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 Harava 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 Pro 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.
This is Andrew Muller. He's a musician friend of mine who goes by the name Viola Bloom.
He's been growing in music production for a number of years now, accumulating a large
array of cool synths and effect mabobs that plug into his 2015 MacBook Pro, glowing logo
and all.
Software-wise, music producers are spoiled for choice with their digital audio workstation
software. Andrew's choice when writing and producing tunes is reason.
For us, a slow computer is a bit of a nuisance, but for Andrew, it can really cramp his creative
flow. Our audio buffer size is very important, so you can see we have a certain amount of samples
here and it tells us what our latency is. This song, for example, will not play unless I have the set to 2,000 samples.
So 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, I want to record some instruments. It starts to create a mess, so it's like, okay, well, I'm just going to increase the
buffer size.
It's like a very long delay.
It's literally impossible because your brain gets confused because 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.
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 LTTstore.com, dressed
like me with their plaid flannel. In the edit den, he uses a massive, powerful desktop PC, threadripper, 3090 and all.
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 a new MacBook Pro.
I'm going to see if it's just as fast. Is it going to be faster than mine?
You're going to tell me. You know this is what you want.
I'm not going to say anything.
The goal of 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? Well, I could find my backpack, put a touchscreen on a MacBook, go diving for iPhones, clean
my airpods, fix iCloud storage, make a video with an iPhone, use a slow computer and collapse.
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.
At his desk, Hoffman edits high-quality, high-bit rate Mac Address footage.
Now we do have a server to edit footage of, however, it and Macs 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 transcode is just a little bit slower.
For example, it would be like seven minutes to transcode something on the Threadripper
versus 12 minutes on the MacBook Pro, but I just look at it and try to listen to the
fan and I rarely hear the fan sometimes. I mean, it is a bit of a bigger difference, 12 minutes to seven minutes.
It's pretty rough, I would say, but the time difference is like a couple of minutes.
It's not exactly close, but it's not exactly far.
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. I was expecting it to like, like I was at 2,000, so I'm going to go up more samples.
So it actually just got worse when I changed it to 1,000 samples for some reason.
Yeah, maybe that's what I need to experiment with is lower.
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 Mac book, I opened up a song and like immediately it wouldn't play until
I had it at 4,000 samples.
So how did you feel when the performance was not as good? Oh man, that was so disappointing.
It felt awful. I was like, did I make a huge mistake here?
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 are you going to buy a Mac book? Yeah, I bought a Mac book and it just shipped last night.
Oh, you just got it? And it just shipped last night and I got a UPS sticker on my door and I went and picked
it up just before this interview. So you still went and got one anyway?
I still got it anyways. 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 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 Macs 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.
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.