MacBook Air M1 vs MacBook Pro M1 (2021). 8GB vs 16GB. Full review and real performance demos.

hi there my name's mark payne here i've got two apple macbooks one is an air one is a pro they're both m1 silicon machines using the latest technology from apple maybe you're buying for yourself or a partner or a young person that's about to go to college or university and you want to know which one of these two machines is going to be right for you there's three hundred dollars in it at the base and there are also upgrades in terms of memory and ssd space that we're going to be discussing and working out is it worth the extra money we'll compare both of these machines running standard office productivity tools and also we'll look at more advanced audio and video editing tools as well let's go [Music] i've separated this discussion into nine sections firstly we're going to talk about the apple silicon the m1 chip what is the advantage to you buying an m1 machine over an intel machine are there any disadvantages secondly we will look at features in common these machines are very similar so what is the difference between an air and a pro in section three we'll home in on the differences in section four we'll discuss the price comparisons between the air and the pro in section five we'll discuss those upgrades who needs them why do you need to put more memory in the machine why do you need to put more ssd into it what will it do for you in section 6 we'll run the standard industry benchmarks we'll be looking at geekbench and also cinebench in section 7 we'll load both of the machines up with office productivity tools from apple and from microsoft zoom microsoft teams is there any difference in section 8 we'll look at logic pro x the audio editing daw from apple finally in section 9 we will run a demonstration using final cut pro apple's video editing software and we'll make a comparison of how this runs on both the air and the pro so what happened with intel and apple well this is my older 2019 machine which is an intel machine it's the same 13-inch form factor and pretty much if you put them side-by-side you really can't tell the difference not a lot has changed physically between the machines but what has changed is that apple's using its own silicon inside these machines its own chip the m1 chip which is based on five nanometer uh silicon technology much higher component density on the chips much lower power consumption now what happened at the end of the kind of macbook line i feel with intel is intel were developing more and more performant chips more cores higher clock speeds and because they hadn't really moved the technology on all that was happening was we were just generating more and more heat and putting these really hot performance chips in small form factor machines especially the the air suffered from this terribly where you couldn't really get the performance out of it before it would overheat and then we had people with the pro machines the 13-inch pro machines suffering from overheating even doing basic things like running microsoft teams and having the fan run like crazy and then even on the 16-inch version you ended up frightened about what machine you were going to buy and if you didn't put the right gpu in the 16 there are hundreds of problems documented all over the internet where this became more and more of a problem what apple have done is they've completely redesigned the internals of these machines using the m1 chip which is a system-on-chip concept we bring together the ram the gpu and the cpu cores we put them all in one place it runs with incredible power efficiency and incredible performance and these machines are totally wiping the floor with the old intel machines and while they're doing it they're using way less battery power and they're generating way way less heat now the m1 chip is a risk chip it's a reduced instruction set chip which makes it highly efficient but it does run different machine code that means that programs that have been compiled for intel based computers need to be recompiled for the m1 now if a developer has not recompiled the code it really doesn't matter because apple provides this translation software called rosetta 2 which will basically take the old version of the application and translate it on the fly invisible to you into the m1 code an example of this within one manufacturer would be microsoft where outlook the mail host has been completely rewritten and is running as native m1 code but as of yet microsoft teams for example has not been converted neither has one drive being converted so when these programs run they run under rosetta 2 emulation how does this matter to you it really doesn't matter you're going to see far better performance on the m1 machines compared to the older intel machines independent of whether an application has been ported over to m1 code or not even if it's still running translated the performance is far far superior so what's in common between the air and the pro well they're basically the same 13-inch macbook form factor the macbook air is slightly thinner at the front and slightly fatter at the back and it's lighter by about the weight of a chocolate bar and a small chocolate bar once you've got them in a cases it's really going to make no difference to the size of the of either machine in your backpack or whatever you carry your computer in now looking at this video you might feel that the air is smaller than the pro but i would just say there's a weird thing going on here