Jurassic Punk

December 16, 2022

If you’re reading this blog, you probably know the story — at least, you think you do. As Steven Spielberg began production on 1993’s Jurassic Park, he and Industrial Light and Magic’s Dennis Muren planned to execute the all-important visual effects component of the film’s prehistoric predators using tried-and-true stop- and go-motion animation¹. But a bleeding-edge computer animation test convinced Spielberg and producer Kathleen Kennedy to risk it all on computer-generated dinosaurs, forever altering the course of visual effects in film.

It’s a story that had direct and momentous impact on my career, as I was a year away from graduating CalArts. Industry appetites for ILM’s digital magic would have the studio crewing up so rapidly that even a barely-drinking-age Stu was considered a viable hire. After contributing to both Jumanji and Casper, I was assigned to help out with the special edition re-release of Star Wars, where I lit, rendered, and provided rigging support for a Jabba the Hutt model built and animated by Steve “Spaz” Williams² — the artist who created that industry-redefining test.

I distinctly remember a feeling of being thrown to the wolves. No one at the company seemed to know how to handle Williams, and I was an expendable pawn (who may or may not belong here) that they could toss into “the pit” with him in hopes of finalizing the single longest animation take in ILM’s young computer animation history. I had months to work on the sequence, which had me compositing in new footage of Boba Fett, puppet-animating Han Solo to step over Jabba’s tail, and hand-painting repairs to the Jabba renders to get the shots approved.

Working on Star Wars was, of course, a dream come true for this Gen Xer, even if I knew the material we were adding would never be a part of what I would consider to be the canonical version of the film. But it was working on Casper that put me in dailies every morning with Dennis Muren.

George Lucas, Ron Howard, Phil Tippet and Dennis Muren with a stop-motion puppet from *Willow.*

Muren was unequivocally my childhood hero, and working with him was as meaningful to me as getting my name in the credits of a Star Wars movie, or in the pages of Cinefex. I learned so much from watching him review dailies. The first time he complimented my lighting, I was ecstatic. Maybe I did belong here.

The Dennis Muren I knew emerged from Jurassic with an unmatched sense of how to incorporate the new frontier of digital VFX into ILM’s models-and-miniatures tradition. But his role in that initial test was always a bit unclear in the accounts I read and heard.

Williams with his fateful test animation.

Jurassic Punk is the deeply personal and profoundly surprising documentary about the man at the center of that pivotal — and controversial — moment in visual effects history. Director Scott Leberecht, my contemporary at late-’90s ILM, had unique access to not only Williams himself, but also his personal archive of memorabilia and never-before-seen footage. It makes for a compelling, informative, and deeply human story — complete with what for me amounts to a Shyamalan-level twist.

In Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) declares of the ostensibly sterile dinosaurs’ miraculous ability to reproduce: “Life... finds a way.” Computer animation was inevitably going to crash through barriers and find its way into the film industry — and as with those fictional T-Rexes and Velociraptors, the way it happened was painful, and maybe even a little dangerous.

Jurassic Punk is a must watch for anyone who thinks they know the story of how everything changed in visual effects. It’s available today for purchase or rent on Apple TV.

As my readership mysteriously gets younger while I remain believably the same age, I feel compelled to address the reaction you might be having to this information if it’s new to you. If it sounds crazy to be considering King Kong-style puppet animation in 1993, just look at what ILM and Phil Tippet were able to do in 1988 with Willow, or even as far back as 1981 with Dragonslayer. Stop motion animation had been commanding the screen as recently as 1990 with Robocop 2. There's stop-motion in Terminator 2 (1991) that I bet you've never noticed. We were all watching puppets in theaters all the time back then, onions firmly tied to our belts.
Williams’s nickname is now widely understood to be a harmful slur, so I’ve included it here only once, for context.

Lightroom Adds Video Color Editing, with Prolost Presets

June 15, 2022

From the Lightroom Blog:

The same edit controls that you already use to make your photography shine can now be used with your videos as well! Not only can you use Lightroom’s editing capabilities to make your video clips look their best, you can also copy and paste edit settings between photos and videos, allowing you to achieve a consistent aesthetic across both your photos and videos. Presets, including Premium Presets and Lightroom’s AI-powered Recommended Presets, can also be used with videos. Lightroom also allows you to trim off the beginning or end of a video clip to highlight the part of the video that is most important.

Premium Presets in Lightroom for iPhone.

Not all of Lightroom’s color controls are working for video, but it’s enough to be useful. Not every video workflow requires a timeline and dedicated color tools, so I welcome these features.

In fact, I was graciously invited to contribute to them, in the form of a set of Premium Presets available to Creative Cloud subscribers.

Update Lightroom to the latest version to get the new video features, and find my presets under Video: Creative.

Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and Apple Studio Display, running Cinema 4D and Redshift.

Mac Studio and Studio Display

March 17, 2022

In October of 2021 I got to test a 14″ MacBook Pro with M1 Max processor. It performed so well, that I, along with many Mac power-users, questioned whether it could replace my desktop Mac.

Last week, I reported that the answer turned out to be no:

What makes a computer powerful, for my workflow, is not just processing power. It's connectedness, and presence. It’s speakers and microphones and ingesting CFAST while rapidly recalling raw files from fifteen years ago. It’s the power of side-by side displays that remind me in the morning of what I was working on the previous day, because nothing has moved and a dozen apps are still running. It’s desk space and disk space, and most importantly, head space.

I love having a separate desktop and laptop. My ideal laptop should be nimble, freeing my desktop to be a workstation, intractably entangled in a jumble of peripherals.

My desktops of choice for many years now have been highly-specced iMacs, culminating with Apple’s one-hit-wonder iMac Pro, which I spent Mac Pro money on and considered to be the ideal computer for my needs.

Until the very day after I wrote the above, when Apple announced the Mac Studio.

Split Personality

As an iMac fan I never saw any downsides to the all-in-one design. From 2009 to 2017, with each new iMac I bought, everything got better; processors, drive speed, displays. Upgrading all of them at once in a reliable, preconfigured package perfectly met my needs as a power user, not computer-tinkerer.

I was hoping that Apple would put the power of the M1 Max in a big iMac. But I was concerned that the direction they went with the iMac 24″, which is thinner than the original iPhone, would challenge two of the features I love most about my iMac Pro: its quiet cooling and plethora of professional ports.

