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.