9to5Mac on the Mac Pro being dead on arrival

Honestly I was thinking about writing a post like this article, but Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac has beat me too it.

The recent pate of articles from Gurman and their bad news on the Mac Pro has really had me thinking. No Quad Apple Silicon means no performance boost over the Studio. No memory upgrades makes sense, but no external graphics card, means a decided lack of expansion, and a need to spend more upfront, without the possibility of later upgrades.

As for PCI Expansion, sure a video i/o card from black magic would be cheaper than external, and you could put in a fast ssd pci card, but those are damn expensive. Maybe an Apple Accelerator, but like the one in the current, you know it would be quickly added to the next chips, so why bother.

And having more options for storage, I would love that. I so miss my 4 internal slots for spinning hard drives, but more likely I see room for more proprietary Apple SSDs, which would be too expensive and likely not user upgrade-able.

The one thing no articles I have seen talk about would be more Thunderbolt ports, which would be great. I already use two Thunderbolt 4 Hubs, and still lack for ports, but is that and better cooling and maybe room for a second hard drive worth thousands more?

The answer is no. There needs to be a realistic reason for a Mac Pro to exist.

So maybe Apple waits till the M3, when they can do a quad chip design and really do an insane machine, and they go for an iMac Pro right now. I would be dissapointed, but not surprised. Mainly disappointment because I would love to move to 32 inch monitors for my next machine.

9to5Mac on Gurman talking M1 Mac Pro, Mac Mini Redesign, and iMac Pro

José Andorno at 9to5Mac has this article on an interview Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman gave.

It is really interesting that it says there was a M1 MacPro ready but they decided to wait for the M2, which means they won’t make the 2 year promise on the move to Apple Silicon.

Honestly it is likely because the M1 could only do dual, and the performance would not have been hugely more than the Mac Studio if there was not a quad option. So likely the M2 can do Quad.

Issues I am having with 6K BRAW in After Effects on my aging iMac Pro

So I am in the middle of making 2 short films shot on my BlackMagicDesign 6k Pro, and I am shooting in 6k 23.976 Blackmagic Raw Constant 8:1, and both have serious visual effects. And I have been having issues with running out of memory in After Effects.

Now my machine is getting old, it is a an iMac Pro with the upgraded Radeon Pro Vega 64X with 16 GB of RAM, but I only have 64 GB of DDR4 RAM, which I am thinking is the main issue. And I am running of a RAID 5 with 36 GB of mechanical drive space, which has at least half empty. And I have even moved the After Effects Disk Cache to a fast external SSD with a 250 GB cache.

For BRAW support I am using the amazing BRAW Studio from Autokroma. This plug in really is great in Premiere Pro because it allows selection of multiple BRAW clips to allow editing if they are all shot the same, and also to save out a sidecar file easily so any program can see what you have done. It works in Premiere Pro and After Effects and replaces Blackmagic’s BRAW plugin which has more limited functionality.

Still using this I do seem to be having RAM issues with RAM previews where my RAM is running out very quickly and won’t render out a whole shot. I find myself having to restart after effects to get a longer RAM preview, and many times even a computer restart.

Now I am also doing a lot of green screen and using Maxon formerly Red Giant’s Primatte Keyer 6 to key, so that might be also a RAM hog here. I have never had an issue with 4k Alexa ProRES footage in green screen though.

I tend to think it might be the BRAW , as on some shots I used BRAW Studio to do the initial grade and save out a sidecar, and then render them in Media Composer in ProRES HQ. With this footage I get much longer renders. Now I know it is less compressed, as the files are larger, and with the LUT added, there is less to decode, but this is very drive intensive.

And sure the 6K is bigger than 4K, and eating more RAM.

And the new M1 chips with ProRES processor wouldn’t help here, because it is BRAW, and 128 GB of shared memory and video memory doesn’t seem like a whole bunch more.

I am hoping the whole lesson isn’t that BRAW 6K is just too processor intensive.

Been having the weirdest crash, where I can’t shutdown my iMac Pro, on shutdown, it crashes and restarts

So my iMac Pro has been crashing on shutdown. I shutdown and the computer seems to fully shut down, but then restarts and shows a crash. The crash kept showing com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily as the crash, so I realized it was hard drive related.

