We asked the Experts team to nominate their product of 2021, here is Mike Thornton’s entry… do you agree?

In this article, Mike Thornton shares why the Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max, is his product of 2021 now that we have started to see what the 2nd generation ‘pro’ Apple Silicon computers can do, there is no doubt in his mind that they are awesome.

First Impressions

Before we get into why this is my product of 2021, I just wanted to share my first impressions of the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with an M1 Max System on a Chip with 64GB of unified memory.

It is replacing my 2012 MacBook Pro, which I bought back in 2012 and so it really doesn’t owe me anything. What is interesting is that unlike Russ’ 1st gen M1 MBP, which is smaller and thinner than the 2nd-gen M1, you can see that the old school 2012 15” MBP is both larger and thicker than the new 2021 16” MBP.

As you can see my 2012 MacBook Pro has served me well, but with Apple releasing their first ‘pro’ Apple Silicon machines, rather than the entry-level 1st gen MacBook Pro laptops, and I am retiring at the end of 2021, I decided now was the time to press the button on a replacement for my 8-year-old Apple laptop, in the hope that this one would last me another 8 years.

Which One Did I Go For? M1 Pro Or M1 Max?

With the new Apple Silicon M1 Pro, the CPU part is the same on both chips, with a 10-core processor made up of eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores. The difference is in the GPU part of the SoC. The new 2nd-gen chip has 16 graphics cores. This compares to 8 CPU cores, four high-performance cores and four energy-efficient cores and only 8 graphics cores with 32GB of RAM. The 14-inch model has a screen resolution of 3024 x 1964 pixels and it can support up to 2 external displays as well as the built-in screen.

The second chip is the M1 Max, the CPU part is the same on both chips, with a 10-core processor made up of eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores. The difference is in the GPU part of the SoC. The new 2nd-gen M1 Max chip has 32 graphics cores, whereas the M1 Pro comes with 16 graphics cores. The larger 16-inch model has a resolution of 3456 x 2234 pixels and can support up to 4 external displays as well as the built-in screen.

Compared to the fastest PC laptop Apple could find, the M1 Max uses 100W less power with similar performance with Machine Learning tasks between 3 and 20 times faster than before.

As expected MagSafe makes a welcome return to Apple’s laptops, following it making its iPhone debut with the iPhone 12 release last year.  Also, there has been a boost to the charging speed too as the system sees the MagSafe connection as part of the Apple Ecosystem.

As I wanted a computer that could last another 8 years, I decided to get the best one I could. This is the spec I chose…

• Apple M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine

• 64GB unified memory

• 1TB SSD storage

• 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display

• Three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI port, SDXC card slot, MagSafe 3 port

• 140W USB-C Power Adapter

• Backlit Magic Keyboard with Touch ID - US English

I went for the M1 Max mainly to get the additional graphics performance and also so I could get 64GB of unified memory even though the system on a chip architecture seems to require less memory compared to the Intel based machines. When it came to the internal drive, I decided to go up one level from the base model and go fro a 1TB drive. All my recent machines have had a 512GB boot drive, but I am always having to be careful about what stays on the internal drives and so chose to have a little more space and chose the 1TB option.

My First Impressions

When it came to setting up my new M1 Max laptop, it was simplicity itself, right from the unboxing experience, to switching it on for the first time, through to installing the software.

Although I was able to set up the new MBP to connect to my wi-fi, and even though there are more ports on it, 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports using USB-C, as well as an HDMI and SD card ports, there is no Ethernet port as standard.

So my first challenge was to fix that, I needed an adaptor, but what ports would I need on this adaptor? I didn’t want to end up with another bag full of adaptors for each different application, like Ethernet, USB-A sockets for things like my iLok, yes I know you can now get USB-C iLoks, and finally, really old-school connectivity, which for me includes VGA, which I need for the projectors at church.

My research led me to select a USB C Laptop Docking Station from Amazon which extends one USB C port to Dual Monitor 4K HDMI, VGA, Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB 3.0 ports, 2 USB 2.0 ports, USB C Power Charging Port (max 100W), USB C Data Transfer port (5Gbps), SD/Micro SD card readers and 3.5mm Mic/audio.

