All the talk of the 5K iMac being dead, I bet it is more the parts shortage

I highly doubt the 5K 27” iMac is completely dead, sure it is dead for now, in favor of the much more expensive Mac Studio and Studio Display. The thing is that is a minimum $3500, much more than a base 5K Intel iMac. I think a 5K iMac isn’t dead, but with Studio Displays pushing towards a June ship time, Apple just had to chose one or the other. And especially if the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is pushed to 2023, the Mac Studio fills that high end gap much more successfully now, and once there is no supply shortage bet they do do the Apple Silicon 5K iMac that many have been waiting for.

Larry Jordan did an Apple Motion Speed Test and it is slower on the new 2021 M1 Pro MacBook Pro than a 2017 Intel iMac

Larry Jordan did a speed test of Apple Motion on Intel Vs. Apple Silicon and Apple Motion got slaughtered.

Now I don’t think this has anything to do with the hardway, but more not been working on the code for Motion, instead focusing on Final Cut, but it is disturbing since it is pretty much as shared graphics engine between the two. And interestingly it gives more perspective on AVID being so slow on updating for M1, because you obviously need to really update the code to make it faster, and if even Apple is slow to update, then how can you expect 3rd parties to be fast (with the exception of Blackmagic who could not be faster on their updates).

Let’s hope Apple gets on this and updates the Motion codebase, as for me the best features of FCP are what Motion can do.

Apple’s new M1 24” iMac is an impressive and beautiful consumer machine.

 

So one of the things Apple released yesterday, was there new 24” inch iMac in up to 7 colors like the iMac was originally. And this is an impressive and thin Machine, at only 11.5 mm thicks, wow!

And with the impressive performance of the M1 chip and a beautiful 4.5 K 24” display thus will be an impressive machine for many users, though it is obviously not meant for pros, and especially the $1299.00 base Machine which only has 2 thunderbolt/ USB 4 ports and unlike it’s bigger brothers doesn’t include gigabit ethernet on the power block (and a pro machine would have 10 GB ethernet).

The higher end machines for $1499 and $1699 have one more gpu core and 2 usb 3 ports as well as the afore mentioned ethernet, and their magic keyboard includes touch id (which are also color matched to your machine), though one with a numberpad is an extra cost.

And the 16GB unified memory for both CPU snd GPU will be further hampered by the larger display, and lack of cooling fan for pro work.

I really look forward to seeing what the pro variant of the m1 chip is and if it has external graphics support, or even pci support. And any pro iMac will need to be thicker and have a fan, and maybe a bigger display.

Strangely this computer is so thin they couldn’t keep the headphone jack on the back and had to put it on the side, which is certainly easier to use.

I like that you can order one with a vesa mount instead of the included stand, since the stand doesn’t have height control. Maybe an iMac pro could include height control as well, as long as it doesn’t cost as much as the stand for the MacPro HDR display.

And with Final Cut Pro X and DaVinci working well on M1 Macs and Premiere having Beta support the future looks bright for M1 pro users, though it isn’t here yet. And an expensive plug in upgrade cycle to M1 support is certainly in our future.

Still for most users this should be an impressive machine, though why the chin? I know iMacs have had it for a while, but I would rather not have it and have the display edge to edge.

The wait to see the M1 Pro Chips is killing most pro users right now, but hopefully Apple is using the time wisely, and going to really blow us away with what they release.

This machine is really quite impressive, and many users will be very happy with it, but does anyone think it is weird to not have an Apple logo on the chin?

I can’t wait to see one, though with the pandemic that may be a while.

So Apple killed the iMac Pro, now it is all about seeing what video options M1 Macs have

 

So I got an iMac Pro because my old Mac Pro 4,1 died, and there was no new MacPro out as of yet. It was obviously a stop gap machine, and it’s only ugprade was removing the lowest multi-core version and an upgrade to the Radeon Pro Vega 64x 16 GB from the Vega 64 16GB, which is just a slight speed increase.

And the latest 27 inch iMac can in fact beat the performance for the iMac Pro. The top of the line can be upgraded to a 3.6GHz 10 Core Intel-Core i9 with turbo boost to 5.0GHZ, it can have up to 128GB of RAM, up to an 8TB internal SSD, an the top video card is a Radeo Pro 5700 XT  with 16GB of GDDR6 Memory. This machine should smash the 10 Core iMac Pro in performance, and the Xeon’s never really added anything to the Mac except multi-core and the ability to have dual processors. And you can even get the Matte finish from the MacPro displays for half the price, which is impressive, but they need a second display like that to match the price and look.

It is likely that the next M1 or it’s follow up chip will be an iMac, but the first M1 machines not only share video memory with the main memory, but also stop at 16GB of total RAM. And sure the performance of them has been impressive, but for heavy pro work Apple had better be doing some form of video card to really push the video end and GPU performance, and we have seen no sign of it, but I would hope that a high end iMac, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro would have it to push the video performance.

Video editing software needs a separate GPU with it’s own memory, lets hope Apple agrees.

