hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing well in this video we'll
be breaking down my m1 macbook pro based studio setup i've been getting a lot of questions about
this laptop those of you who follow the channel you know i switched from an imac to an intel based
macbook pro in about 2020 i really appreciated the flexibility as well as the workflow
that that laptop based studio allowed me however previously the macbook pro the intel based version
specifically had quite a few limitations in terms of using it in this kind of environment the
performance connectivity thermals and fan issues got to be something that we really had to consider
and so i want to talk about you know what has changed here with apple silicon also want to
talk about compatibility in terms of your plug-ins and daws and also just what the landscape of apple
silicon in the macbook pro looks like moving forward i've had this laptop since launch date
so about six months now this is not sponsored by apple i purchased the laptop these are just my
honest experiences in hopes that it will help you all who are considering these laptops real quickly
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mainly for video editing and for 4k content so a lot of you are not going to need
that amount of power and we'll talk more about that when i get to some recommendations but i
just wanted to let you know the specific specs of the machine here in front of me let's talk about
some real world performance jumps and just what i noticed initially in terms of that apple silicon
changed there so i had a session on the intel based macbook pro that i was working on it's quite
involving well over 100 tracks plenty of plugins and lots of processing and that intel macbook pro
could not get through the timeline or i could not bounce those tracks without freezing about half of
the audio tracks in the session and i really was getting frustrated and struggling with trying to
to wrap that one up same session opening on the m1 macbook pro apple silicon was tapping the
cpus at about 25 percent no hiccups everything playing back perfectly so i was very impressed
just with that initial test now the other thing that i noticed working in sessions and also just
in the day-to-day is that i never heard the fans turn on big issue with the previous macbook pro
models was the thermals and that fan would go relentlessly i just know that i had a lot of
issues with noise and it seemed like the fans would kick on even just starting up the laptop
it's almost like the laptop didn't know when was appropriate to turn on the fans so it would just
do it at the most inconvenient times just to interrupt you and frustrate you a little bit
i had some third party solutions that i shared i can happily say with this i haven't had to go out
and search for those things it just runs the way it's supposed to it runs cool it runs efficient
i didn't hear the fans kick in at all for about the first two or three weeks that i had the laptop
now i did start running some benchmarks and then i also did some final cut exports of 4k content
and i was able to get the fans up and spinning now i've heard people talking about the 14 inch
model specifically with this m1 max processor saying that it's loud and that the fans kick on
very easily i'm not doing heavy gaming or you know 3d rendering but that has not been my experience
i've had absolutely no issues with the fans and that's coming from someone here in the audio space
that's very sensitive to noise now one thing for those of you specifically in the audio environment
if you're still really concerned about the fan noise and you want to keep those at a minimum
you can activate what's called low power mode here in os x monterey what this will do is
just reduce the amount of energy it will you know dim the display a little bit do subtle things
to make sure that those fans aren't going to kick on unless it's absolutely necessary now again even
with low power mode unchecked i barely ever hear these fans turn on another very important aspect
of utilizing a macbook pro in the studio is the connectivity and how you're going to interface
the laptop with all of the equipment that you see in the studio your external monitor all of your
hard drives you know the different audio pieces that you see here i wanted that to be a very
simple solution and so what i was able to do in my previous setup was implement one single
thunderbolt cable that would connect to the laptop and then everything that you see here
is all connected through that thankfully with thunderbolt that is possible now previously i
had a caldigit ts3 plus hub which was great did a video about that and i recently updated to the ts4
which gives me again the thunderbolt 4 connection which we now have on the m1 macbook pro and also
additional ports faster ports for my ssd hard drives this has just been an essential
indispensable uh piece of the studio and allowing me to you know hook all these things up in a way
that's just no hassle and i can just close the laptop eject my hard drives you know take that out
on the go and then when i come back in the studio hook it up with that single cable i can close the
screen if i want to use it in clamshell mode and put it up on the external display as far
as the connectivity on the laptop itself i'm not going to go into a lot of detail but i will just
say that there have been improvements there and there's plenty of useful ports to have what you
need on the go there's also the return of magsafe which i had on an older macbook pro and liked
i will also say that the addition of a high impedance headphone jack has been really useful
for taking this out on the go i flew across the country with this a few weeks ago took my
you know professional studio headphones with me previously when you hook them up to your laptop
you know they just don't have the power that's going to give you the performance you need out of
a high quality headphone like this this headphone jack is very comparable to you know what i hear
with my interface or with a dedicated headphone amplifier so a really nice pro audio edition so
i've said a lot of great things about the laptop thus far it has been a great experience but now
let's talk about some of the things that haven't been quite as smooth as maybe i thought they were
going to be which is you know the move from intel based programs your plugins daws to what is apple
silicon right so that's the optimized language and the processor and here all that works together
for that native arm architecture now they did build something called rosetta which is basically
just a translation language that's optimized that takes anything that's built for the intel based
processor and allows it to run on apple silicon so that's been helpful however when i first you
know got this machine and just opened up logic for example in native arm apple silicon mode a lot of
the plugins had not yet been compiled to run on apple silicon which means they just won't open or