This gave me everything I needed, plus a little bit more, it offers another USB-C data port to replace the one it is plugged into, and I was even more impressed when it arrived as it’s so compact.

The Tests

As my world is mainly post-production I wanted to see what it could do. There was no doubt from the tests Russ Hughes had undertaken that the M1 Max powered computers were powerful. If you want to learn more then check out these articles…

• MacBook Pro 2021 With M1 Max - Experts Give Their First Impressions

• Pro Tools Tested On MacBook Pro M1 Max With Staggering Results

• Spectrasonics Omnisphere Tested On MacBook Pro M1 Max

For the first test, I wanted to see how well my MacBook Pro M1 Max powered laptop would do with a post-production session. One of the challenges, especially with post-production content is that so much of the content we work on, we cannot share here on Production Expert. Then I remembered that Netflix had released FREE Dolby Atmos Pro Tools Sessions Of Their Sol Levante Anime Production which you get learn more about and get the session download files by clicking the button below…

The Sol Levante project is is a full Dolby Atmos session, albeit somewhat simplified with busses and objects using 262 voices, which meant I could not run it on my Mac mini HDX 1 system, without enabling the Hybrid Engine to then have access to 2048 voices.

My Intel-powered Mac mini could not even play this session with the Dynamic Plug Processing disabled, I had to enable it just to get the session to run. Then I tried to reduce the Hardware buffer size but I found that I needed to change the buffer size, then save and close the session and then re-open it otherwise the session would not play at all. I established that the smallest buffer size I could have was 256 samples. Any lower, and it would not play on my Mac mini.

The only thing I did on the MacBook Pro was to reassign the outputs to my MacBook Pro speakers, and I was away, and on my MacBook Pro, I could reduce the hardware buffer size down to 32 samples and disable the Dynamic Plugin Processing. But to provide a fair comparison I set both computers to a buffer size of 256 samples and enabled Dynamic Plugin Processing.

The video file provided with the session is an Apple ProRes 4444 at 1920x1080 file.

This Is An Unapproved System

Remember like our previous tests, this is Pro Tools 2021.10 running on an unapproved OS (macOS Monterey 12.0.1) on an, as yet, unapproved computer, because Avid is yet to approve the Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max powered computers yet.

Also, we are running the session on the internal boot drive, rather than on a separate media drive, which is how the Mac mini system is configured.

We are only using the Avid Stock plugins as there are issues with some plugins, that will be resolved when iLok releases the next version of their software.

When we start the test, what you will be looking at is the MacBook Pro screen with the Big Counter and System Usage windows open on the right-hand side and then to keep things as simple as possible on the left-hand side you will be able to see the Big Counter and System Usage from the Mac mini.

There you have it. The session played without any issues right down to 32 samples of hardware buffer size, playing off the internal drive, which is not recommended by Avid and the video engine worked without any issues even though neither the OS nor the computer are approved by Avid yet. Whereas my Mac mini 2018 running macOS Mojave, an approved computer running an approved OS and the session is on a separate SSD media drive as recommended by Avid, could not play the session with Dynamic Plugin Processing disabled and when enabled could only play with the hardware buffer size set to at least 256 samples.

In this second set of tests using a new Apple Silicon 16-Inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Max SoC with 64GB of unified Memory, I wanted to investigate using the new Avid Apple Silicon native HD driver with an HDX1 System and whether using Avid DNxHD or H264 video makes a difference with these new powerful laptops.

Although Official Support via Rosetta 2 for Pro Tools Software has been in place since Pro Tools 2021.6, the 2021.10 release of Pro Tools brought Native support for HDX and HD Native hardware with the release of Universal Binary HD Drivers bringing Apple Silicon support to previously incompatible HDX hardware. 

This means that there is now a driver which can run on M1 Macs running Pro Tools via Rosetta. Unlike applications like Pro Tools, a driver can't run via Rosetta. Because of this HDX and HD Native users can now use their Avid hardware on an M1 Mac with Pro Tools running via Rosetta 2 and the driver running natively.