Now I have a lot of hard drives hooked up to my computer, not only for work, but for personal use as well, and I currently have 2 OWC Thunderbays hooked up to my mac, one Thunderbolt 3 which is mine and a Thunderbolt 2 that is works, and about 3 work hard drives, plus 4 external hard drives for storage in one 4 bay from OWC as well as s couple other storage and backup drives, and an external SSD as a media cache and about 4 work hard drives, and the internal on my iMac Pro. So a metric shit ton of hard drives.

Now I started disconnecting drives and trying things and got various results, with the problem occurring with different drives, but then finally it came down to the second OWC Thunderbay, the Thunderbolt 2 one. And if I turn that off the problem stopped happening. So I started wondering if it was the 2 different drives, and I wrote to OWC / Softraid as they are both OWC drives with softraid.

I gave them the crash report, and they told me something I didn’t know.

This is a kernel bug in MacOS. To avoid this, unmount and disconnect the USB drives before shutdown. (or your thunder bay). Its a known bug that 12 drives will cause a Mac to crash at shutdown.

Well how long has Apple had this damn issue. I know most people don’t get close to that, but I have surpassed it and ran the fuck into it.

Sure I can shut drives down first, but that is certainly a pain in the ass. And sometimes I have to shutdown the drives, then restart and then I can shutdown.

Color me frustrated, but OWC was fast and helpful.

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.

AppleInsider reporting on a fouth M1 Chip which would be 12 Core for an updated iMac Pro

Malcolm Owen at AppleInsider is reporting on a Fourth M1 chip with 12-core CPU may arrive in updated iMac Pro. This would be something above the Apple Silicon M1 Max, which is 10 core (8 core with 2 efficiency cores), so this would likely be 10 core with 2 efficiency cores. This sounds like a last M1 before M2 chips come in.

Maybe this makes the iMac Pro a bridge between the current Mac Book Pro and the Apple Silicon Mac Pro which has yet to be announced. it had seemed that the dual and maybe quad M1 Max chips rumored for the Mac Pro would also be for the iMac Pro, but this might mean it is an in between.

Let’s hope the iMac Pro has more than the current 4 Thunderbolt ports, 8 would rock, but 6 would be helpful.

Chance Miller at 9to5Mac is reporting that TSMC will begin pilot production of 3nm chips in 4th Quarter 2022

Chance Miller is saying that TSMC begins pilot program of 3nm chips, could be used in 2023 iPhones and Macs.

This will be huge for Macs if it happens, because this means more efficiency for the same power wattage and more efficiency, and though it won’t be till 2023, it could be major for the new Pro Macs with smaller chips making less heat, since the likely multiples of the M1 Max and M1 Pro will certainly create more heat.

Chadwick Shoults of Creative Video Tips on the M1 Max MacPro vs his Mac Pro for video editing in DaVinci Resolve

Another great video from Chadwick shoults and this one showing just how fast the new M1 Max MacBook Pro is at DaVinci Resolve, which not only says allot about what Apple did, but also what Black Magic Design has done about getting DaVinci to really shine on Apple Silicon.

Man I can’t wait for an Apple Silicon iMac Pro and Mac Pro to really see what these chips can do, and if rumors are right they will likely be M2 Max chips, as the MacBook Air next year is likely to be the first M2.

MacRumors reports on Anandtech’s Deep Dive into the M1 Pro and M1 Max.

MacRumors posted on Anandtech’s Deep Dive in to the M1 Pro and M1 Max. And here is the AndanTech Deep dive.

The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.

Wow, this sounds amazing, as I have said, can’t wait for the Apple Silicon iMac Pro and Mac Pro to see what they can do!

9to5Mac reports that the M1 Max GPU beats an AMD Radeo Pro W6900x in Affinity Benchmark

Filipe Esposito at 9 to 5 first reported on this, from a test by Andy Somerfield at Affinity Photohttps://9to5mac.com/2021/10/25/apple-m1-max-gpu-beats-6000-amd-radeon-pro-w6900x-in-affinity-benchmark/

This is pretty amazing, beating a $6000 GPU from the 2019 MacPro! Wow. So the Apple Silicon iMac Pro and Mac Pro will certainly be impressive machines.