For Apple to address this, they would have to do two things they’ve been steadfastly avoiding: build a mini-Mac Pro (or a big Mac Mini?) and release a standalone display for mortal humans. Not only was I unconvinced Apple would do this, I was skeptical I would prefer the result to the convenience of a pro-grade iMac.

So I watched the March 8th event with cautious hope, but little optimism.

Mac Stu(dio)

Spoiler alert: Apple nailed it.

Before revealing what kind of container it would be in, Apple talked at length about “one last chip” in the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max lineup: the M1 Ultra. Simply put, it’s two M1 Maxes “fused” together, which means it is configurable to double every one of the M1 Max specs, but is still seen by the OS as one multi-core CPU, and a single GPU.

The M1 Max runs cool, but will heat up and potentially even thermally throttle in the 14″ MacBook Pro. Two of them together didn’t feel like something that could fit in a paper-thin all-in-one, even with a power cord and a fan.

And then Apple revealed the Mac Studio. Milled from a solid block of aluminum, this mini Mac Pro — or is it a big Mac Mini? — is exactly what I said I didn’t want, and the minute I saw it, I knew I’d been wrong.

Especially when Apple revealed the exact display I’ve been begging them to make. The Studio Display is essentially the same 27″ non-HDR panel found in the 5K iMac, but with a Center Stage camera, barely-there bezels, and aluminum trappings.

It had been convenient to upgrade both my display and computer with each new iMac, but there are downsides to using a consumer computer for pro work. It’s not fun to add or remove peripherals from a tall display, and it’s scary sometimes to know that when you tilt your monitor by a few degrees (or elevate your standing desk), you’re yanking on a dozen or more cables. I immediately saw how decoupling the display from the computer could create a better experience for me — one that I simply wasn’t open to in the form of a 40-pound behemoth rolling around on $400 wheels, enclosing airspace I would never fill with PCI cards I would never buy.

Profiles in Courage

I tested a maxed-out Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, 64-Core CPU, 128GB of integrated memory, and 8TB SSD. This time I was prepared, with Maxon’s benchamrk tool for the Redshift GPU-based 3D render engine, and the same render-intensive After Effects project I had just profiled on the M1 Max laptop.

While the Mac Studio is configurable with an M1 Max, the M1 Ultra version should be the fastest Mac ever made, containing two complete M1 Max chips. I was curious how close it might come to being twice as fast as the M1 Max MacBook Pro.

Redshift Benchmark

The M1 Ultra rendered the Redshift Benchmark in six minutes, ten seconds. That’s not quite twice as fast as the 11:08 from the M1 Max, but significantly faster.

In testing my own scenes, with render quality cranked up to unnecessarily high levels (I am me, after all), I got a similar proportion of results.

Seconds to render a super cool Redshift scene incompetently set up by me. Shorter bars are better.

The trajectory of Apple’s integrated GPU performance is fascinating to me. On one hand, this is a grahics card-without-a-card with up to 128 GB of VRAM, performing at levels never before seen on a Mac. On the other hand, it’s still outpaced by a high-end gaming laptop that unabashedly spins up loud fans and draws a power like a Marvel villain. Will Apple’s GPUs have terabytes of RAM by the time they outperform an NVIDIA card?

In practice, working with Redshift is way more fun on the big display and cool-to-the-touch keyboard of the Mac Studio. There's less “road feel” than with a laptop — you just push on it as hard as you can, blissfully unaware of how hard it’s working. You would not say that about working on the Razer gaming laptop.

After Effects Beta

Where Activity Monitor shows Redshift pegging the M1 Ultra’s integrated GPU to 100% for the duration of a Cinema 4D batch render, After Effects, even with M1-optimized multiprocessing in public beta, does not do the same for the 20-core CPU. Compositing is more i/o bound than ray-tracing, but this project uses very little media, and the SSD of the Mac Studio is faster than some RAM, so the issue is really that my chosen project uses a part of After Effects that is notoriously not modern: the 2.5D renderer introduced in, and not substantially updated since, 2001.

My little spaceships rendered faster on the Studio, but we’ve hit the point of diminishing returns.

Circle of Stone spaceship pass only, rendering in Adobe After Effects. Shorter bars are better. iMac Pro as tested: 3 GHz 10-Core Intel Xeon W, 128 GB 2666 MHz DDR4, Radeon Pro Vega 64 16 GB.

Double, or Trouble?

In my limited testing, with these highly-specific tasks, the M1 Ultra is handily faster than an M1 Max, but not doubly so. There’s a soft shoulder to the performance envelope of the M1 line. I plan on running some more tests of course, but my sense is that those of us who make the creative tools that can truly take advantage of the M1 Ultra’s power still have work to do to occupy every corner of performance possible.

After Effects beta rendering about seven frames at once of my benchmark project. CPU to spare.

Cool it Now

I didn’t just render a few benchmarks on the M1 Ultra, I did my best to keep the little Alumilump rendering 24 hours a day. The design of this big little box is half fan, and I wanted to see and hear it pushed to its limits.

On the rare occasions that I could do that to my iMac Pro, that quiet cooling would become audible, and a stream of hot air would flow from the back. After an all-night Redshift render, the 14″ MacBook Pro with M1 Max would also get loud enough to call attention to itself in a quiet room, and I recorded the temperature of the housing at 100.8º F (38.2º C). This is hot enough to be uncomfortable, but nothing compared to some Intel MacBook Pros I’ve owned over the years, one of which would burn my fingertips routinely even when placed on an active cooling stand. There's a spot on the top of my 16″ MacBook Pro (2019, 2.4 GHz 8-core i9) that gets that hot when the machine is essentially idle.

After letting the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra render hundreds of frames with its 64-core GPU pegged the entire time, I placed my hand behind the box and felt the slightest waft of warm-ish air gently emitting. If I pressed my ear to it, I could just barely hear the fans over the other sounds in my studio.

This is why this thing is not built in to the back of a display. It’s a quiet, cool beast with ludicrous specs.

It’s a workstation.

After 20 straight hours of maxed-out GPU rendering, a wee puff of warm air.

Many Ports in a Storm

It’s a workstation because it never breaks a sweat, but it’s also a workstation because it is bristling with ports. The SSD card slot is on the front, for human use. There are two USB-C ports right next to it (Thunderbolt 4 on the M1 Ultra). You know. for stuff.

There are four Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back, alongside 10-gig ethernet and HDMI. All welcome, but the real joy is from the two USB-A ports. I filled them up fast and still had to resort to some adapters, but I’ll be able to swap this one-for-one with my iMac pro and not miss a Loupedeck or a Streamdeck.

