. There was a table of at least 10 people sitting at the table next to us and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM had their heads down in their phones. There was not a single person at that table interacting with anyone else(at least in-person) at that table. And that isn't an anomaly in todays society. It's SOP.

 

[Tamerlin]

I really like Apple and I've spent countless thousands of dollars over the years on iPod's, iPad's, iPhone's and computers, but some of what they do is infuriating and I agree that they do not get the true "pro market". But from where I sit and what I do, I'll take a half-assed Mac over the slickest Windows machine any day.

If Apple made better hardware, I'd use it. But right now IMO Asus is leading the pack as far as design goes, and neck and neck with Acer and Razer performance wise. Apple's not even in the ballpark, and I suspect that it's just half-assing the entire x86 lineup because of the ARM transition plan.

Of course, there's also the part about the iDevices (meaning all of them) being far more lucrative...

One of the worst mistakes I ever made was buying my Mom a windows laptop, because it was a fraction of the cost of a MB, about four years ago, so she could have a computer to use over at my Grandmothers house when she went over there to sit with her(she had an iMac at her house that I bought her for Christmas years ago). She then started using it for everything at work after her windows desktop there died. She has constant problems with that little POS. Whereas her iMac is probably 9-10 years old and still going strong. As well as the MBP I bought my GF the same year. And I want a new 16" MBP, but my 2012 RMBP just keeps on trucking, too(hell, my 17" 2009 MBP still works).

My experience has been the opposite, in that the least reliable computer I've ever owned was a MBP. I absolutely hated that machine. It ended up being the only computer I ever retired because it was too unreliable rather than because I needed more performance to keep up with the change in my needs.

That said, I've only ever purchased premium machines, never cheapos, regardless of the platform. I have next to no experience with the budget stuff.

Exactly. Heck, even before the pandemic, all you had to do was walk into almost any restaurant, bar, etc. and everyone was on their phone. I've got a picture from just a few years ago, buried on my phone somewhere, that I took at a "nice" burger joint. There was a table of at least 10 people sitting at the table next to us and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM had their heads down in their phones. There was not a single person at that table interacting with anyone else(at least in-person) at that table. And that isn't an anomaly in todays society. It's SOP.

Yes, it is unfortunately becoming the norm. It's not a good direction for society to be heading in.

 

[Less_is_more]

As their movie SW, FCPX, is huge everywhere except the traditional centres of LA and London perhaps they are less interested in that traditional video/media market?

What do people use in LA and London?

I’m just getting into video and trying to figure out what software to learn. This move by Apple away from Intel doesn’t make the choice any easier. I got burned when Apple dumped Aperture (for stills) a while ago and don’t relish repeating the error. On the other hand, Final Cut Pro X looks like it would suit me best. I wonder if the next major version will be for ARM.

 

[Run&Gun]

The worst computer I ever owned was a $5K+ Gateway 2000 laptop(my first computer) I bought in the late 90's. The only good thing about that computer was the built-in DVD player and the RCA outs that let me feed my TV. It was an awesome computer for maybe a year and then it was junk. It would take it in excess of five minutes to boot and shutdown. After that, I bought a mid+ priced Dell. I got a few years out of that one and gave them one more try and actually half-way liked the last one and had it for about two years before I made the switch to MBP's in 2009 and then have never looked back.

They may be different now, but my ~11 years experience with windows machines were basically the same with each one. They started out nice, but within a year or so, they ran like old broken down Yugo's. I don't know if it was just deficiencies in the OS(corrupting, losing files, etc.) or the hardware just wore out or some combination of the two and other factors(I also regularly defraged the drives, something I've never had to do with a Mac), but I have never experienced anything similar in the ~11 years I've been on Mac.

I'm not making this a Mac vs Window's post (because everyone has their own likes, needs and experiences), just stating my experiences.

 

[Run&Gun]

What do people use in LA and London?

I’m just getting into video and trying to figure out what software to learn. This move by Apple away from Intel doesn’t make the choice any easier. I got burned when Apple dumped Aperture (for stills) a while ago and don’t relish repeating the error. On the other hand, Final Cut Pro X looks like it would suit me best. I wonder if the next major version will be for ARM.

This is one of the things that I really dislike about Apple, their take-it-or-leave-it/our-way-or the-highway mentality. They have no problem at all dropping something off a cliff with little to no warning or migratory/transitional periods(there was fair warning that Aperture was going bye-bye, though). I also purposefully stay behind on OS updates on my phone and computer. But that is just generally good practice no matter what, so that you don't get bitten by some undiscovered bug or undisclosed "feature".

 

[JAMedia]

What do people use in LA and London?

I’m just getting into video and trying to figure out what software to learn. This move by Apple away from Intel doesn’t make the choice any easier. I got burned when Apple dumped Aperture (for stills) a while ago and don’t relish repeating the error. On the other hand, Final Cut Pro X looks like it would suit me best. I wonder if the next major version will be for ARM.