with the lens this this one is closer to you it looks bigger this one's further away it looks smaller they are both exactly the same size all of the macbook airs and the macbook pro m1 feature the same eight core cpu which has four really high efficiency cores which are low power and those calls are engaged for basic web browsing word processing male hosts that sort of thing and then there are four high power cores which are used for high intensity cpu operations video processing audio editing that sort of thing the advantage being is really those high performance cores can be turned off when the machine is not busy and for this reason the battery range is extended on both of these machines if you're interested in a more detailed video that i've made about the performance of the m1 chip measuring it with specific benchmarks then i'll put a link just here for you which i would really recommend that you have a look at next we move on to the keyboard which really is identical between both machines in terms of its feel this is the new magic keyboard there was a lot of problems with the previous butterfly keyboard in the end apple have ditched the butterfly keyboard that gave problems and was a bit clacky and now we have these really nice magic keyboards now with the trackpads which feel really really good i'd assume that they were both exactly the same but in actual fact the one on the pro is just 10 millimeters wider that brings us on to ports now in previous revisions of some of the pro machines there were two ports on this side and two ports on that side on the new machines what we have is we only have two ports on the left hand side there are no ports on either machine on the right hand side and these ports are a usb 4 supporting also thunderbolt protocol 40 gigabit per second ports highly performant one port can charge the machine and then carry i o for a 6k display working up to 60 hertz for your disk drives your external ssds for usbs it doesn't really bother me that there are only two ports here because i wouldn't want four wires coming out the macbook anyway i just don't think that's a very elegant solution if i'm needing to connect more things is my preferences i use this this is a bridge stone pro dock this is a fantastic device i got this from amazon i'll put the link to amazon down below if you want to look at that what this does is it takes a thunderbolt input from the computer you only need to connect it once because this single cable is going to carry all of the data that we need from the computer to connect to our external peripherals and because this comes with its own power supply this is also going to carry power up and charge the battery even while you're using it so one connection is going to do it all it gives me another usbc output which i use for my external ssd it gives me three usb 3 connections old styley it gives me an internet connection which is gigabit hardwired it gives me this is the input the thunderbolt input it also gives me a thunderbolt output and what i'm doing with that is i then send it to an old thunderbolt display i have to convert thunderbolt 3 back to thunderbolt 2 using an adapter i mean i've had that thing probably for about seven years or something and then alternatively you have the displayport connection which can also be converted easily to hdmi it also quite nicely has on the side of it an sd card slot so it makes it easy to pop in your camera cards it's called a bridge stone pro dock both the air and the pro will only support one additional external display now that can be a 6k screen running at 60hz so if you want to go and get yourself one of those fantastic super wide screens they would be supported but only one of course you get to use the built-in display at the same time as the external display so you can have both of those running but only one external display is supported now the gpus on these machines actually are highly effective i would say approaching the performance of the even the 16-inch intel macbook pros that are being sold currently but i am going to say that this will not support an external gpu if you want to go in that direction you cannot you can only use the gpus the 8 core gpu system that's part of the system on chip m1 device in the link to the video here i've provided detailed benchmarking information on the m1 systems compared to previous intel machines and also even my studio imac pro machine in common to both machines unfortunately is a very disappointing 720p camera it's not a hd camera and this is a little frustrating for everybody but really it's not changed since the intel version of the 13. my assumption is that with the really thin profile of the screen lid they can't find the depth put a decent camera and sensor so we're limited to this non-hd 720p camera however i will say that the processing that's on both of these machines to clean up the image of the camera is actually a big improvement and i've also had plenty of comments from colleagues when i've been using microsoft teams or zoom they're saying that they can tell the difference in the image quality that they're seeing at their end and while we're on this subject of communications the microphone arrays in both of these machines have been improved they're much more directional and they pick up more of you and less of the room now i will say that on the pro the quality of the microphone is pretty much approaching studio quality i still wouldn't record that way because i'm an audio snob but effectively both of these