Display’s the Thing

The Studio Display lacks true HDR and 120Hz ProMotion, two things almost no one will miss. But for only $300 more than the LG 5K UltraFine Apple had been suggesting one might use with a Mac Mini or MacBook Pro, you get a factory-calibrated display with a beautiful aluminum housing and stand. Strangely, this display also contains a better processor than Apple shipped in the Dev Kit Mac Mini (or currently supplies in an Apple TV), presumably to run that Center Stage camera.

As you should expect from Apple, the Studio Display has great P3 wide-gamut color accuracy out of the box. In my testing, it doesn’t seem to exhibit the mild and temporary burn-in that I sometimes notice on my iMac Pro. It’s a very good display, and should be viewed as the essential mate to the Mac Studio, although it will be popular with anyone looking to dock a MacBook Pro as well.

Center Stage

Center Stage is Apple’s term for a front-facing camera that pans and zooms to frame people. This works by starting with an ultra-wide camera, and using facial recognition to drive a crop. Simple enough, except that doing just that would look terrible. No one loves how they look on the edges of a fisheye lens.

Apple is doing it the hard way, like they did on the 12.9″ iPad Pro; they are accurately removing the lens distortion and vignetting from the ultra-wide image, then panning and zooming across that rectilinear result with a virtual 3D camera. You can see perspective lines change as if the camera was physically panning. We learn to do this kind of photographically-accurate reframing in visual effects, and typically don’t expect commodity hardware to do it in real time for chats with grandma. Unless it’s Apple.

Of course, since you’re looking at a crop of a heavily-processed image, resolution and clarity are what Apple trades for panning and tilting, and you can sure tell. On a portable iPad this makes a lot of sense. On a desktop, Center Stage may have the side effect of forcing you to clean a wider frustum of your room before that morning Zoom with the team.

Update: Many reviewers have noticed the suspiciously low quality of the camera, and Apple has stated that there’s a software issue at fault and a fix coming.

We Don’t Talk about Nano

If Mork had an iPhone would he be a Nanu-texter?

When I finally caved and bought a Pro Display XDR, I did not opt for the Nano-texture surface option, a $1,000 add-on designed to cut down on glare. I was already accustomed to positioning my desk to avoid reflections in my brightly-lit studio because of the reflective iMac Pro screen.

In 3D rendering we talk about surfaces being “energy conserving.” This is a fancy way of saying that no more light can bounce off a surface than hit it in the first place, and that light can be either specular (like a mirror reflection), or diffuse (like paper), or somewhere in-between — but where it reflects specularly, it cannot reflect diffusely, and vice-versa.

This is why, while you can’t see my reflection in the photo above, you can see a slight hint of a shadow on the screen from my window frames. Only diffuse ilumination registers shadows (you can’t cast a shadow on a mirror). Apple has traded specular reflection for diffuse.

If you could have a slider to blend between Nano and non-nano.

When Apple started shipping shiny laptop screens (as an option) in the 2000s, it was because of this trade-off: diffuse light washes out a display, where specular reflectivity improves contrast, as long as the reflections aren’t overpowering. When a display surface is highly specular, like my iMac Pro screen, manufacturers attempt to cut down on reflections by using anti-reflective coatings. No one had yet combined the idea of an anti-reflective optical coating with a matte display. But that’s exactly what Apple has done with the Nano-texture Glass.

Testing the Studio Display with Nano-texture Glass on sunny days in my studio, it seems to achieve the best of both sides of the trade-off. It absorbs the majority of the direct light that falls onto it, and what light it does bounce back, it scatters into unrecognizable (and slightly purple) diffuse reflections. It seems worth the comparatively-reasonable $300 surcharge if your environment is not well-controlled for light. Just beware that the Nano-texture surface is more difficult to preserve and clean than a standard shiny display.

Out Standing

Apple gotta Apple, and one place they did it with the Studio Display is the $400 option of a tilt- and height-adjustable stand. In my opinion, which is corroborated by ergonomics experts, Apple’s iMacs place the display too low on a surface that also supports the keyboard and mouse. I’ve always put my iMac on a riser, which is not only ergonomic, it’s also useful as a place to stash stuff or route cables.

The luxury of the premium stand is not in the extra height it provides (it actually looks kinda E.T.-awkward in tall mode), but rather in the experience of adjusting it. So if you share a computer with a person with different ergonomic preferences, and would therefore be manipulating the display often, it might be something to consider. Otherwise I’d suggest you stack your Mac on a rack.

HDR is the Future

My rendition of how an LED array backlights an HDR display.

I guess. But we don’t live in the future, we live in the present. Apple’s approach to High Dynamic Range display (from the Pro Display XDR down to the 12.9″ iPad Pro) is a miraculously good implementation of a flawed method: using zoned backlights that are significantly less dense than the pixels of the display. I illustrated this process in my MacBook Pro post, but I didn’t go into detail about how and when you can see artifacts associated with it. Let’s put it this way, if you want to remain happy with your Apple HDR display, don’t seek out videos designed to show where it breaks.

But even with a true per-pixel HDR display, such as my OLED TV, I remain skeptical of the value of really bright stuff in movies and TV. I like the deep, rich black and color accuracy promised by HDR presentation, but the actual High part in HDR still leaves me with mixed feelings. I wrote about this back in 2017 and still feel mostly the same.

I was reminded of this when watching the season two finale of Ted Lasso on Apple TV+. Early in the episode, Sam (Toheeb Jimoh) is in the locker room looking at a piece of paper. Typically my family watches Ted Lasso on a Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) TV, but this time we were watching on my 12.9″ iPad Pro. I was shocked by the creative decision to render the overhead lighting in the locker room at what seemed to be the very maximum brightness supported by the display. It completely distracted from Jimoh’s beautiful performance. In fact, it simply made it hard to see, because my eyes had to adjust to the brightness of the background.

A frame from Ted Lasso

Photographed off the HDR display on a MacBook Pro.

That same photo, underexposed by three stops. The ceiling lights are just below clipping now.

Let me try to capture this experience for you. Here’s the frame displayed in HDR on my 14″ MacBook Pro. It looks normal enough at exposure, but since the photo is not HDR, you can’t see how much brighter the ceiling lights are. But if I reduce the brightness of the photo by three whole stops, you can see what the true visual impression of this shot is: his face and the white of the paper he’s holding are at such wildly different brightness values than the background that the shot is hard to look at — like trying to talk to a friend when they’re sitting in front of a bright window.