Your GPU is very important with Adobe Premiere, so control your monitor resolution with SwitchResX to save video memory, especially on an iMac or iMac Pro

 

When my MacPro 4,1 finally kicked the bucket I was devastated, especially since the new MacPro wasn’t out yet, and I needed a machine to edit on. The solution was the very powerful iMac Pro with the Radeon Pro Vega 64X 16GB. Now that blew my old video card out of the water, but video editing apps can use every bit of power you have and more, so you want to save as much video processing power as you can.

The problem is that the default settings or even scaled settings on an iMac Pro or even an iMac are made to make the screen look amazing, not save on video memory, and for a long time the OS X control panels have removed the important statistics on the display control panel.

Now if you hover over the choices it tells you what resolution it is like and that scaled resolutions might affect performance, but they don’t tell you what the default resolution is actually doing.

This is where the awesome SwitchResX comes in. The app is $16, or $250 for a site license. It takes a little playing to get it all set up nicely (especially turning off all the resolutions that you don’t want).

It runs in your menu bar, and you can customize to remove all the resolutions you don’t want, but when you go into the iMac Pro or iMac’s resolutions you see where I am going.

You can see I have chosen 2560×1440 which is the normal default resolution, but I have not chosen the HiDPI version. HiDPI is what Apple does to make the monitor look great, it takes your resolution and runs it twice to subsample and make it look better, but basically whatever video ram it is using for your primary display it is doubling it to make the display look nicer.

For a video editor this is a huge no no, don’t waste your video memory, it is precious! Make sure to set your display to a non HiDPI resolution so that you are not wasting your video memory!

Of course this isn’t all that SwitchResX can do, you can actually set different resolutions for different apps and have it change as you switch apps. Now I have tried that out and it worked very well, but I have realized I just like one resolution for my 2 monitors, and try and save as much video memory as I can, so that is why I use SwitchResX, and the less video memory you have the more important this is.

I am assuming this will be the same with M1 iMacs, but they don’t exist yet. If they stay like the current M1 macs and share memory with the mac, then it is even more important to use less memory for your display so that you can use more for editing!

Apple updated the iMac today and made the lowest iMac Pro 10 core, are these the last Intel Macs?

Apple upgraded the iMac today with new processors, all SSD (say goodbye to Fusion drives), up to 10 core 10th generation intel processors, AMD 5000 series graphics cards, and the option to have a matte finish for $500. They also got rid of the 8 core iMac Pro, making the bottom model 10 cores, to match the cores of the new top 5K. Still look the same, a new look will wait for Apple Silicon.

Tim Cook mentioned that they still had Intel machines in the works. Is this the last Intel machine before Apple Silicon arrives? It seems likely unless there is one more laptop processor upgrade, but it seems unlikely.

Rogue Amoeba blog on the sad state of Mac Hardware

Quentin Carnicelli recently posed a great article on the sad state of upgrades across the whole line of the Macintosh Computers. Basically it comes down to the fact that other than the iMac Pro which came out in December (half a year ago) there isn’t a single mac that has been updated in a year.

This is really a sad state. And the Mac Mini has been almost 4 years without an update or a price drop for old as hell hardware. Macs used to at least get processor upgrades once in a while with the form staying the same, but it seems we are not even getting that anymore.

Apple really has become a phone company that occasionally releases some new computer hardware.

And this makes me worry even more for the supposed new MacPro which we will learn about in 2019! Honestly no computer should take 3 years to design and ship. Especially when what Pros really want is the old cheese-grater with updated hardware. All the hints at a modular design really scares me. I don’t want modular, I want upgradeable with off the shelf PC components. Not some proprietary monstrosity that is upgradeable with over-expensive modules that only follow Apple’s upgrade schedule, which is slow at best. And most of us want some choice, mostly the choice to use NVIDIA graphics cards and not have to run it externally via thunderbolt which is not and never will be as fast as a 16x PCI bus.

Apple has refreshed it’s entire iMac Line, with a 4K 21.5 inch and all 27 inch models now 5K

Apple has refreshed it’s entire iMac line. They all sport Thunderbolt 2 ports, and there is now a 21.5 inch 4K display (Starting at $1499), and they have made all 27 Inch Models 5K (at $1799-2299)! AWESOME!

And they have upgraded their wireless keyboards, mice and touchpads with rechargeable batteries with a month life that charge and pair using lightning cables.

The iMacs are pretty exciting as editing machines, especially with Thunderbolt. I would still prefer NVIDIA graphics over the AMD that Apple now uses across it’s line, but they are still good cards.

Apple Updates iMacs with Haswell Processors and NVIDIA 7 Series GPU’s

Apple has once again updated it’s iMacs, now with Haswell Processors, PCI SSD cards and NVIDIA 7 series GPU’s!. Now that the MacPro is going fully AMD only, people wanting CUDA will have iMacs as their main option, as you can go up to a GTX 780M with 4GB of GDDR5 Memory. Would rather have a non-mobile version of the processor, but these should still rock for CUDA.

If only APPLE would relent and release a MacPro that is actually expandable, and doesn’t use just thunderbolt for expansion, but that is unlikely to happen. Thinking a hackintosh looks more and more likely in my Future!