they won't run correctly if a lot of the plugins and the tools you're using in your daw aren't
working properly you need to switch your daw into rosetta mode so you just need to make sure that
that open using rosetta is checked now to this day six months later i am still running logic pro in
rosetta so i think for those of us who bought these six months ago you know we were kind of
way ahead of the curve in terms of where that transition was and there was still just a lot of
incompatibility versus now i think the landscape has improved dramatically still some things
you know to work through i still have a few plugins that are not updated yet the good news
is the performance jumps and just the smoothness of everything running here on this system has been
in rosetta mode which means it's just an optimized you know version of the intel language so once
everything is completely running on apple silicon and i open up logic with all the plugins running
in that native language it just means it's going to be that much faster which gives you even more
of future perspective of the power that's here that's not even necessarily being fully tapped at
least in my case and for most of you out there who are going to be running in rosetta mode at least
for a little while longer it's going to be really exciting when all of the programs all the plugins
all of the different software is running you know optimized for the native arm architecture
i'm sure a lot of you are going to ask why i went with the 14 inch versus the 16 inch and this is
really a personal decision you're gonna have some trade-offs and mainly that's gonna be in slight
performance differences between the 14-inch and the 16-inch mainly because the 16-inch is bigger
it is gonna have slightly improved thermals it also has slightly bigger fans in the 16 inch so
i was a little bit concerned about that but like i said the 14 inch even with the m1 max in practice
here in a real world setting fan issue thermals have not been a problem for me battery life i
use this in traveling didn't have my charger with me and this thing lasted what seemed like
forever without a dead battery my old macbook you might be lucky to get three or four hours
even in intensive tasks with this i'm getting more like 10 hours and if you're doing light tasks like
email and video you can get upwards of 18 to 20 hours so you're not gonna need your charger the
whole day previously owning a 13-inch macbook pro was a 2010 model i just love the form factor of it
i thought the size of it was great it was a little bit underwhelming in terms of power but that's
what made me so excited about the 14 inches now we have that same you know more compact form factor
that makes it easy to travel and be on the go with but i don't feel like i'm sacrificing power at all
this thing is a beast i call it the little beast for a reason it's the perfect form factor and the
screen is really impressive even for a smaller 14 inch like i mentioned at the beginning of the
video you know this particular macbook pro that i have here it's going to be overkill for probably
you know 80 percent of you out there who are doing just music and audio and not really getting into
the video side of things so i want to talk about some things to consider if you're in the market
for a new macbook pro right now we got the 13-inch the 14-inch and the 16 you know this 13 inch model
with the touch bar i think this is gonna get phased out or will be updated very soon i
wouldn't personally be looking at that one so it really comes down to you know 14 and 16. like i
said that's a preference do you want to go for more of a smaller form factor or if you want
slightly better specs in terms of performance and thermals is it really going to make that much of
a difference that's for you to decide also if you primarily have the macbook docked here in
the studio versus if you're taking it out and you know using it remotely in other studios or
you're meeting up with friends to do music that's something to consider this 16 inch is considerably
larger what you can equip the laptops with is the same so let's just go ahead and say we select the
14 inch and choose this one now as far as specific specs here i would recommend sticking with the
baseline m1 pro processor still a 10 core cpu you know when we start talking about the m1 max those
advantages really start to come down to the gpu cores more for a video based user so i would
stick with that now as far as memory these days no matter what macbook you're going for i would
try to stick with at least 32 gigs of ram just as far as you know using intensive plugins and things
and moving forward that's going to be a safe bet storage i went with a two terabyte ssd i like just
knowing that i've got a little bit of extra space if you look at this right now i'm only using about
yeah a half a terabyte now that you have the sd card back in the macbook pro if you just need
to store sessions and audio files and things like that save yourself some money from having
to get such a big internal ssd so i think one terabyte would be just fine so with those specs i
mean we're still looking at a lot of money i would just say consider checking out the macbook air now
right now this is just the original m1 but i have a feeling that this machine is going to be updated
very soon and it may be one of the first machines to see the m2 chip which i think they're going to
get a lot of power and efficiency out of and once again this compact form factor in the macbook air
may be redesigned and so i think that this for those of you in audio and music specifically
could be a really nice machine and also save you some money because right now these are starting
at you know right around a thousand bucks so i would definitely just keep an eye on that
i know this is a video about macbook pros but i think that macbook air could end up being a
really great option for audio professionals out there in the near future with apple silicon all
right y'all so i hope this was helpful getting some of my real world experience and impressions
of the new m1 macbook pro over the past six months and i hope it's answered some questions for those
of you who may be you know previous intel macbook pro owners and you're thinking about
maybe jumping into apple silicon what has that looked like what will it look like moving forward
i think if you were an early adopter like me maybe that was a little bit rockier than you thought but
it's getting to be more of a smoother ride as we move forward as more developers embrace the apple
silicon environment i think this machine the power of this hasn't even been fully tapped so i'm just
excited to see where that's headed and also where the apple silicon chips are headed they're gonna
get nothing but better so there's never been a better time to get into being a macbook pro user
especially as someone in the music and audio space so if you learn anything in the video please
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