This is such an odd creative choice (repeated throughout the series) that one might even suspect that Apple is pushing its show creators to grade for HDR effect, to show off their hardware’s capability. But HDR mastering does not require your backgrounds to overpower your actor’s faces. As I discovered when writing about this in 2017, Roger Deakins made damn sure this didn’t happen in Sicario, for example.

A maximum brightness lets you tell the story of “bright” without having to literally be bright. Literal brightness steals focus. pic.twitter.com/vSMh12Fhbd
— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) April 20, 2017

There are beautiful HDR experiences out there, such as Deakins’s own work on Blade Runner 2049. But it’s not an automatic win across the board. You shouldn’t be watching movies on your computer screen anyway, but you will view your own iPhone-shot photos and videos there, and those are likely to be HDR now as well. So, are you missing out tremendously to not have a High Dynamic Range computer monitor?

No, for two reasons:

First: for home movies, HDR is fun, but not essential.

And B: you get a little of it anyway, thanks to EDR.

EDR is Apple’s quietly cool tech for eeking HDR visuals out of an SDR display. And for you, dear reader, I have quantified exactly how much HDR your Studio Display’s EDR can muster.

sRGB

Hard clip at 1.0 white.

ACES

Rec. 709 ODT.

ACES

Down five stops.

Consider this image. It’s an HDR test pattern I made that shows gray bars increasing in brightness, with text over each at exactly one stop hotter than the bar. I’m displaying it here as both a clipped-at-1.0 sRGB image, as well as an ACES Rec. 709 ODT version, the highlight-rolloff of which helps you see the otherwise-too-bright-for-SRD values. There’s also a five-stops-underexposed ACES version, just so you can read all the text. The bottom bar really is 32 times brighter than “white.”

The clipped sRGB version above is how the test pattern will appear on a pure SDR display. The white bar is the same pure white as the rest of the image, and you can’t read the text on it.

And that’s how it appears on the Studio Display:

WIth the brightness all the way up, the HDR text pattern clips at 1.0 white on the non-HDR Studio Display.

But only at maximum brightness. As soon as you reduce the screen brightness by even one tick, Apple’s EDR technology kicks in and uses the headroom to show you values brighter than white.

EDR reveals one extra stop of HDR highlight detail.

Hey, that’s HDR! Well, kinda. To be true HDR there are more requirements, such as deeper blacks than this uniformly-backlit display can muster (you'll only notice in a pitch-dark room). But it’s a little bit of HDR, and that’s just fine. And you get it without zoned backlight artifacts, or hey-where-did-my-$6,000-go artifacts.

Let’s take a look at what true HDR gets us on the Pro Display XDR:

Basically, one more stop of overbrights. A stop is a lot, twice as much light. But it’s also the bare minimum of extra range this chart can reveal. And hey, also notice that the image is not as uniform in color temperature as the Studio Display’s. The shadows are cool and the highlights are warm, where the visible range presents as neutral on the cheaper Studio display. And yes, you can plainly see that dark border around the edge of the Pro Display XDR in everyday use.

The Pro Display XDR and the HDR displays on the 2021 MacBook Pros and the 12.9″ iPad Pro are good, don’t get me wrong. But there are going to be people telling you you’re missing out on the HDR party with the Studio Display. I hope this little exploration gives you some perspective on whether or not you agree.

Download the HDR Test Pattern

Enough Mac Prose

There’s so much more to say about the Mac Studio, let’s do a lightning round:

Is the Mac Studio beautiful? No. Did Apple intentionally make it utilitarian in appearance to head off any form-over-function critiques that turned out to be tragically valid regarding the trashcan Mac Pro? Good question.
Do I love the way this little Meatwad looks? Yes. I thought about hiding it in the cabinet alongside my RAIDs. but then I’d lose access to the front ports. It’s a functional object and it looks like one. It’s kind of, dare I say it, a truck.
When I first set this thing up and just plugged my old-fashioned USB-A mouse into it without a second thought, I felt joy.
If it’s weird that the Studio Display has a better computer in it than many computers, what’s even weirder is that the keyboard also has a computer in it, for handling Touch ID. Which is wonderful to finally have on my desktop.
The Studio Display is not just a monitor with a camera. It’s a hub, with three USB-C ports and one Thunderbolt 3. It can also deliver enough power over USB to fast-charge a 16″ M1 Max MacBook Pro.
The Studio Display has speakers! And they do a sort of sound-bar attempt at spatial audio. As with the speakers in Apple’s recent laptops, they sound better than they should for their size and orientation. Unlike with a laptop, Studio-ness demands real speakers, and there goes my second USB-A port to my DAC.
These are handy.

Configuring a Mac Studio

With the MacBook Pro, I suggested that if you weren’t tempted by the maxed-out configuration, or accustomed to spending $4,000+ on a Mac laptop, then maybe you should consider the MacBook Air instead. This was a glib way of saying that the sweet spot for the pro-est laptop Apple’s made since the 17″ “lunch tray” MacBook Pro was at the pro-est end. Basically, don’t buy a 2WD Jeep.

I do not feel the same about the Mac Studio. The M1 Ultra version is extra in every way: It starts at double the base price of the M1 Max version. It weighs two pounds more, thanks to a copper heat sink. It is configurable to specs that your software almost assuredly cannot fully harness, and your wallet almost certainly will remember.

There’s a real range of viable options for configuring a Mac Studio. It starts great and goes to eleven. So here’s my buying advice:

First, the easy part: Everyone tempted by the Studio Display should go for it. It will be the perfect partner to a laptop or the Mac Studio. There’s nothing else you should get. As I’ve said before, if you’re the rare weirdo who should have ever bought a Pro Display XDR, you know it. Everyone else, here’s your perfect Mac display. If you have extra dough to spend, Nano over E.T.-mode.

As for the Mac Studio, it will be hard to gauge your needs for a computer this far ahead of what’s come before. But here are a few things to consider:

The SSD upgrades are expensive, but this is your one shot at getting a massive amount of insanely-fast, Apple-warranteed drive space. If you edit big media files, stills or video, and are accustomed to working off a big external RAID like I am, you may want to consider upgrading the SSD and working locally for truly ludicrous multiple-streams-of-ProRes performance.
As I mentioned above, the front ports are slower in the Max than in the Ultra.
RAM upgrade? I’ve been living with 128 GB of RAM for years now. It was a luxury in 2017, and I can’t imagine going backwards. But RAM hits different in the M1 world, and might not be the be-all-end-all of lazy ADHD computing like it was in the Intel era.
GPU upgrade? I bet you already know the answer to this one based on your workflow. This might be the exclusive domain of folks doing crazy computations on the GPU, like 3D rendering. That’s all. There is no other valid use of GPU compute. Stop ruining the planet.

