Honestly he hits the nail on the head on all of these, and I still remember my disappointment on the trashcan Mac Pro when it came out, though amazing how something similar with Apple Silicon, without any expandabillity except for Thunderbolt 4, and now I am excited for it.
How things have changed! Of course the built in Pro Res acceleration will certainly be a boon for editing, but I guess also running on an iMac Pro for the last few years has shown me that I don’t need that much expandability except for more damn Thunderbolt 4/USB C ports (as I already have 2 OWC Thunderbolt 4 hubs, and could use more ports).
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.
Of course this isn’t a solution for people who use their MacBooks in closed position with bluetooth accessories this won’t work, so we will has to wait for an apple fix or manually turn bluetooth off and on at night.
Of course we know some, like a bigger version of the M1 Max with more cores and more graphics cores and more memory.
And of course that means a smaller box than the current Intel Mac Pro.
And of course less expansion, because it is unlikely to have PCI slots especially since it doesn’t need an afterburner since it is built into the processor now, and only thunderbolt for expansion.
So really we are not saying anything new here. And sure it is all speculation.
I personally hope for more storage options. It would be great to have at least 2 banks of raided SSD’s, as I am sure there won’t be any room for spinning hard disks (though I would love a bank of 4, but am sure that will need external needs).
Honestly the New MacPro will likely be pretty damn small, but with some fans to cool the processors down for better performance.
This is because PCIe 6.0 has officially been released, though there is no hardware that supports it yet, while the 2019 MacPro is on PCI 3 which was released in 2010. It is pretty bad since PCIe 4 was released a 2 years before the MacPro, and PCIe 5.0 has been out since 2019.
I am still excited for the next MacPro, though I doubt it will have any user available PCIe slots anyway, though hopefully it’s hard drive attaches faster than PCI 3. Likely it’s only expansion will be Thunderbolt 4 (which it will hopefully have more than 2 buses and 4 ports).
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.
The Apple Silicon MacPro will have to set itself apart with impressive CPU and GPU power as you are not going to be able to add either of these and I am even doubtful of PCI support. And I doubt there will ever be external GPU support through Thunderbolt on M1 Macs either, unless apple ever figures this out for their own hardware, but likely they would just like you to buy a new machine.
I am tending to doubt their will even be additional bays for RAM or Hard drives, though with a likely dual or quad M1 MAX, it will certainly be larger than a Mac Mini and need more cooling, but I doubt it will need to be too much bigger.
I would like to see more Thunderbolt ports though. The 4 Thunderbolt Ports on my iMac Pro are kind of a joke, and the MacPro has more and the video cards also add 4 additional ports, so 8 or more thunderbolt ports would be awesome (and 12 would be better, or at least 8 thunderbolt and 4 USB.
And maybe the ability to have 2 raided hard drives for video, but with the prices Apple charge for SSD hard drives, that would cost a fortune, but it would be great for video editing.
Any which way it will be the raw processing power of the chips and the included ProRES accelerators that really makes this machine rock and roll for video editors.
You would think it would be so much easier at this point, but AVID is still so slow to respond. I mean there won’t be Intel Macs at all soon. Come on AVID, get on the ball. I know they are always slow with updates, but come on. And yes I know that AVID has to have systems that work on so many systems to keep going, but if you get a new license you only get recent versions anyway.
Honestly even with all the recent updated whenever I get on AVID I feel like I have stepped into the past and not in a good way. Even getting footage from DaVinci Resolve is not as simple as it is with Premiere. I know backwards compatibility, but AVID users really need to try out Premiere Pro with Productions and a single compression format (like ProRES) and see how well Premiere runs.
.zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .xar, and .yaa archives,
examine and extract individual files and folders,
inspect install scripts and other package resources to make sure that a package is trustworthy before installing it,
analyze existing installations on your system, to help you determine who installed a particular file on your system,
view archive contents straight from the Finder via QuickLook,
view and extract files from archives via your choice of a slick GUI or an automation-friendly command-line interface, and even
inspect the contents of .zip files (and other supported types) over the Web without downloading the entire archive first.
I love that it lets you go into an installer and just extract what you want from it. This is such a powerful tool for $20.00 and I have owned various versions for years.
