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

[Run&Gun]

New laptops today!
Very fast and expensive.
Will make your films great!​

But are they really that expensive when you look at what they can do and how long they last? The first laptop(windows) that I bought(computer period) was even more expensive than a well equipped MBP(you have to max out a MAX with 8TB to get more expensive) and it was a flaming pile of garbage in less than two years. My current one was ~$4K or so, which works out to a little over a dollar a day. Even the base model MAX at $3500 is a beast.

 

[ahalpert]

But are they really that expensive when you look at what they can do and how long they last? The first laptop(windows) that I bought(computer period) was even more expensive than a well equipped MBP(you have to max out a MAX with 8TB to get more expensive) and it was a flaming pile of garbage in less than two years. My current one was ~$4K or so, which works out to a little over a dollar a day. Even the base model MAX at $3500 is a beast.

Well, they're basically the same price as they were before Silicon. In 2019: "A fully loaded 16-inch MacBook Pro costs $6,099
But it starts at a much more reasonable $2,399"

LOL 2011 MBP: "Solid-state drives can also be added: 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB. Those aren't cheap: the 128GB upgrade costs $250, whereas the 512GB costs a whopping $1,250."

The 2011 17" MBP started at $2499 but I'm not sure what the price was fully-loaded

 

[ahalpert]

Here's another gem of marketing language. On their e-mail blast about the new MBPs, B&H leads off with "Any creatives waiting for the next great computer for their work can now rest as the latest 14" and 16" MacBook Pros give users more power than ever imagined."

Do you want them to rest? Or do you want them to get up, buy the computer, and get to work? If they were waiting before, wasn't that more akin to resting?

 

[Thomas Smet]

I'm really hoping we get these chips and options in a Mac mini form factor. Not everyone needs portability. A M1 Max Mac mini with 64 GB would be a very nice machine and should be more affordable. I can see getting a decked out Mini and keeping my M1 MBA for super light portability. I'm doing live HD streaming, 4k 10 bit HEVC Canon R6 editing in FCP and 4k BRAW editing in Resolve on this beast already and its great. Recently did a lot of 3D assets for a Halloween live video stream with Blender. Blender even now has a native Apple Silicon version. Plus Apple just joined the Blender Fund and has assigned engineers to finally add GPU Metal support to the Cycles renderer in Blender. Blender 3.1 is going to have full Metal GPU rendering next year. Apple is going pro in a big way now.

With that said keep in mind with the MBP you are also getting a 1600 nit peak perfect P3 color HDR 10bit display to grade on. You can't even dream of getting a better HDR grading display for close to the entire MBP price right now. A base 14" is $1,999 and has the same great HDR 1600 nits and 100% P3 color. Even if tehered to a desk its hard to pass up such an affordable option to create very nice HDR content that surpasses the best TVs out there right now. Heck even if I get a Mac Desktop I want want a base 14" just for the XDR display. I have a 13" XDR iPad Pro and its amazing. The local dimming is a tad weird at times but only under rare circumstances at max brightness. Right now I grade HDR with tone mapping and render to air drop and check on my iPad Pro.

The 16" also has 3456 width resolution now which is equally impressive. Not yet true UHD but its getting much closer. I have always been a fan of how apple handles laptop resolution vs Windows which just does a dummy pick of HD or UHD and not take into consideration what is the optimal comfortable resolution to use on that size of a device. Plus I doubt you are going to miss a lot of details with a 3840 video displayed on a 3456 wide display.

I think its easy to spec and price out the max option but considering hoe well the M1 already works for many of us we need to ask if we really need all that horsepower. For me whats important is the ability to has 32 GB, two external displays and that gorgeous XDR display. The base models are priced very well for what they are.

Its also not really fair to compare to a PC laptop that may have a really crappy SDR display. A good HDR grading display not even close to 1600 nits is going to cost thousands of dollars. Asus has a model that peaks at 1000 nits and its $3,000. Be prepared to pay 10x more if you want 1600 nits on anything besides the Apple Pro Display. These MBPs Arte run at 100% power on battery which is another thing t factor in. PC laptops can be powerful and affordable but on battery they tend to slow down a lot and are lucky to last maybe two hours. Plus at higher performance levels they are not exactly affordable either. A Razer with a 3080 GPU is also in the $3,300 price range and is a power guzzling beast. Apple is comparing their Max 32 core GPU to the 3080. We shall see if thats true but a lot of factors need to be taking into consideration. Are the apps used in benchmarks optimized for Apple Silicon and Metal for example. We have seen Resolve recently do a massive native M1 update with humungous performance gains. Resolve was already impressive on the M1 but now its a beast. The M1 GPU seems to do tasks a but more efficiently than other GPUs and when utilized correctly that little GPU can actually do a lot. I think with the right optimizations we could see some tasks equal to a mobile 3080 GPU. Raw Metal scores are almost useless and I have seen some optimized results that seem to go way beyond what the Metal scores should be.