The everything-maxed-out Mac Studio I tested retails for $7,999 USD. Add the display and that bumps to $10,298. Not cheap — also not more than I’ve ever spent on a Mac. But let’s look at another comparison:

A little context on the pricing of #MacStudio. Compare my iMac Pro config from Dec. 2017 with a Mac Studio + Display with max CPU, same RAM, and same SSD. Pre-tax: $9750 for iMac, $8,000 for Studio. #AppleEvent pic.twitter.com/ROYHXhAGOI
— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) March 9, 2022

If you back off on the display extras and the SSD, the price drops to significantly less than I spent on my iMac Pro four years ago. Everyone’s idea of reasonable is different, but Apple has the low end locked up with the M1 Mac Mini and MacBook Air, and now they have a steady progression into the extreme high end, with something for everyone along the way.

And truly, consider the comparisons above. Doubling the chip and the base price does not (yet) double your speed, espcially where the GPU is concerned. So the Ultra option really is for those kinds of pros who can turn every second of faster render times into money — but for whatever reasons haven’t extended that theory into a willingness to work on Windows.

More Mac Pros

Apple also said there’s a Mac Pro coming.

I’m not sure what to do with this information.

I will be very curious to see how Apple differentiates such a beast from the Mac Studio. Time will tell, but Apple is on a tear with their home-spun silicon, and I wouldn’t want my satisfaction with the Mac Studio to stop them.

There’s also an interesting dynamic here, where as Apple doubles, and doubles-again their chip architecture, the CPU performance is pantsing the industry, but the GPU performance, for the tests that matter to me, are not accelerating upwards fast enough to compete with NVIDIA. There’s still a performance gap to close on the GPU front — maybe the Mac Pro is where Apple will tell that story.

They’re making it harder and harder for me to keep my renders nice and slow. But I’ll find a way.

Stu Studio

Apple made a Mac just for me, the Mac I didn’t know I wanted and never dared ask for. It’s the first new model of Macintosh computer in a very long time, and it’s a more than worthy addition. As with the recent MacBook Pros, it speaks with design and features to a renewed focus on usability above all else, along with industry-moving performance.

The best thing that happened during a short week of having Mac Studio in my studio was that I got re-excited about doing computationally-intensive creative work. Since my Amiga 1000 days, I’ve always loved the feeling of my computer dutifully rendering a complex scene overnight. Coming up with projects to keep this little beast busy stole time from more urgent responsibilities. Because, you see, I couldn’t wait to see what I did with it.

The 2021 MacBook Pro alongside the cable-management fail of my iMac Pro

M1 Max MacBook Pro Long-term Report

March 07, 2022

Back in October when I got a chance to use a pre-release 14″ MacBook Pro with M1 Max processor, I openly questioned whether this laptop could replace my venerable iMac Pro. Four months later, I’m back with an update.

A good amount has happened since then, for example:

After Effects: Explores the Cores

Yes, I figured out how to make this render very, very slowly.

After Effects multiprocessing is now a thing, released for Intel and in public beta for Apple silicon. And it’s largely good! It doesn’t speed up the processing of a single frame, but allows After Effects to render multiple frames at once, both for interactive previews and final renders. Not every project is ideal for this kind of optimization. TANK, for example, is the kind of project that benefits greatly from re-using cached information from one frame to the next.

But I do have a rather heavy After Effects project from Circle of Stone, the one that I talked about at IBC 2019. I used After Effects 3D and expressions to create procedural flying car traffic for a futuristic matte painting shot. Like TANK, I used hundreds of layers to create the final effect. Unlike TANK, this project multi-processes well, and doesn’t require any features or plug-ins that aren’t yet running on Adobe’s M1-optimized After Effects public beta.

In just four months even Adobe, who were famously late to the Mac Intel transition, have optimized quite a bit of After Effects for Apple's processors. While we’re not all the way there (crucially, I am still not able to run the TANK benchmark project from my previous post), the proposition of replacing my desktop machine with this portable powerhouse became even more pressing.

The Display: The Best There is, but Not Perfect

I’m of two minds about the MacBook Pro display and Apple’s mini-LED HDR displays in general. On one hand, they look great, have excellent color accuracy out of the box, and compete favorably with both professional HDR reference displays and Good Computer Monitors. On the other hand, if Apple bills them as being good enough for professional HDR video color grading, they have to figure out how to close the gap between zoned-backlighting, which does have artifacts despite all of Apple’s cleverness, and true individual-pixel HDR.

The Hardware: As Good as You’d Hope

The laptop is a solid workhorse. Only a few issues have come up during my time with it:

I noticed that the display would frequently seem dim when I opened the laptop after some time. I’d have to tap the F2 key a few times to get it where I’d like it. This seemed to go away after I turned off “Slightly dim the display while on battery” (in the Battery section of System Preferences), but I don’t recall ever needing to do this with previous Apple laptops.
You may recall that I didn’t post any benchmarks of copying files off an SSD via the built-in card slot. This is because I was getting strange behavior that I wound up reporting to Apple, where the copy operation would hang for a long time before initiating. This seems to have been cleared up in non-beta macOS updates since I first encountered it. SSD copying is now just fine.
Ug. My Return key is sticking, just a little. Just enough to be annoying.

The notch turns out to be very much not a problem day-to-day. But having owned the 12.9″ iPad Pro, it’s frustrating to have a lesser front-facing camera on this more-expensive, more-pro, more-always-making-you-aware-of-a-camera’s-presence device. This is not a huge deal breaker for me though, as I am not a person whose participation in a meeting is enhanced by camera clarity.

Everything else that you’d hope would be great about this hardware, is. The battery life is as promised, engendering iPad-like charge-it-once-every-few-days habits. The HDMI port is hugely useful, the cooling works so well you’ll never know it’s there, and the function keys are great to have back, alongside Touch ID.

So it's a solid machine, a fast machine, a reliable machine. Is it ready to be my daily desktop driver?

But It’s Still a Laptop

Even in light of these findings, I never could fully insert the M1 Max to into the role of my venerable iMac Pro.

My iMac Pro is not just a computer, it’s a workstation. I use every one of its eight USB ports (four USC-C, four USB-A), plus a hub, and the 10-gig ethernet jack as well. I run color control surfaces and audio DACs, a Stream Deck and multiple external RAIDs, and even a second display.

