Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1433345
Winter 2022 – LOCAL695.ORG 47 Whether you love or hate the Apple ecosystem of products, there is no denying that they've garnered respect in creative industries and have become one of the leading industry standards for artists around the world. Last year, Apple surprised the world when it announced that it would be abandoning its 15-year relationship with Intel and would begin producing its own line of processors for all products across the Mac line of personal computers. The new M1 processor debuted in the fall of 2020 in the 13-inch MacBook laptops and Mac Mini desktop, boasting impressive specications at an even more impressive price point. Months later, a line of all-in-one iMac's with identical specs was added to the M1 family. This rst-generation M1 processor yielded promising results but its hardware specications were well below what many considered necessary for a "professional" workstation. This caused users to turn toward the future, wondering when Apple would unveil new processors for its Pro series of products. After months of speculation and delays, attributed to the ongoing global chip shortage, the company announced its new 14- inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro's, powered by M1 Pro and M1 Max processors. The units offer a substantial jump in performance compared to the initial M1 lineup from last year, boasting 10-core central processing units (CPU's) and 16-core Neural Engines with up to 32-core graphics processing units (GPU's). One of the biggest critiques of the original M1 series was that Apple's MacBooks, Mac Mini's, and iMac models were all restricted to just 16gb of unied memory, a conguration in which memory is shared between the CPU and GPU rather than each unit having its own dedicated pool of RAM. The new units have raised this cap to 64gb, removing one of the largest performance bottlenecks facing power users. Apple has also introduced a brand-new Media Engine into their laptops, a hardware accelerated feature used to decode or encode ProRes, h.264, and HEVC codec video les. This frees up resources for the rest of the machine, signicantly increasing productivity when working with these types of les. These improvements make the M1 Pro and Max laptops ideal for high-resolution transcodes, 3D rendering, and high track count audio work. In fact, Apple has gone so far as to boast that at max specications, their $3,899 16-inch M1 Max units offer better 8K ProRes performance than the 28-core CPU version of their 2019 Mac Pro desktop, which retails for a minimum of $12,999 and up to $54,199 when fully upgraded. Many users will also be delighted to learn that Apple has restored some of the previously discontinued input ports. The new MacBook Pro's come equipped with three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an HDMI port for an external monitor, an SDXC card reader, and a dedicated charging port compatible with Apple MagSafe 3 chargers. This removes some of the need for expensive dongles and adapters that many have criticized since the 2016 refresh of the Apple notebook line. However, the company remains adamantly opposed to supporting aging interfaces like USB 3.0, CAT 5 Ethernet, and their own Thunderbolt 2 ports, meaning users will still require adapter docks for fairly standard external devices like hard drives, non-Apple brand external mouses & keyboards, and any type of networking equipment.