Apple M1: How much power is 'enough' for you and your music?

so apple came out with some pretty bonkers we are one year into a transition with apple going from their use of intel processors over to their own proprietary apple silicon and i've actually owned one of these apple silicon computers the m1 mac mini that came out last year i've owned it since about april and i think we need to do some soul searching together and figure out what the hell is going on with these new processors and which one do you need do i feel like i should try and sell my mac mini at some point and get one of these new ones let's find out i want to start with just talking about how the past six months have been with using this mac mini i have recorded and mixed and released an entire album on it so that was cool and i've taken some time to try and get to know it see if it does have some weird problems that like aren't going to be real obvious things i have seen it crash about four to five times for some reason whenever i had youtube and photoshop open at the same time everything would stop and the screen would get all like purple and then it would just restart and it said your computer has restarted because of an error i don't know what that's about the other one was like an ableton specific thing which was like dragging around on the timeline and stuff like that and there's just a certain project where when you dragged around it would just freeze when it comes to music production we're still unlike this waiting game right now where we're waiting for more developers to support the whole m1 thing most of the plugins that i use are not being developed for m1 natively yet they all work just fine with rosetta with the except of for some reason parallax by neural dsp has this weird white noise issue it's definitely something that's important to keep in mind because even if apple takes two years to transition these processors any number of brands and developers whose plugins you use could take longer shorter and there's going to be a period of time where like half your plugins are supported and half of them aren't despite all that the overall experience has been really really wonderful when it comes to the processors i'm going to start with the one that i know and love because i've been using it for so long and that's going to be the m1 with m1 you're getting an eight core cpu we'll touch on that in a sec an eight core gpu up to 16 gigabytes of ram at least for the time being here's some features you're also getting that aren't going to be on the spec sheet i'm going to reiterate from my last video that you're going to get dead silence if i have a project in ableton with just an immense amount of plug-ins and i can tell that the cpu is struggling dead silence editing and rendering 4k video dead silence it makes stuff like tracking vocals and all that just a dream i said earlier that it was an eight core cpu with the quotes there here's a little demonstration to show you why i'm saying that when you have the m1 four of the cores are what you would normally associate with like a powerful processor so they're gonna be the ones that like when you start putting a heavy load your computer's gonna have to do some weight lifting four cores are being dedicated to that the other four cores which are called high efficiency cores they're not really going to be focusing on the fact that you've got like 16 instances of serum open on one project they're going to be making sure that the high performance cores don't have to do anything else they don't have to like manage your battery they don't have to like do anything with the time or like all the other little things that a processor might be doing are going to be delegated pretty much to the high efficiency cores i love m1 but now they have two new versions of the m1 the pro and the max the m1 pro oddly comes in two different versions for some reason on the 14 inch you can still get it as an 8 core cpu and then a 14 core gpu which is just weird to me but the version that's way more exciting is the 10 core cpu and 16 core gpu so on the eight core we had four high efficiency and four high performance cores now they have two high efficiency cores and eight high performance cores which is very interesting i wonder if they just felt like four for the high efficiency was like too much or something i don't know so basically they're essentially doubling the power of the m1 which is already great there's an m1 pro and an m1 max the m1 max mostly differs on the gpu side if you're a musician it's not that it's not important at all but i don't think you need a 32 core gpu for most people that is certainly unnecessary but it could be helpful for some people in the music world like if you're working on video games maybe you've got unity open and ableton and unity can take advantage of your gpu and ableton can take advantage of some things maybe it'll help your workflow that way it can also be helpful if you're doing video editing so as someone who is a musician i mean being able to edit music videos is helpful or videos like this from what i get the the real purpose of the m1 max is more for just insane graphics power they call what we usually call ram unified memory and that makes more sense now that we've kind of multiplied the available memory the cpu and the gpu both have access to this memory on the m1 pro it now supports up to 32 gigabytes of memory which is sick and on the max you can get up to 64 gigabytes of unified memory so effectively you can have a 32 core gpu that has access to 32 gigs of ram like a 32 gig vram gpu for reference one of the top graphics cards right now with 3080 ti from nvidia that card has 12 gigabytes of memory now obviously this isn't an apples to apples comparison but it does make me wonder if things like gaming are going to be more viable on a mac because the gpu is just going to be so much better that's for a different video but these new processors are really nuts i mean they're taking the great things about the m1 and obviously multiplying them they just literally made it bigger essentially which one is right for you in my opinion after using it and again i've been doing a bunch of music stuff on it and editing videos m1 i think is still the right choice for most people now obviously if you want the power go for it but if i was being very critical the only thing on my m1 mac mini that i would really like to see some improvement with would be just more brutal track count so if i could really stack high amounts of processing within ableton and it could handle that better that would be good and then in the video editing world if i import like 4k iphone footage or really if i'm editing 4k it works fine but it certainly struggles much more compared to 1080p and a much more powerful gpu for that kind of acceleration would be certainly very helpful at that point something i really like about what they've done is the macbook pro since about 2016 when the disastrous spaceship thin usb-c monsters came out has been sort of a very non-pro laptop i had two 13-inch macbook pros one was a 2016 one was a 2017. other pieces of the processors in them were a complete joke they had two usbc ports they were not pro at all i couldn't hook up a printer or an sd card like this is just a macbook that's slightly bigger and slightly more powerful with the 14 and 16 inch macbook pros with the ports that they finally put back on there and the raw power that's going into them as someone who's been very biased towards the pc side for a lot of my life now it's worth it the dollar twenty five hundred dollar price tag that you would pay for an apple laptop now that is worth it you're gonna have immense access to power and speed in ways that you probably haven't seen ever before in a computer when it's combined with the silence and the efficiency especially and especially considering that these are going to be on laptops tldw the m1 has been phenomenal minus some little issues the new m1 pro and m1 max are crazy and i'm very scared now to see whatever they have coming up next year i'm not a laptop guy so unless for some reason i have a huge change of heart i don't think i'm gonna be getting one of the new uh 14 or 16-inch macbook pros i also just don't need it i'm very happy with my mac mini but let me know what you think do either of the new processors seem like something that you might need if you found this video informative or helpful please give it a like that helps me know i did a good job and other than that i have been matt thank you very much for watching and i'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Matt Citrano

Views: 61,438

Keywords: matt citrano, citrano, music, guitar, mac, m1, silicon, apple, strandberg, pro, max, cpu, processor, enough, right

Id: 03dpIybXhlM

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021