machines have got microphones that are going to be as good as you need them to be the final thing that i'll mention that is in common between both of these machines is wi-fi six now we're getting to the point now where pretty much everything you put in your house has got a wi-fi address so the contention for wi-fi is very very strong and will become even stronger and wi-fi six is future proofing for that but the thing that i've noticed is without a doubt wi-fi on these machines is stronger anywhere i go in the house let's move on now and actually talk about the differences that between the air and the pro what distinguishes one from the other firstly a technical difference is the air is passively cooled and the pro has got active force cooling so there is no fan in the air neither of these machines make a lot of heat and in actual fat is very hard to get the fans to run on the pro you've got to really load the cpu up to get it to run fans so in extreme usage it is possible that the air will have a slightly lower cpu performance than the pro is capable of but it's a small percentage the next difference is the battery in the pro is 8 watt hours bigger than the one in the air we're talking about 50 watt hours in the air and 58 watt hours in the pro this means that the pro does have slightly longer battery life something in the order of 15 percent better now both of these computers are the best laptops i have ever owned for battery life the displays are slightly different the pro has got a display that will go to 500 nits brightness where the air goes to 400 and its brightness even in this harsh studio lighting that i'm using for camera they pop out of both of the machines and looking at the displays i just cannot see a difference between them they have the same retina quality and they have the same resolution in terms of weight the pro is 100 grams heavier effectively an extra bar of chocolate in your backpack although the mechanics of the magic keyboard are identical between the machines love it or hate it the pro has the touch bar this is the thing that lights up and shows you context dependent menus depending on what you're doing in applications and some people really prefer the hard-coded function keys that the air has now your mileage might differ i kind of like the touch bar but i don't miss it when i'm using the air let's take a look at a price comparison of the base air system against the base pro system this is the minimum configuration of either machine that you can get to for my friends in the uk and the usa it doesn't really matter whether i'm talking about dollars or pounds here because the price in dollars and the price in pounds at the moment in the world as i record this at the beginning of 2021 the pound dollar rate is about 1.25 and we have to pay v80 in the uk which loses that uh currency advantage effectively so please forgive me if i talk pounds or us dollars because really they are interchangeable so the minimum you're going to pay on an air is 999. 999 quit for me uk friends okay so and the minimum you're going to pay for a pro is 1 299 the 300 uplift on the pro is really funding a touch pad where i can't tell the difference between the two even though it's 10 millimeters bigger a visual touch bar which some people love and some people hate and improved quality in the microphone array which is debatable whether anybody's going to notice a brighter screen but the screen on the air is already well bright enough so for me the big differences would be the forced fan calling if we really drive this machine into cpu overload that force calling is going to keep cpu performance even in high thermal load the base versions of both these machines come with 256 gigabyte ssd that's where you put the majority of your data your files your music your photos live out on ssd and there's no performance difference between the ssds in these machines the base versions also come both with eight gigabytes of main memory now my wife's air does have a few upgrades it has the gigabyte ssd i wanted to make sure that audrey had more space for personal data she's not a great lover of personal data housekeeping so having a machine with a little bit more space is helpful and this particular machine is a configuration with eight cores in the gpu and really the only reason for that is they were out of stock of the seven core machine it wouldn't have bothered me for audrey's use whether this was a seven core or an eight core gpu that means that the price on this machine was 1249 the majority of that is in the internal ssd the increase from 256 to 512. in terms of my pro configuration i did do a few things to it it does have the maximum memory you can put in you've only got two choices you either have eight gigabytes or you have 16 gigabytes you can't change it later it's really important that you buy a machine with the right amount of memory for you because i'm a power user of these kind of machines i kind of convinced myself that i needed the 16 gigabyte option also this machine has one terabyte of ssd because i do 4k video editing while i'm out and about i really did want the ability to edit some of my sessions using the internal ssd only that brings the cost of my pro up to 1899. so you can see really for the same form factor of machine that's going to have really the same core cpu performance you can pay anywhere between nine nine nine you know just under a thousand dollars up to just under two thousand dollars and they look the same and they will probably do very very