Avid also announced Apple Silicon support for the Avid Video Engine, which means that video can now be played on Apple Silicon-based machines, but please note that with Pro Tools 2021.10 video hardware is not supported at this time.

You can learn more about the process needed to install the Avid HD Driver, in our article Pro Tools HDX And Video Formats Tested On Apple M1 Max.

In the first test, I wanted to see how well the native Pro Tools HD Driver performed on my new MacBook Pro compared to my existing HDX 1 system running on my 2018 Mac mini. For this test, I used the same Sol Levante session in the previous test at 256 sample hardware buffer size with Dynamic Plugin Processing and compare it with the same settings and the same computer running the same session, the only difference being that it is running on the HDX card, albeit running with the Hybrid Engine on as I cannot run this session an HDX 1 system as it takes too many voices.

When we start the test, what you will be looking at is the MacBook Pro screen with the Big Counter and System Usage windows open on the right-hand side.

On the left-hand side, you will see just the Big Counter and System usage windows from the pass running the HDX card. So here goes…

There you have it, in this test, the HDX system, even though it was running with the Hybrid Engine uses less computer processing power.  But this test was made with the hardware buffer size set to 256 samples because the previous test compared my Mac mini setup with the new Apple Silicon M1 Max powered laptop and so it was only fair to compare like with like.

But how far could we push the new MacBook Pro? How small could we make the hardware buffer size and does the video format still make a difference? To answer these questions we set up a second test.

The Second Test - Comparing HDX With Core Audio And DNxHD With H264

To undertake these tests we changed the session. We chose an old Avid Post Production demo, which is an excerpt from an Avid made spy spoof Agent Zero. The original session used 130 voices and after extensive experimentation, we found that duplicating audio tracks in this session to take the voice count up from 130 to 1500 voices and running it with a hardware buffer size of 64 samples took it close to the edge when using CoreAudio.

We also ran this 1500 voice session with 2 different video files, the DNxHD video was a 36MB per second file played at a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, whereas the H264 video was a 4.1MB per second file played at a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels.

What you will be looking at in this second test is an excerpt from Avid’s Agent Zero session, with a grid of 4 System Usage windows.

1. Top left shows the performance of a session using an Avid DNxHD video using an HDX 1 system.

2. Bottom left is also the HDX 1 system but this time with an H264 MP4 video.

3. Top right shows the combination of a DNxHD video and using Apple CoreAudio.

4. Bottom right shows the performance using an H264 MP4 with Apple CoreAudio.

This is what happened…

There is no doubt, that like the test with the Sol Levante session from Netflix, using an HDX card, even while using the Hybrid Engine reduces the load on the computer.

The performance difference between using an H264 or an Avid DNxHD is less clear. Although having analysed the data closely, it would appear that the H264 video does put an extra load on the computer but it’s not as significant as we expected. It could be that the need to convert everything to Avid DNxHD may not be as necessary with the powerful graphics power and unified memory.

Whatever the reason, the power of this computer is phenomenal. 1500 voices and a video all playing from the internal drive is astounding.

In Conclusion

In my view, the M1 Max powered Apple Silicon computers are ready for the professional in terms of performance and remember like all our tests, this is an unsupported computer, running an unsupported OS and it still works incredibly well.

To be ready for the big time we need Avid to approve the 2nd gen M1 computers and macOS Monterey but we also need all our plugins to work too. Until then I will continue to use my 2018 Mac mini HDX1 system for all my Pro Tools work.

However, once the computer and the OS are approved by Avid and all my key plugins are also approved for Monterey and Apple Silicon, I am seriously considering following Russ Hughes’ lead and using my MacBook Pro as both my portable machine and my studio machine in clamshell mode. In my retirement, it will save me the expense of having two computers and will simplify things as all my software will be on the computer, whether I am in the studio or out on the road, all of which makes me very optimistic that I will be able to get 8 years out of this new computer.