 

[hojomo]

I'm really hoping we get these chips and options in a Mac mini form factor. Not everyone needs portability. A M1 Max Mac mini with 64 GB would be a very nice machine and should be more affordable. I can see getting a decked out Mini and keeping my M1 MBA for super light portability. I'm doing live HD streaming, 4k 10 bit HEVC Canon R6 editing in FCP and 4k BRAW editing in Resolve on this beast already and its great. Recently did a lot of 3D assets for a Halloween live video stream with Blender. Blender even now has a native Apple Silicon version. Plus Apple just joined the Blender Fund and has assigned engineers to finally add GPU Metal support to the Cycles renderer in Blender. Blender 3.1 is going to have full Metal GPU rendering next year. Apple is going pro in a big way now.

They would have released it now if they could have counted on of having enough chips, but their priority was to have the MBP for the holiday season and end of the year business purchases (understandably). No doubt it is coming next year. This is really great to hear about Blender on MacOS

With that said keep in mind with the MBP you are also getting a 1600 nit peak perfect P3 color HDR 10bit display to grade on. You can't even dream of getting a better HDR grading display for close to the entire MBP price right now. A base 14" is $1,999 and has the same great HDR 1600 nits and 100% P3 color. Even if tehered to a desk its hard to pass up such an affordable option to create very nice HDR content that surpasses the best TVs out there right now. Heck even if I get a Mac Desktop I want want a base 14" just for the XDR display. I have a 13" XDR iPad Pro and its amazing. The local dimming is a tad weird at times but only under rare circumstances at max brightness. Right now I grade HDR with tone mapping and render to air drop and check on my iPad Pro.

This is why I am buying one, to have something I can process raw and log footage, and be able to judge color for photography and printing. Also the massive shortage of desktop GPU options on PC made a switch a lot more easy to consider.

I have really mixed feelings about using MacOS instead of Windows 10, which I generally like a lot. MacOS gets a lot right but is maddeningly stupid for certain things. I am hoping to be able to dual boot reliably and basically be MacOS when processing video.

 

[alaskacameradude]

They got me. All the features they are adding
(plus putting back a few) got me to upgrade
from my 2014 MacBook Pro.

 

[jonpais]

Apple's laptops just destroyed every PC on the planet, no lie.

 

[Thomas Smet]

For those that really miss the 17" MBP option the 16" is getting much closer. when thinking about the UI space the 16" and 17" were about 127 DPI. The 17" was 1920 wide while the UI space of the new 16" is 1728 wide. Thats only missing 96 pixels on each side. That is in terms of width. Height on the 17" was 1200 and on the new 16" it is 1117 so almost exactly what we had on the 17"

On top of that we have the scale modes thanks to the retina pixels. We do not know yet what options we will have but if we go off the M1 ratios then we could be looking at a 1944 (3888) wide UI mode and a 2268 (4536) wide mode. Much better than we could ever do with the 17" MBP. In all reality we finally have back the nice larger MBP we lost many years ago.

 

[joe1946]

16" 64GB/8TB M1 MAX MacBook Pro vs Mac Pro 32GB/8TB :




Maxed out 16" vs base Mac Pro with 8TB SSD that runs at half the speed..

 

[Jim Feeley]

Ya, the offered/claimed performance of these new MBPs is impressive. Probably all the machine I need for a while.

16" 64GB/8TB M1 MAX MacBook Pro vs Mac Pro 32GB/8TB :

Yes, Apple's add-on price for SSDs and RAM are steep. But if you can squeak by with a smaller internal SSD and lean on external storage (as I do on my Intel 16-inch MBP), you can drop the price a lot:

 

[joe1946]

1TB versions :

 

[Thomas Smet]

Oh that that's another important factor the storage bandwidth. 7.4 GB/s is huge. Even on the M1 MBA the storage is fast enough where having limited ram means its hard to even tell a swap file is being used. Yes that can shorten the lifespan of the storage but after owning my M1 for over ten months and I'm now finally at 2% usage off the write cycles. Took a long time to break past 1%. Because it rounds up I may even be at 1.1% or who knows. All I know is in almost a year I have used under 2% of the write cycles on a 8 GB 256 GB MBA. Having 16 GB, 32 GB or even 64 GB will mean hitting that storage much less for a swap file. When you do however it will be even faster than it is on my M1. I'm not entirely sure many will notice a difference between real ram and swap file.