What makes a computer powerful, for my workflow, is not just processing power. It's connectedness, and presence. It’s speakers and microphones and ingesting CFAST while rapidly recalling raw files from fifteen years ago. It’s the power of side-by side displays that remind me in the morning of what I was working on the previous day, because nothing has moved and a dozen apps are still running. It’s desk space and disk space, and most importantly, head space.

So while I absolutely adore this laptop, it has not replaced my desktop, which is why I’m hopeful and excited about whatever Apple may have in store for us tomorrow and for he rest of the year.

The M1 Max MacBook Pros

October 25, 2021

Apple opened their October event with a young musician creating an Apple-inspired music track in a dingy garage filled with gear worth tens of thousands of dollars. Some viewers commented on the unrealistic portrayal of a creative professional. But I felt like I was looking in a mirror.

If Apple’s target market for the new MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max processors are scruffy weirdos in grungy surroundings with suspiciously killer kit, I am dead-center in their cross-hairs. By day I’m an executive software-maker at Maxon, helping create Cinema 4D and the Red Giant tools. By the other half of the day, I’m a filmmaker and a photographer working out of a no-frills loft in beautiful downtown Emeryville California, home to Pixar and potholes, Bay Bridges and burning trash bins. Like the camera-ready A. G. Cook, I have a Pro Display XDR perched on some reclaimed barn lumber. Unlike him, my work involves nits as much as it does decibels.

Little guy making a play for his turn with the XDR

This won’t be an exhaustive review, but I’ve had a 2021 MacBook Pro for a few days now, and I’ve been able to do enough with it to weigh in on whether it might have a place in your hipster garage of pro-ness.

Here’s what Apple sent me:

14‑inch MacBook Pro - Space Gray
- Apple M1 Max with 10-core CPU
  - 32-core GPU
  - 16-core Neural Engine
- 64GB unified memory
- 4TB SSD storage

This maxed-out silicon configuration is almost exactly what I would buy for myself, except I might opt for the 2TB SSD. With 2TB the price for the 14″ totals $4,099, for 4TB, add $600 USD.

You can indeed configure these machines well into the $5,000 range, but that is not new for Apple’s highest-end laptops.

What is new enough is the the melding of the M1 unified memory architecture with a “pro” specification. A laptop with a 64GB GPU and an SSD as fast as RAM from 10 years ago is so weirdly new that it has a lot of would-be garage-pros confused about where their sweet-spot configuration might be.

The Lazy Pro

I’m not a tower computer guy. I just know myself well enough to know I’ll be too lazy to pull apart my machine and swap out parts.

When Apple announced the Trash Can, I recommended folks consider spending the same money on two iMacs. My habit at the time was to budget a replacement maxed-out iMac every three or so years rather than spend more on an ostensibly upgradable Mac Pro.

This frequent-iMac-upgrade plane worked great for me for about a decade. With each new machine, everything got better — CPU, GPU, storage, memory, and display.

This culminated with a machine that seemed to indicate Apple agreed that iMacs are suited for professional work. When Apple released the iMac Pro, I immediately bought two iMacs-worth of it. Four years later, with ten CPU cores and 128 GB of DDR RAM, it’s still my solid workhorse. I frequently have a dozen apps open at a time, and it runs 24/7 executing automations and remote and local renders. The iMac Pro is incredibly stable — I might restart it once a month or so. I never hear its fans over the other noises in my studio.

While I’ve had to work hard to find any apps that will push its CPU to the limit, the same has not been true for GPU. I color graded a 20-minute short in 4k on this machine, and it did eventually get a bit bogged down.

At the four-year mark, the iMac Pro is about ready for a replacement. After the impressive launch of Apple’s home-grown M1 processor, I’ve been thrilled to imagine what the next pro iMac might look like. What I did not expect is that a laptop might beat it to the punch in replacing my trusty desktop powerhouse.

The 14″ MacBook Pro next to the titanium G4 Powerbook

A New Old Design

I gotta be honest, I made some kind of sound when I opened the box. Maybe like a half-gasp, half chuckle. This thing just looks great. You will get mad at yourself for being so happy that Apple has brought back things it willfully removed, like useful ports and keys. But you’ll get over that quickly as you bask in the sense that Apple has made this thing just for you, you professional garage weirdo.

Touchy About the Bar

I was open to the Touch Bar when it was first introduced. We jumped on supporting it right away in Slugline. I notoriously love alternative input devices, whether it be color control surfaces or keypads, trackballs or touchscreens. What I came to realize though was that however promising the Touch Bar was, it was never an additional input method. It came at the expense of function keys — and as boring as function keys are, they are damn useful. The Touch Bar not only failed to be better than the thing it stole real-estate from, it also didn’t work reliably, and seemingly struggled to hold even Apple’s attention. I never managed to build habits around it, as I am only a part-time laptop user.

I applaud Apple for trying the Touch Bar, and feel bittersweet to see it gone. I hope that Apple won’t stop experimenting with ideas like this, and listening to their users about the results.

From “Courage” to Humility

That uncharacteristic willingness to admit that a grand experiment did not pay out is perhaps the single most dominating vibe of these computers. Apple is not known for graciously admitting a mistake, yet here we have laptops that so resoundingly repudiate their design assertions of the last half-decade that it’s hard for us pros to not feel at least seen, if not downright vindicated.

The SD card slot is back. Its removal was a bet on a wireless future — a bet that no working photographer would take today (I once watched a Sony employee struggle for a good portion of an hour to link a Sony camera to a Sony phone). SD cards were useful in 2016 when they were obliterated from Apple’s laptops, but not exclusively so. Back then, bigger DSLRs mostly shot to bigger and faster CF cards. But in 2021, SD card speeds have earned the smaller storage sticks a place in even my Sony a7RIV, where every shutter click results in a roughly 62MB file.

The HDMI port speaks for itself, but it’s the return of MagSafe that feels like the most profound reversal of course. There can be no sensible explanation for why it was removed now that we’ve seen how it can so perfectly coexist with USB-C charging.

And then there’s the keyboard. Inverted-T arrow keys, of course. Function keys are not only back, they’re full-height. That’s a statement, as is the black surround. Apple is visually emphasizing what’s both new and old, in a way that seemingly pays homage to the titanium G4 PowerBook, the Mac that set the course that Apple’s laptop designs have been sailing on for 20 years.