similar things so in the next section we're going to unpack really the detail of why do we need these options and are they worth it so let's talk memory upgrades minimum memory uh base machine is delivered with 8 gigabytes maximum memory you can have is 16 gigabytes so you can double it or keep it the same is it worth 200 dollars to have 16 gigs over 8 gigs well for me personally i felt it was when you run complex logic sessions they take up a lot of space in memory if you're the sort of audio user that does a lot of composition and uses sample libraries then i'm going to strongly recommend going for 16 gigabytes i can run my logic sessions quite comfortably in eight gigabytes but i think for the producers of you that are out there i would go with 16 gigs however if you're an office productivity user out there and you're using outlook excel microsoft word powerpoint keynote numbers pages zoom microsoft teams you're surfing the internet on safari or chrome and you're looking at youtube and you're streaming videos i will prove to you that this stuff is small memory load on a machine and eight gigabytes is plenty in the link above you'll find a video that i produced looking at memory pressure in great detail comparing the use of office tools to high memory media tools like logic pro and final cut i would really recommend it if you wanted to know more detail about memory sizing so high level media users spend your extra 200 office users keep the money in your pocket and go and buy one of those nice thunderbolt docks that i showed you earlier this brings us on to talking about ssd solid state drives how much ssd space do we need on the machine now this is the location for our data it's our music our photos our personal media library of maybe videos so the base machines come with 256 gigabytes of ssd you can go up to 5 112 gigabytes for 200 pounds one terabyte instead that would be 400 pounds 2 terabytes that would be in 800 pound upgrade i went for one terabyte because i wanted to make sure that i've got plenty of space when i was editing 4k videos the video making process can create very large temporary files and it's really good to have that headroom on your internal drive now my good wife audrey who's lent me this air for this demo session uh doesn't have as much personal data as i do but i'm going to have to say that she's really bad with personal data housekeeping i nearly said hygiene there i don't mean she's bad with data hygiene so unless i want my life to be taken up with managing audrey's data for her i thought it was better to get her the 512 gigabyte machine trust me and that will work out to be worth the extra 200 bucks over the next few years so the performance of ssd is made better if it is installed permanently in the machine the data throughput rate that you will get to and from it will be better but there is no doubt that the modern ssd drives are absolutely superb in terms of their data throughput this is the samsung t7 drive you can get them like this or with an encrypted uh touch bar on in fact i've got one here so this is a t7 and this is a t7 touch but i don't use i don't use the touch the only reason i got it with the touch on because it was a bit cheaper on a black friday deal gigabyte for gigabyte the stuff you have on the outside is going to be cheaper than half the price of the stuff that you put on the inside and the performance of these is so good that you can put your video data on them for editing you can put your logic sessions and all of your tracks and stems on them really we have more throughput than we need and this is not going to be the bottleneck in the performance of your media management these drives have got a usb 3.2 so they plug directly into the macbook pro or into your dock samsung t7 is a complete no-brainer i buy mine from amazon and i've put the links to these products down in the information below i picked up the 512 gigabyte version for about 90 bucks and the one terabyte version is going to cost you 140 dollars of course the great benefit of external ssds is that when you need more you can just buy more unlike ram the 8 gigabytes 16 gigabyte ram decision you do have to make that when you buy the machine okay so let's get into some benchmarking so to compare the air with the pro um eight gigabytes 16 gigabytes remember we're going to use geekbench which is going to focus in on core performance it's going to stress the maths of the cause both in single core mode and multi-core mode use all the functionality of what the chip set is capable of this is the version of geekbench that knows about the m1 system so it's the correct one to be using i'm going to try and run these simultaneously in three two one go now in a way i don't need to run them together because uh all geekbench is going to do is give me a score it's going to do the measurement itself it's not like i i need to run a completion clock here it'll come up with two numbers it'll come up with a number for the single core performance of the machine and also a number of using all cores together uh simultaneously so let's see how it does i might go and get a cup of tea right so i'm back with a cup of tea and uh it's just before six o'clock so if you're still with me it's six o'clock somewhere in the world cheers so geekbench scores are in single core performance 1715 on the air 1714 on the pro there's nothing in it on the multi-core performance 7259 on the multi-core for the air and five six uh the pro is just slightly slower go figure what's the moral