The new Macs even come with more storage meaning that storage will last even longer as it uses the write cycles. In some ways on these new Apple Silicon Macs one can get extra storage vs ram and have much of the same benefit. The GPU does seem to like more ram however so for the best performance I think it would be better to still get at least 32 GB. I think thats why the Max defaults to 32 GB. I think performance would have suffered trying to use it with 16 GB. So far the number of GPU cores seems to do better when it matches the GB of ram. M1 8 GB worked well with 8 cores, Pro the 16 GB works well with 16 cores and the Max with 32 cores works well with 32 GB. On the M1 performance is a bit better under heavy GPU load with 16 GB. I assume the same will be true with the Pro 16 cores and having 32 GB and the Max 32 cores bumping up to 64 GB.

Having that super fast storage however will mean virtually pushing the system way beyond 64 GB when needed and having that double speed is awesome.

 

[Run&Gun]

Ya, the offered/claimed performance of these new MBPs is impressive. Probably all the machine I need for a while.



Yes, Apple's add-on price for SSDs and RAM are steep. But if you can squeak by with a smaller internal SSD and lean on external storage (as I do on my Intel 16-inch MBP), you can drop the price a lot:

Yeah. I’m considering a 64GB MAX with 2TB SSD. That’s a manageable $4299. Or $3899 if I can live with 1TB of storage(which is still more than I currently have).

 

[Thomas Smet]

Ya, the offered/claimed performance of these new MBPs is impressive. Probably all the machine I need for a while.



Yes, Apple's add-on price for SSDs and RAM are steep. But if you can squeak by with a smaller internal SSD and lean on external storage (as I do on my Intel 16-inch MBP), you can drop the price a lot:

Agreed. I'm not entirely sure why we tend to look at the max storage when most of us never need that. Even if we could afford it we tend to use a lot of external storage for projects anyway. Especially those of us that may have a desktop as well. If one can afford the internal storage its super convenient to not have to plug in a drive when carrying around a laptop. If many will use this mostly on a desk and having a laptop means going from desk A to desk B there is very little reason to pay for internal storage. If one mostly edits in the field because they do travel vlogs or on set of a production or in a hotel room then the internal storage may be worth the cost in the long run.

Also if one isn't shooting fat raw video do they really need 8 TB? Most of us don't even use 8 TB external project drives. I understand it might be nice to keep multiple old projects but maybe its best to break that habit and offload older projects as needed. Plus due to the write cycles limit of flash storage I personally feel better beating up a more affordable external drive thats easy to chuck I the trash and replace as needed.

I find 512 GB and 1 TB to be a sweet spot for a MBP. On my MBA so far even 256 GB is enough. Enough to instal all my apps and have space left for swap files. I keep my photos and music libraries on an external drive so it can be moved between the MBA and Mac mini. so beyond the installed apps I don't need a lot of extra space. 512 GB is nice to make sure there are more write cycles for the swap file. 1 TB is nice for that same reason plus then you can keep libraries on the system like photos, books and music. It can also handle some smaller projects as needed. Beyond that seems almost like a waste to me.

Now if this is my only computer and I want the convenience of never plugging in a drive and that convenience maters more than cost then go big.

 

[ahalpert]

I don't think it's just convenience of not plugging in drives, but also speed. I haven't crunched the numbers on this lot, but in a thread last year about SSDs, we all came to the consensus that getting an external drive that could match the speed of the mac internal ssd would cost you about the same per GB or even more as the internal drive. But personally, I don't currently need more than 1 or 2TB tops of storage accessible at those speeds. I'm making do with 512GB

 

[Thomas Smet]

I don't think it's just convenience of not plugging in drives, but also speed. I haven't crunched the numbers on this lot, but in a thread last year about SSDs, we all came to the consensus that getting an external drive that could match the speed of the mac internal ssd would cost you about the same per GB or even more as the internal drive. But personally, I don't currently need more than 1 or 2TB tops of storage accessible at those speeds. I'm making do with 512GB

It kind of comes down to how much speed do you really need for a project drive. A system drive we want as much speed as possible because it determines how quickly the system boots up and apps load. It also greatly helps the swap file feel more like ram.

For compressed video how much speed does one really need? Even 6k BRAW is a pretty decent size that doesn't really need a massive amount of bandwidth unless one is doing a ton of layers at once. Some file formats are larger but the larger the files the faster that internal speed will fill up anyway.

Flash storage of equal speed may be cost prohibitive but a multi drive Raid may not be. Up until 4 TB, SSD is now comparable in cost to an equal size Raid. Going larger however and a Raid will be considerably more cost effective.

No matter what an internal drive is typically not the best project drive. What if the system breaks? What if you run out of space? What if you need to move t another system for whatever reason? Plus its typically not recommended to use an internal drive that is constantly being used for swap file, OS and NLE temp files and so forth. If you are running media that requires 7 GB/s that leaves nothing left for the swap file. If the media on your timeline only requires 3 GB/s that still only leave a portion left for the swap file. Ironically the internal storage should only be used for lighter weight editing tasks and not really heavy projects that typically run from a 8 or 16 drive Raid.

