If you are thinking of buying a new Apple Silicon Mac for using as a studio computer for either music production or post-production then it's worth considering these things first before making the leap to the new M1 powered Apple Mac.
Are the new Apple Mac computers powerful enough?
There are no comprehensive benchmarks for the new Apple Macs so far, so it's hard to make any kind of comparison with older Macs, however, this is what we learnt from Apple's announcement of the new Apple Mac computers.
Apple is developing a family of new Apple Silicon chips. Apple has announced the first chip dedicated for the Mac, it's the Apple M1. It is the first 5-nanometer chip with 16 billion transistors. It has two different types of cores with 4 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores.
According to Apple, it's the highest performance processor Apple has ever made. The new M1 chip has twice the performance using just a quarter of the power. Not only does the M1 have 8 cores, but it also has an 8 core graphics processor built into the chip. It also includes a 16-core neural engine for machine learning and has 11 trillion operations per second.
However in a new Geekbench score using their Baseline option and comparing the new Apple MacBook Air with the most powerful Intel MacBook Pro i9 these scores are shown…
Read more about the power of the new Apple Mac
You Can't Roll Back To Older Versions Of macOS On A New Apple Mac
If you want to use anything other than macOS Big Sur on the new Apple Mac then you can't. Big Sur is tightly linked to the hardware in the new Apple Mac and no other version of macOS is going to run on an Apple Mac using an M1 chip.
macOS Big Sur has been designed for the M1 and so for the first time on a Mac, Apple is able to design the operating system and the silicon together as they have been doing for iPhones and iPads for some years now. They are claiming launching apps is nearly instantaneous, while Safari really ‘shines on Apple Silicon’ as well as 1.5x speedier at running JavaScript and what they claim to be ‘1.9x more responsive’.
There is a hardware-verified secure boot, automatic high-performance encryption, macOS run-time protections.
With Big Sur and M1, Mac users Apple say that users will be able to run a greater range of apps than ever before. All of Apple’s Mac software is now Universal and runs natively on M1 systems.
Apple has optimised all of their apps for the new M1 CPU. For pro-audio, Apple claims you will be able to run 3x more instruments and effect plugins in Logic Pro. For video editors, Final Cut Pro can run up to 6x faster.
Existing Mac apps that have not been updated to Universal ‘should’ run seamlessly with Apple’s Rosetta 2 technology. Apple says that some apps perform better under Rosetta than running natively on Macs with old integrated graphics and for the first time iPhone and iPad apps can now run directly on Mac. Additionally, the foundations of Big Sur are optimised to unlock the power of M1, including developer technologies from Metal for graphics, and Core ML for machine learning.
Is 16GB Of RAM Enough?
Despite the performance and efficiency gains that Apple claims the M1 chip allows, (there is very little independent verification on this just yet), there is one constraint that wasn’t covered in the Apple presentation yesterday and that is memory.
It is clear to us that Apple customers interested in buying a new Mac and needing more than 16GB of RAM will need to purchase an older, Intel-based model. This is because the new M1 SoC cannot support more than 16GB of memory.
From our research what this is likely to mean is that Apple will need to produce at another Arm-based SoC chip and definitely ones that can support more than 16GB of RAM for the true Pro users.
There are some discussions that the Apple Silicon powered machines don’t need as much RAM but we have also discovered that because the M1 uses ‘unified memory’, what that means is that the memory is shared between the CPU and GPU cores, Apple explains…
“[It] means that the GPU and CPU are working over the same memory. Graphics resources, such as textures, images and geometry data, can be shared between the CPU and GPU efficiently, with no overhead, as there's no need to copy data across a PCIe bus.”
This means that although the performance is improved over discrete GPUs, the shared memory may throttle some graphically intense applications.
Also, we are seeing reports that the memory will not be user upgradable so if you planning to get one of these M1 Macs, including the Mac mini, then we recommend that you get 16GB of RAM, because you won’t be able to upgrade it later.
No Thunderbolt 4
The trio of new M1 powered Macs all have 2 USB-C ports that support USB 4 and Thunderbolt, however, Apple is continuing to use Thunderbolt 3 rather than upgrading the new models to Thunderbolt 4.
It seems that the announcement by Intel in July sharing details on Thunderbolt 4, was too late for Apple to integrate Thunderbolt 4 into these new Macs.
What’s The Difference Between Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4?
Although Thunderbolt 4 offers the same 40Gb/s maximum speeds as Thunderbolt 3, it does bring some worthwhile improvements, such as support for docks with four downstream Thunderbolt ports, which would have been very helpful on these 2 port M1 Macs. This is what Intel say...
Double the minimum video and data requirements of Thunderbolt 3.
Video: Support for two 4K displays or one 8K display.
Data: PCIe at 32 Gbps for storage speeds up to 3,000 MBps.
Support for docks with up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports.
PC charging on at least one computer port.
Wake your computer from sleep by touching the keyboard or mouse when connected to a Thunderbolt dock.
Required Intel VT-d-based direct memory access (DMA) protection that helps prevent physical DMA attacks.
Intel has designed new cables that support Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4, with longer lengths that don't compromise the 40Gb/s speeds. Thunderbolt 4 uses the same physical USB-C connector design, and Thunderbolt 4 ports and cables are backward and cross-compatible with USB 4, Thunderbolt 3, and other USB standards.
We expect to see Thunderbolt 4 implementation on the subsequent Pro Apple Silicon powered Macs.
What software and hardware works with the new Apple Mac computers?
macOS Big Sur will include Rosetta 2, which will automatically translate Intel apps to run on the new Apple Macs. It’s designed to support complex apps and their plugins, but there was no mention if that referred to DAWs like Pro Tools or Studio One. Rosetta 2 will do the translation on installation. However, when necessary Rosetta 2 will also be able to translate code on the fly when using Just In Time and JAVA code.
Back in June 2020, during the WWDC 2020 keynote, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering explained that the code could be translated to the new architecture when the programs were installed. In a publicly available document, About the Rosetta Translation Environment, Apple explains more about how Rosetta 2 will translate executables, and what Rosetta 2 can’t translate.
A pro audio software developer told us that this means modern audio application and plugins, which rely on advanced optimisations will, at best, run on a less optimised path, which is itself being translated. For pro-audio workflows, this could be a performance gotcha. At worst, they could crash or not work at all under emulation if they make assumptions about what high-performance Intel processor instructions will be available (although a simple software patch could solve some fundamental programming bugs like that, so we may see ‘Rosetta 2 compatibility’ updates before some full-fat native Apple Silicon ports arrive).
You can see if your software and hardware is compatible with macOS Big Sur using our searchable database. However, remember this is largely showing compatibility running macOS Big Sur on an Intel Mac, with a few entries covering Apple Silicon, so take care.
Should you buy a new Apple Mac for your studio now?
All of this is pointing to the conclusion that these M1 Arm-based Apple Silicon Macs are entry-level machines and may not be powerful enough for pro audio and video applications.
This could well be what Apple has not discounted the Intel-powered Mac minis and MacBook Pro laptops.
If you need a powerful Apple Mac for your studio then our advice is to wait and see, there’s already a lot of great Apple Macs on the market as well as some amazing second-hand bargains. Check out our guide to buying an Apple Mac for audio production.
This is the first generation of new Apple Macs and we expect more powerful Apple Macs to come along, these will include a new iMac and a new Mac Pro expected in the next year or so.
However, keep in mind that we expect to have the new Apple Mac shortly and will be testing both audio software and hardware for compatibility in the next week or so.