for the artist and the creative professional a good computer is an
essential foundational tool and while we're all excited to see how Apple's new
Mac Studio will fit the bill I wanted to give a last harra of a look at the new
Macbook Pro now in the world of tech YouTube we've done our benchmarks and
tried out what's new to tell you how it is and the new Macbook has impressed
just about all of us but what about the types of people who they are made for
what is the MacBook Pro like in the real world the results might surprise you
they surprised
me but
you this is Andrew Mueller he's a
musician friend of mine who goes by the name Viola Bloom viola VI Bloom VI
Bloom he's been growing in music production for a number of years now
accumulating a large array of cool synths and effect mobs that plug into
his 2015 MacBook Pro glowing logo and
all I mean I can pull up a song
file software-wise music producers are spoiled for Choice with their digital
audio workstation software Andrew's Choice when writing and producing Tunes
is reason the reason I like reason is that you can build like very complicated
instruments and it's really cool it's based on more of an analog look like
even when you go into it you see these little rack units that you would
normally see if you went into like a million dooll studio and you can turn
them around and see the wiring and you can rewire them you could do all this
stuff using something like Ableton is like more appropriate but I hate using
Ableton like to write music with yeah cuz this is a song I wrote in the summer
I'm just starting to load it now but then once you go to play it it's like
it's going to stutter a ton for us a slow computer is a bit of a nuisance but
for Andrew it can really cramp his creative flow for audio buffer size is
like very important so you can see like we have a certain amount of samples here
and it tells us what our latency is so like this song for example will not play
unless I have this set to 2,000
samples so this is like cuz this is what you have to do is you have to keep
jumping up your buffer size every time your project gets bigger and now you can
touch the project less because you're like oh well I want to record some instruments it starts to create a mess
so it's like you okay well I'm just going to increase the buffer
size it's like a very long
delay it's literally impossible cuz you like your brain gets confused cuz you
hear it a second later it's just like you feel like an
idiot so can we make Andrew's life a
little better this new Macbook Pro with an M1 Pro processor is about four times
faster than his fourth gen Intel Core i7 laptop and so I want to give it to him
to see if such an upgrade actually makes any
difference
stop on the other side what about one of our video editors like Hoffman whom you
might recognize he's an editor here at LMG who occasionally takes photos for
Merch on LTT Store.com dress like me with their plaid flannel in the edit Den
he uses a massive powerful desktop PC Threadripper 390 in all it's just so
fast I don't really have to care about his workstation is very powerful and
very big so I want to see how much an M1 Max powered MacBook Pro with 24 cores
Compares what the heck are you doing well we're replacing your desktop heavy
and hot with the new Macbook Pro we're going to see if it's just as fast is it
going to be faster than mine well you're going to tell me you know this is what
you want not going to say
anything the goal with this video is to get an idea of what it would be like
were someone to add one of these MacBook Pros into their workflow so we're going
to need a bit of time at least over a week to let them get their hands dirty
so what do I do in the meantime I should probably read the sponsor thing right
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below many of the new features introduced in the MacBook Pro are
extremely handy especially in Hoffman's case that SD card reader almost worth
the price of Entry alone except for the fact that you also get that fabulous xdr
display the screen it's just so nice I I
can trust the screen I actually edit photos on the screen all the time for
LTD store the keyboard is just so nice it's so tactile it's exactly what I
wanted at his desk Hoffman edits high quality High bit rate Mac Address
footage now we do have a server to edit footage of of however it and Max have a
bit of a Fickle relationship so Hoffman's editing locally so how does
the MacBook compare to the Threadripper there are times when the trans coat is
just a little bit slower for example it would be like 7 minutes to transcat
something on the thre rer versus a 12 minutes on let's say MacBook Pro but I
just look at it and you know try to listen to the fan and I rarely hear the
fans sometimes I mean it is a bit of a big difference 12 minutes to 7 minutes
it's pretty rough I would say but the time difference is like a couple minutes
it's not exactly close but it's not
exactly far it just it surprises me
every time is that I can carry such a powerful computer with me in in such
like a small form factor and I look at my threat Ripper machine it's like big
and
bulky so back to Andrew the issue for
him was managing the buffer in reason to hear his multi-layered song he needed a
big buffer which meant he can't play along with it so is the new Mac any
better like my old computer once a song got bigger I would have to be up to like
2,000 samples which is like it's very hard to record
so that's not too bad for only 512 samples like I was expecting it to like
like I was at 2,000 so I'm gonna go up more samples your sample rate oh it's so
it actually just got worse when I changed it to a thousand samples for some reason what yeah maybe maybe that's
what I need to experiment with is lower like my D my DSP is at like Max
that's very weird right it's getting worse and worse and worse I think it'll
get better now at 4,000 and like the new Macbook I opened up a song and like IM
immediately it wouldn't play until I had it at 4,000
samples so how did you feel in the performance was not as good oh man that
was so disappointing it felt awful it was like
oh did I make a huge mistake here like it made me feel like I was an early
adopter it shows that the problem here is the software in the digital audio
workstation space reason is known for being a little behind their latest
update 12 now supports HD graphics for retina screens Andrew however uses
version 11 and while it should run on M1 through Rosetta something is clearly
getting Lost in Translation and Native M1 support looks a long way off despite
the M1 being a part of the system
requirements so uh are you going to buy a Macbook I'm yeah I bought a Macbook
and it just shipped last night and it just shipped last night and I got a UPS
sticker on my door and I went and picked it up just before you uh this interview
you still had got one anyway I still I still got it anyways yeah oh you got a
space gray one it's space gray what can I say for me I was motivated just
because my computer was getting slow and and while I'm trying to work on these
projects and I got 2,000 samples on my buffer size and then I upgraded it
doesn't even solve that problem so now I'm actually in a funny position where
I'm like oh maybe I would move to Ableton because I know it's going to
perform way better and that might be a mistake but I'm motivated to make that
mistake because I have this problem
now these powerful Apple silicon Maxs
have brought loads of enthusiasm to the platform especially from creative
professionals like Hoffman and Andrew both of whom really fell for the
features design and future of the new architecture it's like four grand enough
even to put their money where their mouth is
but after the hardware transition comes the hard part which is the software
transition there are loads of great chip features like the neural engine the
media engine and countless GPU cores for developers to take advantage of but it's
going to require lots of work to do so larger developers like the ones who make
Ableton will get there faster in fact we
saw them in the Apple Studio announcement but it's harder for smaller
developers like the one who makes reason and at a time when Apple's developer
relationships are dropping towards all-time lows this might be for users
the biggest difficulty of this transition would I get one here's the
deal I'm saying that I love it because I didn't pay for it if you don't need to upgrade then
just wait a bit when you look at machine that's so small and you tell yourself
that it's almost $4,000 you kind of start to think is it
justifiable because if I can't use it in a professional environment then where am
I going to use it
thanks for testing out this Mac Address I'll admit this wasn't quite the
conclusion I was expecting when I set out to make this video but if you think
the MacBook Pro will make your Computing faster then give this a like and if
you're curious about the Mac Studio then subscribe now in the comments I'm
curious about what apps you use that aren't quite Apple silicon native yet
like Microsoft teams