Most of us are editing projects that fly flawlessly on a 500 MB/s SSD. Heck even a 7200 RPM drive may be good enough for many 10bit 4k compressed video formats. I tend to edit right from the SSD I use to shoot with on my P4k.

 

[ahalpert]

What's a swap file? It was Dan (puredrifting) who wanted to max out his throughput. Not sure why. I think just for footage transfers. I think he went with an NVME.2 raid. I get by with SSDs and even HDDs, although don't SSDs have a major advantage for video editing because of the faster seek time? But my typical workflow is to load proxies onto my internal SSD and edit directly from that, including sending proxy-quailty exports to my clients. So, I am mostly working off the internal drive (but, obviously, with tiny bitrates). And then I connect the footage drive only for finishing the cut

 

[Thomas Smet]

What's a swap file? It was Dan (puredrifting) who wanted to max out his throughput. Not sure why. I think just for footage transfers. I think he went with an NVME.2 raid. I get by with SSDs and even HDDs, although don't SSDs have a major advantage for video editing because of the faster seek time? But my typical workflow is to load proxies onto my internal SSD and edit directly from that, including sending proxy-quailty exports to my clients. So, I am mostly working off the internal drive (but, obviously, with tiny bitrates). And then I connect the footage drive only for finishing the cut

The swap file is where data is dumped when the system runs low on memory. Think of it like using a chunk of the flash storage as temporary ram. On laptop HDDs it sucked horribly because the drives were so slow. With SSD it as better but still not great. With 3 Gb/s flash storage it starts to get really fast and in many cases hard to tell when a system is using ram or the swap file. With a 7 Gb/s storage that will be even better. We are essentially getting a slower but much larger form of secondary ram for the system to use. If the drive is large enough like a 128 GB swap file for a total of 192 Gb of system memory.

Obviously if one can they should get more ram first since it will always be faster but if one does get a 16 GB MBP it may not be the end of the world either and they may themselves very surprised at how much it can do. On my M1 I only have 8 GB and last week I have Apple Motion, Affinity Design, OBS and Blender 2.93 open at the same time working on some live video streaming backgrounds for a Halloween DJ event. MBA never screamed at me once even when I was rendering HD from Blender.

People tend to laugh when they see a base M1 having 8 GB of ram but this thing seems to do a heck of a lot more than anybody expected it to. Part of that is thanks to the unified memory. Part is thanks to how well optimized MacOS is for memory. Part is thanks to the ultra fast flash storage and swap file system.

 

[hojomo]

The swap file is where data is dumped when the system runs low on memory. Think of it like using a chunk of the flash storage as temporary ram. On laptop HDDs it sucked horribly because the drives were so slow. With SSD it as better but still not great. With 3 Gb/s flash storage it starts to get really fast and in many cases hard to tell when a system is using ram or the swap file. With a 7 Gb/s storage that will be even better. We are essentially getting a slower but much larger form of secondary ram for the system to use. If the drive is large enough like a 128 GB swap file for a total of 192 Gb of system memory.

Obviously if one can they should get more ram first since it will always be faster but if one does get a 16 GB MBP it may not be the end of the world either and they may themselves very surprised at how much it can do. On my M1 I only have 8 GB and last week I have Apple Motion, Affinity Design, OBS and Blender 2.93 open at the same time working on some live video streaming backgrounds for a Halloween DJ event. MBA never screamed at me once even when I was rendering HD from Blender.

People tend to laugh when they see a base M1 having 8 GB of ram but this thing seems to do a heck of a lot more than anybody expected it to. Part of that is thanks to the unified memory. Part is thanks to how well optimized MacOS is for memory. Part is thanks to the ultra fast flash storage and swap file system.

You should absolutely be separating your data from OS on different drives for both the reasons Thomas mentions; but various programs use a swap (scratch disk) file, not just the OS. You are creating a bottleneck having that all take place on one drive inevitably in a video production workflow

 

[ahalpert]

You should absolutely be separating your data from OS on different drives for both the reasons Thomas mentions; but various programs use a swap (scratch disk) file, not just the OS. You are creating a bottleneck having that all take place on one drive inevitably in a video production workflow

It's probably a non-issue with the types of files I'm working with. I create 960x540 h264 proxies in fcpx and work from those off the internal drive. My fcpx library backups get uploaded to my Google drive account as soon as they get saved. All original media is elsewhere. I agree it's not ideal to have editing material on your OS drive, it's just a lifestyle thing. I do most of my editing on the couch (or wherever) and I can have a half dozen projects accessible simultaneously without connecting any drives.