Of course, it also ensures that folks at the coffee shop will know you have the new one. The combined package does that thing Apple excels at, where a new design makes your existing device instantly feel old and clunky.

Welcome to Mac-y Notch

Both the 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro models feature a notch at the top of the screen where the FaceTime camera and display-related sensors reside. On paper it seems like this will take getting used to, but in practice it’s quite easy to forget about — except in Cinema 4D, which already has a hard time fitting all of its menus on smaller screens.

Two key takeaways for the notch: First, it’s pure bonus. The screen below the notch is the typical Mac laptop 16:10 aspect, and the notch area adds 74 pixels more for the (now slightly taller) Monterey menu bar to straddle it. So you’re not losing one notch’s-worth of screen, you’re gaining the two “ears.”

Second: Finally the bizarre menu bar transparency Apple added a few macOS revisions ago makes sense. Choose a dark wallpaper image, leave Reduce Transparency off (for me, this is a change from my usual Mac setup), and enjoy a dark-mode-esque menu bar into which the notch all but disappears, even when the system appearance is light.

The Display

Part of the reason that the best Macs have built-in displays is that Apple makes the best displays. I wrote about the Pro Display XDR and Apple’s EDR technology at the end of last year, and since then Apple has miniaturized their mini-LED backlit displays to fit in an iPad Pro and now these laptops.

Mini LED is not as pure an HDR delivery method as, say, OLED, where every pixel is individually addressed. As with the 12.9″ iPad Pro, you can spot the characteristic blooming artifacts around starfields and bright titles against black. But only if you're in a pitch-black room and looking very closely.

Think about it this way — Apple touts 10,000 LEDs, which sounds like a lot. But that roughly measures out to a grid of, say, 132 × 76 LEDs. And Apple has not claimed that the illumination zones are single-LED in size. So the HDR-nes of these displays is far lower resolution than an Apple Watch Series 3 screen.

A fanciful rendition showing how the LED backlight array is coupled with a traditional LCD panel.

It shouldn't work as well as it does, but for the most part, the display simply looks great — and then when you throw some real HDR imagery up and those 1,600 peak nits kick in, it transforms into a shockingly gorgeous thing.

But, crucially, not just gorgeous — your absolute best bet for the correct gorgeous, under a variety of viewing conditions.

The TLDR of a future @prolost post is basically: If you want to do color management right, buy a recent Mac with a built-in display — and that's it. I'm sure it won't be controversial in the least. 😬
— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) March 6, 2021

I’m not quite ready to open those floodgates today, but I’ll reiterate the sentiment: Apple’s displays are calibrated, profiled, accurate, and consistent, at a commodity level. The same display can show color-accurate HDR right next to color-accurate SDR.

Which makes it all the more frustrating that Apple doesn’t make a sensible monitor to attach to these new computers.

How do you demonstrate an HDR display? Obviously you take an HDR photo, display it in HDR on the HDR display, and then take another HDR photo of that. Then you make an animated GIF of exposures to show how the HDR highlights compare to the white of this page. Obviously.

My hope is that the Pro Display XDR is like the 2011 Tesla Roadster — an open ploy for the money-is-no-object customer to fund the development of more broad-market options. If an 12.9″ iPad Pro can sell for $1099, then surely Apple could sell a larger version of that display, sans computer guts, for less than $6,000?

The 2021 MacBook Pro displays are miraculous. But these laptops desperately want to be connected to one or more additional displays.

Because they are taking a real shot at replacing your desktop.

Max Out the M1 Max in your Macs?

It was interesting to listen to the ATP guys struggle to figure out their ideal configurations. Spoiler alert: none of their decisions will make any sense to you.

But it’s a real challenge, because the speeds and feeds stats we’re so accustomed to are now intermingled and out-of-scale. What is the importance of RAM on these new integrated systems? I’ve been doing genuine production work on my M1 Air, and it only has 16 GB of shared memory. The new architecture makes our old assumptions obsolete.

Typically a big reason I splurge on RAM is for the playback cache in Adobe After Effects. But Apple‘s latest SSDs could be as fast as the RAM in your last computer, so when After Effects reverts to its disk cache, you may not notice.

I think I have an answer to how you should configure these new computers. You’re going to hate it. But first...

Some Performance Numbers

This is not my thing. I’m not a fastidious hardware tester, and I haven’t had much time with this MacBook Pro.

Worst of all, being me, I ran the most extensive tests using Adobe After Effects, which is not M1 optimized, and has never been famous for using multiple cores well.

Prepare to hate this part. Hit me up on Twitter and tell me what paces you’d like to see me run this thing through.

After Effects: Ignores the Cores

The first test project I chose was 300 frames from my film TANK. This is a deep and complex After Effects project with hundreds of comps, tens of thousands of layers, and a rats nest of complex expressions.

I was delighted to see that my trusty iMac Pro turned in per-frame averages around 27 seconds. This is at least twice as fast as when I actually rendered the film, an improvement that has to be almost exclusively due to the improved JavaScript expressions engine. Good job, After Effects team!

I chose After Effects for my testing because it matters to me, but After Effects is not an ideal tool for measuring a computer’s raw power. While cooking my TANK frames, the ten cores of the iMac Pro hovered at about 15–20% utilization. This lack of parallel processing ability in my most-used creative app is a big part of why I chose the iMac Pro configuration I did — the 10-core was the best choice for single-thread speed.

After Effects leisurely rendering on my iMac Pro

Now that we’ve established that my CPU test is utterly ridiculous, let’s double down and compare it with After Effects running on a computer that the After Effects team has probably never seen, under emulation. That’s right, at the time of this writing, After Effects runs under Rosetta 2 on M1 Macs.

So how fast did the pretend computer running on a real computer render 300 frames of my short film?

Minutes to render 300 frames of TANK. Shorter bars are better.

Almost exactly the same.

Let that sink in: After Effects is about as fast running in emulation on the M1 Max as it is on a $10,000 desktop computer from four years ago.

Oh, and there’s, ahem, one more thing.

The MacBook Pro was not plugged in for this test.

In a crazy stroke of fate, my entire block had a power outage the first full day I had with the M1 Max. So my first test render was sans juice.

Once the power was restored, I launched the same render again, now with the MacBook Pro powered via USB-C. And then I got a reminder of why I hate doing these tests.

Why was the render slower under AC power? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it’s the common “new device syndrome” that plagues tech reviewers. When a Mac (or iPhone or iPad) is newly set-up, it has a lot of housekeeping to do: syncing account data and photos, checking for updates, and various other background tasks which, under Monterey, could include scanning every single photo in your library for text to OCR.

