Which Macbook Pro Is Best For Music Production – Apple computers have been around for a few years, especially in the MacBook line. The footprint is small, ports are missing, the keyboard is full of problems, and some important things like the drive and memory size are considered pitiful compared to other laptops.
What professional audio users want is power, low fan noise, and ports to plug things in, and Apple seems to be getting those things in every iteration of the MacBook Pro. By doing so, Apple leaves itself open to criticism from the professional community. Of course, many Apple users struggle with dongles and other ways around these limitations, given that the Mac’s hardware and software ecosystem is so beautiful it’s uncomfortable.
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When it comes to desktops, Apple ships with the Mac Pro 7.1, a beast of a machine that, when fully loaded, can pack a serious punch. The Mac Pro has gotten a lot of love from the pro audio community. Since then, it has been widely adopted in studios around the world.
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Then Apple announced the M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, featuring Apple’s new Silicon M1 SoC technology. The new M1 chip makes a serious impact and got us all excited, but the specs have been announced and it looks like Apple hasn’t learned how to make a laptop for professional audio users. Few ports, external monitor issues and low memory deals. When we first reviewed the MacBook Pro M1 right after launch, we knew that the first machine was just the beginning and the main course was to come.
Apple then announced new, more powerful MacBook computers in October 2021 powered by the new M1 Pro and M1 Mac SoCs. It’s even better that Apple is offering this new device with the things you’ve been asking for—ports, memory, and the right hard drive. So the audio community really got one
Russ Hughes and James Richmond delivered a new Apple MacBook Pro powered by the new M1 Max SoC. Here are our first impressions of the new MacBook Pro… is it really a pro?
Is here. My new notebook computer, MacBook Pro 2021 14. I ordered this machine when it was announced at the Apple event last week.
Macbook Pro 13 Inch
It arrived a few hours ago so I’m still getting everything ready but I just said WOW. This thing is ridiculous.
The new machine has a 10-core M1 Max processor, 64 GB of RAM, 2 TB of internal storage. It replaces the 2017 MacBook Pro 15″ with 3.1GHz and 16GB RAM. Yes, the one with the annoying keyboard. I wouldn’t compare the new machine to this one though.
I want to talk a little about how it compares to my main studio computer, the 16-core 3.2GHz i7 Mac Pro tower with 192GB of memory. Is that even fair? However, the Mac Pro can be redundant these days.
Geekbench 5 reported the laptop’s single-core score of 1729, compared to the tower’s single-core score of 1129. That’s 35% faster. From a laptop that costs about 40% of what the tower does. That’s incredible.
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Multicore performance reported a score of 11604 versus the tower’s score of 13920, with the tower being about 17% faster. This is still very respectable.
The Blackmagic Disk Speed Test reported read and write speeds of around 5500 mBit/s, roughly double what the Mac Pro is capable of. Pretty amazing. In a device that weighs around 1.5 kg. And the score is very temporary because I did a test that was a little against the way it should be done, which is when the engine is idling.
The tests are performed while the machine is busy copying data in the background. I expect the single and multicore scores to go up after the install is complete and the disk speed will go up I imagine.
Well, for starters, the new MacBook Pros are very fast and capable. Maybe we don’t worry about how fast it is and just use it. His power felt limitless.
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I have Logic and Pro Tools installed and even the most CPU heavy sessions run flawlessly. CPU usage is incredibly low. Fan noise is absent. Heat, a problem with previous Intel-based models, is absent. It has enough ports, sensibly adding HDMI and SD card support
So does this mean I’ll ditch the tower and just rely on this laptop? No, or at least not yet. I still rely on Avid Pro Tools HDX and there is no way to use this card without using the expansion chassis.
Also, the Apple Silicon / M1 release is still ongoing, I don’t want to rely on this device as a studio hub until it’s well and truly established.
Finally, I like the tower format as a studio computer, you can expand the storage beyond what you can do in the notebook format and add more cards.
When Is Apple (aapl) Releasing New Mac Pro, 15 Inch Macbook Air, New Imac, M3?
That doesn’t take away from this new notebook, however, which is an amazing piece of engineering. It will probably take me another day or so to install and configure the software to my liking and then I can really put it to the test.
I have the device, 10-core M1 Max processor, 64GB RAM, 1TB internal storage, for a few hours. I enjoyed using the M1 as I also have an M1 13″ MacBook Pro, which I received a few days after Apple announced the M1 last year. You can read more about my impressions of the machine here.
Built like a professional machine, it looks and feels like the old heavy MacBook Pros we loved, a departure from Apple’s obsession with making everything thinner. This is truly the essence of style…yes from Apple.
Now we have an actual power connector in the form of the new MagSafe, which comes with a pro-feel braided power cable – so maybe the day the broken cable in the connector is gone too? Even better, there are three Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) connectors that can be used for;
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PLUS (yes Plus, we’re still talking about the Apple MacBook ?) we also have an HDMI 2.0 connector, which means no more messing around trying to connect multiple monitors. There’s also an SDXC card slot for reading and writing popular camera card formats. Finally, there’s a high-spec headphone jack with the option to use faster high-impedance headphones.
Suffice to say, the new keyboard is better and more solid. The speakers are also better than previous MacBooks, with a smaller back and greater stereo range.
I haven’t had the unit long enough to run any useful power tests like James, they will come in the next week and month as compatibility fixes. But I ran Geekbench and below is a comparison between the MacBook Pro 13″ M1, the new MacBook Pro Max 14″ and the original loaded 16″ Intel i9 MacBook Pro.
Of course, as James pointed out with this new MacBook Pro, we’re getting some impressive performance results. When we say shocking, we mean it. AnandTech ran some serious performance tests on the new machine and this is what it concluded;
The World’s Best Computers For Music Production 2016 │ Sound Oracle
On the CPU side, doubling the performance cores is an obvious way to increase performance – the competition does this in some of their models as well. How Apple is different is not just the scaled CPU core, but the entire environment. It’s not just 4 extra performance cores, it’s a new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has expanded the memory subsystem to never look at size, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to reach performance numbers that simply aren’t considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here not only beat competing laptop models, but compete with the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring server-grade hardware to beat the M1 Max – it’s generally ridiculous.
Of course, in the month to get serious power from the MacBook Pro means two things; heat and fan noise, of course, the fans follow the heat, because night after day, it is an inevitable problem, also have to find a way. However, Apple’s Silicon SoC runs around 40 degrees even when pushed hard in previous tests. This new machine has even better cooling than the first generation Mac M1, and it’s almost impossible to get a fan to work on one of them. The new Mac is a great machine in many ways.
After a little taster arrived, I quickly ran a purely unscientific test session in Pro Tools around 700 tracks using Stock Avid plugins. Here’s a short video showing a large Pro Tools 2020.10 session running on an Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max 14″.