of this story the the air and the pro machine are the same m1 chip you're gonna get numbers which are very similar now remember here the point is to compare the air to the pro i'm not making comments in this video about how performant this is against other apple machines or in fact other machines from other manufacturers if you want to see more about that on the benchmarking that i've done across apple devices there's a link just here okay so next we're going to use cinebench which is a different kind of benchmark that's going to completely stress the whole system cpu cores gpu cores it's heavyweight video rendering it's going to build up heat in the cause and this is the situation where we might see a better performance from the pro compared to the air uh the program is going to run over 10 minutes i'll try and time it the same on both machines so we've got a comparison three two one go let's see if it starts on both of them yes the rendering process on both is is really going at the same speed it will do a number of passes i think it's ten passes by default or it's ten minutes i can't quite remember now you can see that we are using 99 100 percent of uh machine utilization uh you can see that all the cores are fully busy and the machine isn't really under memory pressure because um this is not a memory intensive program it's a cpu intensive program and at the moment the pro is running around 19 000 rpm and i don't hear the fans at all there are other things in my house which are noisier than that and uh you won't see a fan speed for the air because it doesn't have any fans so we're into past two now both machines are into past two i think the pro machine looking at the rendering is just slightly ahead it's fan speed is now at three uh five to four some of the temperature sensors are into the 94 degrees on the air machine whereas we're seeing no more than 80 degrees on the on the pro machine so you can see the active cooling is beginning to work we're into the um 3000 rpm it's whisper quiet but you might just be able to hear that in the background five minutes into the test you can still see we've got some 95 degrees c uh temperatures within the cores to keep control of that the air will have to throttle the cpus back in terms of clock speed so that things are not so hot and trust me if i did this on an intel machine and you would really hear this thing banging out fan speed and uh being throttled because it it wouldn't like doing this job over here you can see neither the air or the pro machine is under any particular stress even the air machine without its cooling of course i don't expect to feel any machine heat here oh i can feel you know it's it's warm to turn you know it's not hot if i was to do the same thing on the pro it really feels the same to be honest with you maybe it's just slightly cooler the pro machine's well into past six and the air machine is still finishing up on past five so last 10 seconds of the test i'll just let the microphone open just to uh hear the fans uh really i've got a hard disk uh just running underneath my bench down here and i can hear that shaking about more than i can hear the fan speed on the pro so the pro is finished so we end up with 7400 against 6700 it's not a big difference that shows the difference between the pro and the air and the thermal capability but neither of these were stressful i mean this is the air is still really good gpu type performance uh even compared to the pro in this section i want to look at uh a good mix of general tools and office productivity tools so both of these machines are running four virtual uh desktops so that i've got four screens that i can go between it's the same on this one they're configured in exactly the same way we're running outlook outlook is native it's microsoft have developed that in m1 code they're both running safari where one of the pages of safari is a streaming video from youtube four or five different pages of safari open we're running microsoft excel we're running uh word we're running a an instance of google chrome so it's the same on this machine we've got some excel we've got some word and we've got some google chrome and then uh on the next page we're running a zoom session and we're also running microsoft teams i just think this is pretty much everything that you would generally throw at a machine on a day-to-day basis so looking at eye statistica you can see that currently the air is running at 15 and the pro is running at 21 now so really neither of these machines are under cpu pressure and remember i'm running pretty much simultaneously all the office productivity stuff that you're likely to want to run let's talk about memory though let's have a look at the air machine and also the pro machine so on the air machine i've ordered all of the programs in memory usage the biggest user of memory that you can see is the youtube page that i've got open in safari and that's uh running about 609 megabytes you know 0.6 of a gig with the youtube thing over on the pro machine it's a similar size 540 megabytes in memory but you can see that none of these programs really are huge the office programs are huge in terms of their memory need what that brings us to is that on the on the eight gigabyte machine you can see that there is eight gigabytes installed on the air it's saying that we've used 6.7 gigabytes of it we need to be really careful how we interpret this memory utilization because 6.7 gigabytes used of an eight gigabyte machine might frighten you into