My guess is that some of these tasks had been paused under battery power, and resumed once I plugged-in, stealing a few cycles from After Effects.

A few days later I re-rendered the sequence and got results identical the battery test. But that’s still very notable: After Effects did not push the M1 Max hard enough to engage any kind of power throttling. In fact, the laptop never even got noticeably warm during these renders.

I rounded out my testing with my Intel 16″ MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9) and my M1 MacBook Air (16GB). The 16″ got right in there with the iMac and M1 Max, and got hella loud and hot in the process. The M1 Air quietly and coolly chugged along to provide the only result not within a margin of error with the others.

Update 2021-10-28

Adobe has released a multiprocessing update to After Effects, as well as a public beta of an M1-native version. More tests wiill be needed, but for now there are specifics about this beast of a project file I chose as my benchmark that complicate that.

Adobe Premiere: More Testing Needed

I loaded some 4k ProRes footage into Premiere and layered a few Magic Bullet Colorista corrections on top, including a key and an animated mask. Then I added Magic Bullet Renoiser for grain, and a light pinch of Mojo. I set the preview resolution to full, and pressed play. Silky smooth, even at full-screen.

Unlike After Effects, Premiere is M1-native, as are the Magic Bullet effects. So this is a reasonable test, and a very promising one.

There’s a lot more to test here. I plan on de-archiving the 20-minute short film I graded in Premiere a few years ago, the one that started to bog down my iMac Pro. A big difference there is that the footage is XAVC, which Premiere has to work a lot harder to decode. In my limited testing, Premiere did not love heavily inter-frame compressed footage on the M1 Max any more than it does on my Intel Macs.

Cinema 4D and Full Metal Redshift

Again, I have only scratched the surface here, but, well, just watch:

That’s Redshift, Maxon's GPU render engine, pegging the integrated graphics to render an IPR session (that’s Interactive Photorealistic Rendering) in Cinema 4D. I’ve never seen this kind of performance from a Mac.

Oh, and this was recorded while the MacBook Pro was on battery power.

Update: Some Real Numbers

This morning after posting I ran some proper Redshift benchmarks, pitting the M1 Max against a Razer gaming laptop with a GeForce RTX 3080. This is a $4,000 laptop (that is currently unavailable, like all things NVIDIA), the power brick of which feels like it weighs as much as any Mac laptop.

The M1 Max completed the Redshift render in 11 minutes, 13 seconds. The Razor took less than half that at 4:29.

But on battery, the numbers are much closer. Again, the Mac weirdly sped up without AC, coming in at 11:08, where the Razer slowed to 9:52.

The NVIDIA card with its RTX module specifically designed for ray-tracing certainly has the edge — as long as you're plugged-in. Also worth remembering: Redshift for Mac is fresh out of beta and still in active development.

The Razer is a damn fine laptop with a touch OLED display and a GPU you can’t buy because bitcoin? Comes with free lead brick.

Issues

Not everything was seamless with my little 14″ powerhouse. It came with macOS Monterey 12.0.1, which seems very Big Sur-like in compatibility with apps I use, and has some lovely features such as Focus modes that sync with your iOS/iPadOS 15 devices. But Shortcuts, which I was excited about, is still quite buggy. The TV app failed to play purchased movies from my iTunes library, which is a bummer when you’re trying to test an HDR display. I couldn’t get Sidecar to work with my iPad Pro running iPadOS 15.1 public beta.

Adobe Premiere blazed through a ProRes encode but maxed out the CPU and then crashed on an H.265 encode.

And as port-y as the new ports are, all my three-button mice are still USB-A. So I’m still rocking’ dongles.

The Biggest Issue

...is that, like I said above, this machine wants to be a desktop. Now, me and A. G. Cook can plug ours into our Pro Display XDRs and make that happen, but unless HDR color grading is a well-paying gig for you, the XDR makes no sense.

Presumably Apple will make my dream M1 MaxiMaxMax iMac soon enough, but I’ll still want to dock my laptop to an Apple-quality display. I currently do that with the LG UltraFine 4k, a black plastic nothing that doesn’t support EDR.

It’s time for Apple to make a display for normal garage weirdos.

How to Configure your 2021 MacBook Pro

I am in a weird position here in that I already have two of the very few Intel Macs that are marginally speedier than these new laptops at some tasks. I also own an M1 MacBook Air, which snuck up on me and stole my heart. It’s light, it feels fast, and it punches miles above its weight. It’s the cheapest Mac I’ve mentioned here by a healthy margin.

So my advice is this: Go big or go Air. Either max out your M1 Max, or don’t bother with these machines. These MacBook Pros exist to compete at the very highest end of laptop performance, so don’t buy one that’s not racetrack-ready.

Spending the extra money to max out my iMac Pro has kept it useful for at least a year longer than my usual iMac cycle. In that year, a lot has happened. So spending as much as you can now on a computer might buy you extra time, during which I can almost guarantee you, Apple will release something that makes these machines look old and clunky.

On the other hand, the M1 MacBook Air is just an insane amount of computer in an affordable, sleek package. If you’ve never used one, you will be shocked at how fast it feels. And if you’ve never spent five grand on a Mac laptop before, I’m not clear on why you’d start now.

I bet you hate this advice. Here’s why I feel good giving it: You will ignore it. Because you are a pro. You are in your garage with your warped priorities and your cool gear and you know exactly what you want to do with this computer. Like me and my silly After Effects project file, you may never peak those performance bars. But you’ll love knowing that you could.

Towering Over

These days it doesn’t require much patience to have your laziness vindicated. Shortly after the release of the new Mac Pro, Apple made available the Afterburner card. This $2000 add-on offers hardware-accelerated ProRes encoding and decoding. Now that same power is essentially built-in to the iPhone 13, and these new MacBook Pros.

Apple is going hard with their in-house processors, and with these pro laptops, I think they are showing their vison for the future: integrated, enclosed, and efficient. Just like the best Macs have always been.

I would not be surprised if the days of the towering Mac full of PCI Express card slots are over. Apple has demonstrated that they can scale the M1 to be competitive with big, expensive power-hungry laptops with dedicated GPUs. We knew they were competing with Intel. Now I think it’s clear they intend to go toe-to-toe with NVIDIA as well, on the desktop as well as in our backpacks.

Time will tell. But for now, I have to decide if this laptop is going to be my new desktop.