Hollywood (LA) and London (Pinewood, Elstree etc etc ) came from the old Film Tradition and a lot of them use Resolve (for colour) and things like Avid. However Hollywood is dying on it's feet (some one on here did a very good easy on this recently) and is no longer the "centre of the [film] world" in fact I believe Bollywood (India) surpassed it on all measures a few years ago. Also those not steeped in it's traditions and working practices and often starting with new digital cameras do things very differently. (different not wrong) Ie the 100's of thousands of corporate video people, youtubers, documentary, ENG etc in much the same way everyone bar studio photographers went digital whilst some studios still say film is they only way!

I have used FCPX for about a decade on Macs. It is intuitive and easy to use. It was a no brainer for me as I was on Mac's for still photography, web design and document production. (ie Adobe CS3-6 and lightroom) sijce they were Power PC CPU's However we are now moving off Mac's (for a lot of reasons) if FCPX was on PC I would use it but of course it isn't. So I am trying to get to grips with Resolve. Resolve is buggy, non-intuative and has a steep learning curve. Also the Blackmagic Design forum seems to be full of LA film people who seem to dislike with a passion "Youtube/iMovie" people that are not "proper" film people.

 

[puredrifting]

What do people use in LA and London?

I’m just getting into video and trying to figure out what software to learn. This move by Apple away from Intel doesn’t make the choice any easier. I got burned when Apple dumped Aperture (for stills) a while ago and don’t relish repeating the error. On the other hand, Final Cut Pro X looks like it would suit me best. I wonder if the next major version will be for ARM.

LA is predominantly a Mac town in entertainment, other than in high end motion graphics where several of the people I collaborate with over the past few years are in PC space utilizng AE, Cinema 4D, etc. simply because
the rendering horsepower is a lot cheaper on PCs. This year, I am in the live streaming space and honestly, Macs suck for live streaming, all that's available for the most part of software-based unreliable solutions like Wirecast, etc.
We are using half a dozen high end custom built PCs utilizing vMix Call and Live which is a PC only program. But when we edit, it's still on FCP X and Resolve. So in the end, buy the tool that does what you want,
buy the platform that works best for you to do it on. I am kind of the same why about computers as I am about Presidential candidates, they both suck, they both have issues, which one will do the least amount of damage
to what I am trying to accomplish?

For edit bays though, I see more Macs here than PCs. FCP X is an excellent program, the fastest editor on the market. If your concerns are compatibility with what's most popular in LA, that will be AVID for
the high end and Premiere in the low to medium space. Few edit bays in LA in the entertainment business run FCP X or Resolve. I can't speak to London although I have shot there but have not done post there.

 

[DLD]

The worst computer I ever owned was a $5K+ Gateway 2000 laptop(my first computer) I bought in the late 90's...

This is apropos of nothing.

I used to have neighbors in their 80's. She was a German Jew from Breslau originally (how she survived the war, she never told me) and he was a former Red Army officer, who commanded an anti-tank gun in Kursk (among other things). Sometime around 2005, they began to look for their first private computer. The elderly gentleman kept asking me, "What about Gatesway? Is that any good?". I would reply, "First of all, it's not Gatesway. It's Gateway". "But it does belong to Bill Gates himself, right?" "No, it doesn't. Bill Gates is a chairman/CEO of Microsoft, which provides the operating system". "Then who owns Gatesway?" "Uh, it's a corporation. Just buy whatever is in your budget range".

In any case, Resolve is a bit of a Johnny-come-lately, with Adobe and Apple holding a lot of legacy business. As the processing power improves, the workflow migrates onto a less expensive workstations. ARM based servers are also just coming into their own. It's going to be a wild shootout.

 

[alaskacameradude]

This year, I am in the live streaming space and honestly, Macs suck for live streaming, all that's available for the most part of software-based unreliable solutions like Wirecast, etc.
We are using half a dozen high end custom built PCs utilizing vMix Call and Live which is a PC only program.

The latest version of Wirecast (14.4) seems to be
pretty stable in my experience on a Mac. However
there are a variety of good options on the Mac for
live streaming. ECamm Live for more consumer
oriented stuff, BlueFrame’s Production Truck or
Mimo Live for more professional things. There is
also LSS. But you definitely can’t buy a ‘low end’ Mac
like a MacBook Air to stream with. You need something
with a good CPU and GPU. MacPro’s work great.
IMac Pro and high end MacBook Pro with the good
(5600M) GPU work pretty good as well. VMix is
great but if you already own a ‘high end’ Mac these
alternatives will definitely work great for live-streaming.
With the benefit of not needing to buy another computer.
Of course if you are ‘starting from scratch’ a good PC
with vMix is a great choice.

Also either way (Mac or PC) I would
recommend NewBlue’s Titler Live for animated
titles and graphics. It’s world’s better than vMix’s
GT Title Designer. Titler Live is kind of
‘After Effects for live streamers.’