thinking you don't have a lot of memory left but you will notice that here we've got 1.2 gigabytes given over to the file system cache it's the habit of the operating system here to give free memory over to file system caching in the old days our file systems were out on hard disk drives that were slow so if we could we would take the most popular pages that we were accessing out on the disk and we would bring them into memory cache in the modern area we need to do that less because our disk space is ssd and it's much much faster but still the operating system brings things into file system cache and you can see that same story is repeated over here on the pro machine in the it's a 16 gigabyte machine of which we've used 10 gigabytes well how can that be it's not running any different programs to what the air is using and i just really want to warn you again about interpreting how much memory you need you see people that are going to tell you you need 16 gigabytes for office aren't really understanding that the machine is just grabbing that memory for no good reason you'll notice that the file system cache used here is five gigabytes so you could basically take five gigabytes off of that number it's just that we've seen that memories available so we've grabbed it the truth is that because you can see green in this area here in the memory pressure area on both machines you can see that they're green and because of that neither of them these machines are under memory pressure so i'm hoping that's giving you confidence that as a personal and office prop productivity user with an eight gigabyte machine as the air is right now you're going to see no difference in performance compared to having 16 gigabytes you're just putting memory in the machine that you don't need for office use first of all i can't do this side by side because unfortunately the waves plug-in licensing and other licenses that i have i can only run one session at a time but i've got a benchmark that i use to do this that i've used consistently through all my demonstrations now i want to get to this really quickly if you want to see the detail all of this up in the link here i will show you the detail of cpu tuning for logic on m1 systems and it's probably about half an hour long it'll go into a deep dive of this benchmark that i'm running and also i do one which is all about memory utilization of logic and i'm linking that here now as well so if you feel this is a little bit quick and you would like to go back and look at this in more detail i've given you those two video links so this is the pro with my standard benchmark which is my good friend martin gordon and his green light band and we did a live stream kind of video production which i then post produced afterwards for audio it's a 96k project it's got 40 odd channels and all the general plugins that i would normally use remember the intel machine that we were talking about earlier 2019 of intel machine no chance that this machine would run this session not a hope in hell wondering why it's not running because i need to click in there here it is running so here it is running and you can see that we're nicely balanced over all eight cores uh i'm using all eight calls in the machine the high performance cores and the local performance cores remember all that detail is in this video that i'm linking here okay it's running comfortably as you can see not too much utilization the cpu cores and you should be able to hear this in the background i'm just going to quickly check yeah that's all running great the session is running off of the uh the external ssd that you can see there and notice that the drive i o utilization is very very very very low these external disks uh are superb for that remember there's a link for the samsung t7s if you want to get yourself one that's in the link down below from amazon okay that's all good running well now what i have here are some abbey road reverbs it looks like this it's a emulation of the abbey road plate reverb which is very accurate to the abbey road plate but unfortunately he's really hungry for cpu but the reason i put it in this session is it really loads the machine up so already you can see there's a lot more activity because i've only added one of these plugins let's start to really load the machine up there's three plugins loaded and you can start to see the build up of cpu pressure uh now it's gone into a system overload there i'm going to say okay to that restart it and what you'll notice is that logic will re-thread that workload over its affinity cues and we're now we will run comfortably now uh run again it won't have any issues so let's load up some more there's another one uh that's the uh sixth one going in sorry the that's the fifth one no that's the fourth one going in uh the fifth one uh the sixth one i generally don't think this will go much further uh let me just stop it and restart it just to make sure we rebalance the affinity cues that's all looking pretty good we are running comfortably you'll notice that the cpu utilization is up in the 61 percent kind of area but we are on the ragged edge of this not working let's show you what happens when i add the seventh one and uh still seems to be managing to run i'll stop it restart it uh really busy on the affinity cues now there it's just falling over and okay so that's the seventh one uh let's stop that oh no actually system overload so i would suggest to use seven seven as is as far as we can really go it's not reliable with seven you've just seen it fall over again so let's let's actually knock one of those out let's run it with the six extra hungry abbey road reverbs that's just overloaded so even six is on the ragged edge let's go back down to five and um let's go again five seems to be running and while i'm concluding let's hope that keeps running on in the background now i i would never run five of these abby reverbs it's really crazy thing to do and don't listen to the mix because it's probably been completely messed up by these reverbs but the point is just to load the machine that's running quite reliably let's put the sixth one back in see what we get yeah maybe it's gonna run stop it start it uh so you've got a feel for this now okay six six is possible five definitely reliable seven is shaky that's the performance of the pro you'll notice that we're not really using a lot of cpu here the cpu utilization is not massively high and the reason for that is that logic needs a lot of peak cpu capability but because the mix is changing and different buses are coming in and out and certain effects are being turned on and off you need the availability of cpu headroom but this is not a big heat generator so if you look at the eye statistic of fans you'll notice the fan isn't even running even though we're on the ragged edge of running out of cpu power can you see that logic doesn't really use cpu in that way it has high peak requirements but reasonably low overall average requirements therefore we could maybe think that there won't be very much difference between the air and the pro because in this scenario the uh pro isn't even running its fans okay that's fine and that's as far as we'll take it oh one thing no it's not as far as we'll take it one thing i want i'd hate you to think i script this stuff uh the one thing i did want to show you is that in this situation logic you can see here is 4.4 gigabytes in memory so it it's it's a reasonably large program in fact way larger than anything else that's running here but it is still only four gigabytes now my my job is post production of live shows so i'm not a great user of sample libraries or live playing into software instruments if that's your bag your logic sessions and your requirements on memory is going to be higher than that and i will be recommending later that if that is your bag then i would really be recommending the 16 gigabyte machine but can you see for what i do which is the post production of live events then actual fact my logic memory utilization is quite small and again i would suggest to you and i will prove it that this is actually going to run on an air just fine the eight gigabyte air will have no problems doing my kind of live show post-production okay i'm back with the macbook air and uh you can see that's the macbook air because it's got the funky cover on it and uh this is the eight gigabyte machine okay it's running the same uh session and it has been running this session for 10 minutes i've been looping around my point of doing that is i wanted to prove to you that i've heat soaked the machine so it's been it's had this consistent uh uh 60 odd percent cpu utilization for a long time and the two hottest sensors are down here there's this 92 degree sensor and uh goes around 97 degrees now and it and it balances around those kind of figures remember this machine's got a cover on it and i'm i'm warm i'm holding it here now this is an air it has no fan okay so this is warm like your cat's warm it's not warm like a hot water bottle is warm this isn't even toasty it's it's it's human being warm is the kind of heat that comes off of it and the same is true of you know the surface and this has reached a stable point in its uh uh in its thermal cycle if you like so this machine can run this level of cpu activity all day long now you'll notice that in fact it's running six abbey road uh reverbs it's it's got the same kind of cpu uh affinity q load as the pro had so i'm not giving this any easier time and the pro basically fell over when i added the seventh one i've added the seventh one here it's still running in fact now it's just aborted you can see what my message is quite simply my message is this there is no difference for logic between the performance of the air and the performance of the pro they're both working equally well and it's due to the fact that logic really isn't a big average cpu user uh it doesn't drive the thermal limits of the machines so that's good news and we're still getting system overload there with seven so let's cut it down to six and run it again uh also let's just have a quick chat about memory you can see we've again we've used about four gigabytes of memory it's an eight gigabyte machine of which uh six gigabytes of memory has been used uh we have got 1.6 gigabytes of cache files which is a loose hold on memory when we're under pressure that'll be the first thing to get sacrificed and you can see this machine really isn't under memory pressure because we've got a green line here and very little swap space used uh remind you again up here more information on memory pressure how it works and how it's measured so i'll go there you'll see much more information okay so good test same machine it's going to work well remember that if you are the kind of person that uses a lot of sample libraries and live software instruments then get the 16 gigabyte machine it's 200 pounds or 200 between the 8 and the 16 gigabyte machine if you're a big sample library user and you're into native instruments you've already spent a thousand pounds on sample libraries go and spend the 200 and get the memory upgrade to put you in a safe position but you can see for the kind of work that i do as a post-production guy that's working on live shows the eight gig of my machine would absolutely cut it for me and i would be happy with either so welcome back we're going to finally look at final cut pro x so a bit of a complicated setup here we've got the air we've got the pro and we've got my studio machine which is an imac pro 10 core with an expensive gpu in it so you know we're just over a grand here you know 1 200 pounds 1 800 pounds and uh over five and a half grand i paid for that thing seriously final cut pro on m1 machines is buttery smooth i mean these are 4k uh projects and i'm going to render them in 4k uh final cut is completely coded native for m1 silicon and for example davinci resolve is as well i know people are complaining about their premiere pro performance right now we're in january 2001 and as you have yet adobe haven't recoded that for m1 so i think that's a little bit lumpy when you use it let's render these out so just let me get this going and i'll start the stopwatch as well so so we're four and a half minutes in i've started the render process on all three machines i've left it a little bit of time otherwise you just don't want to be waiting the amount of time this takes to finish remember we're rendering out a uh a 4k file here let's see how we're getting on well the air is at 35 percent finished the pro is at 34 finished i mean the air is beating the pro go figure and uh at uh nearly five minutes the imac pro is at 48 so the imac pro is slightly ahead and i would expect that for for a a five and a half gram machine with a dedicated gpu and a desk class um desktop class uh frame around it so let's look at some cpu utilizations uh unfortunately i'm not able to run screen capture the screen capture process really interferes with what final cut is doing we find that on the air the image of the final cut program has grown to 2.8 gigabytes so on the 8 gigabyte air it's grown to 2 gigs on the 16 gigabyte pro it's actually grown to a 4.9 nearly 5 gigabytes so it's twice the size and on the uh 32 gigabyte machine it's grown to nearly eight gigabytes so it would appear that final cut will take the memory if it's available to it but what i am going to suggest to you it's not really making any difference in the render speed and looking back where we are we're now at 44 on the air and the air is beating the pro now so we've just hit 10 and a half minutes and uh the um the imac pro has finished the render uh it's actually a 20 minute file uh 20 minute pro project so uh just you know ten and a half minutes and the imac pro was done with it we're at 70 on the air and we're at 67 on the pro so the air is still keeping up obviously we're not going to see any level of thermal throttling on the air at all because uh a processor utilization of 13 it's just not an issue so we're nearly 13 minutes now and i will say that the air has really caught up on its memory and now the logic pro program has managed to obtain six gigabytes of memory so its residency is increased and that's really um there's some bit more swap spots swap file space uh being used to support that and let's have a look at progress um we now got the air at 81 and the pro is at uh 77 so there's still it's still just a little bit ahead and eight gigabyte air certainly isn't any slower than a 16 gigabyte pro in fact at the moment it's actually faster so if you're a final cut pro user then hopefully that gives you some kind of confidence that an air is going to be a good choice even if you're uh working on 4k projects so at 1545 the air is just complete and its file is completed rendered so that's 15.45 compared to about 11 and a half minutes on the imac pro so that's that was at 16.30 so it took about another minute for the macbook pro to complete compared to the air so there you go you pay more money you get a slower machine of course there is i can't i can't absolutely make this test environment perfect because this is my uh machine which has got quite a lot of stuff installed onto it this is my wife's machine that has less stuff installed to it i've already shown you that difference but it just shows you the the class of a 16 minute completion on a now circa 1000 and a bit machine compared to a five and a half grand machine that was completing it in 11 minutes now if i did this on a 13 inch intel machine no chance i could go and have dinner go and have a few glasses of wine come back and i'll still be waiting for it to finish and i will be listening to huge amounts of fan noise so that that is the reality of uh this measurement so hope you hopefully you can see doesn't really matter what you buy here for final cut both machines are going to serve you very very well

Channel: Mark Payne

Views: 494,277

Keywords: Yamaha, Yamaha Pro Audio, Midas, Midas Consoles, Digico, Allen and Heath, Shure, Sennheiser, Behringer, L-Acoustics, d&b audio, d&b audiotechnik, acoustics, audio, live sound, mixing, mixing consoles, Logic Pro X, Logic Pro, Logic, Final Cut Pro, FCP, FCPX, Waves, Waves Plugins, Studio, Audio production, Production, Apple M1, MacBook Pro, Apple MacBook, Speaker Systems, Audio Tutorial, Dante, Audio Networking, Dante Virtual Soundcard, audinate, DSP, Digital Audio, SFL, SFL Group, lacoustics

Id: Iy2Olv1clEE

Length: 46min 47sec (2807 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021