Now we will see if Apple every does a touch screen with a laptop. I know Apple says it isn’t good, but being able to use a pencil on it would be amazing.
Honestly I would love an iPad that is actually a Mac, like an old school Modbook. That would be my first laptop in a long time, and it would be easy since they use the same processor now, but I doubt it is coming anytime soon, but I would love to be proved wrong.
And the apple pencil is so damn good , using on a mac would be amazing, and I know I can use sidecar, but it isn’t perfect yet.
Now I am running the new Safari within Big Sur in the Safari Technology Preview, and I am on an iMac Pro with a second 27″ monitor, so 2 27″ monitors running at 2560×1440. To me the new safari is only trying to save space, but doing it at the cost of usability.
This is current safari’s bar with 3 tabsAnd Monterey’s Safari with 3 tabs, you already lose the title of the web site.Current safari with 9 tabsMonterey with 9 tabs, much less legible and even worse with no ICO filesBig Sur Safari with 15 tabsMonterey with 15 tabs, already you can see tabs stacking on top of each otherAnd 18 tabs in Big Sur Safari
The tabs in Monterey become illegible and hard to find too quickly and all so the tab bar can take up less space. All well and good for a small screened laptops users, but useless for large displays! And even more useless for power users who have lots of plug ins which also take up space!
And you can’t even activate the old functionality in Safari, only the new tabs are available.
And this is Firefox with Tree Style tabs. They are always legible and you can have so many of them. Once again, maybe not so good for a small laptop, but for a big monitor it is essential. If only firefox would have a true dark mode and allow me to get rid of the light title bar at the top, but at least it means you can read the web site title. Still I wish I could turn the top tabs off and just have tree style tabs.
Of course there is also Vivaldi, which has tree style tabs built in. It is a gorgeous and fast browser, built on chrome, while I would prefer Firefox for it being a different engine and the most customizable browser.
And that isn’t even the worst of it. If you have Safari at default settings, when you switch tabs you get the tabs changing color based on the web site. For some web sites, it isn’t so bad, but for others…
Look how it changes, especially when it hits BBC news, this is completely distracting.
Luckily you can turn this off in advanced tabs.
Just make sure to check Never Use Background Color in Toolbar.
Sometimes your Mac is running badly and needs some maintenance, now there are a couple of paid utilities I fall back to (mainly TechTool and Diskwarrior, but I will post more about those later) but the first I run is always the free OnyX. Onyx is a GUI or graphical user interface for various terminal utilities. It is from Titanium Software and has different versions for each version of the OS.
I always go to Maintenance and usually run everything except disk positions on desktop. It will quit all open apps and run. And the run will take a while, maybe even an hour depending on hard drive size, then will restart your machine.
I run this when Premiere is being sketchy, lots of crashes, and the system just seems to be running wrong. It isn’t a utility for Premiere, but for your system overall.
It would be nice to see new video cards offered by Apple too since they are supporting more current video cards in the latest versions of Big Sur.
The Mac Pro is supposed to be this upgrade-able machine, so it would be great to see Apple actually make some upgrades available before the completely EOL it. Otherwise all the upgrade ability talk was just bullshit, because they knew that Apple Silicon was coming.
This would be a good boon to editors though to have one last MacPro with the best processor available.
None seem like deal breakers, and the Portrait Mode blurred background could be something with the cameras, which would mean not supported on M1 Mac Mini.
Apple has said they will continue to support Intel Macs for some time, but slowly removing features from Intel doesn’t really seem like full support, and gives doubt to rumors of a final Mac Pro with newer Intel Processor.
Eric Philpott at the Adobe Blog has a report on the latest Pfeiffer Benchmark Reports of Adobe Premiere Pro on Apple Silicon M1, and the results are pretty unbelievable.
From first launch to final exports, everything is faster — on average 77 percent faster than comparable Intel-based systems — and editing is buttery smooth.
Wow, those are seriously impressive results, and would speed up the edit every day. I can’t wait to see what the M2 or even M3 will do, especially if they really goose the graphics cores and allow for more RAM. I am getting more and more excited for an M1 MacPro, even with limited expansion. I mean I have been pretty damn happy with my iMac Pro.
So Apple upgrade it’s Music service recently and added both Lossless and Spacial Audio to it’s Apple Music for the same price. Now I haven’t yet tried the Lossless mainly because I use Beats Pro headphones on my iPhone and I haven’t yet upgraded to Big Sur on my mac, though I am excited to try it on my mac since I have an old Emotiva XDA-1 which should be able to handle at least higher quality audio very well. I also have some wired lightning bolt headphones from 1more that should be able to handle it for my iPhone, that I need to try out.
So I decided to give Spacial Audio a whirl. There are a couple of demos with the Weekend and Marvin Gay and then some playlists. And I have to say the effect is certainly amazing and a hue improvement over the stereo versions. It certainly sounds like the music just opened up completely and does sound so much better. Wow!
I would to hear some pink floyd mixed for this, as it sounds so expansive. I have to say I am impressed.
UPDATE
OK trying out the lossless on my 1more headphones, not the highest quality but 24bit 48hz and it is pretty damn impressive! The Spacial certainly improves the wireless experience, but the Lossless is damned impressive.
FURTHER UPDATE
Turned on Lossless on my Mac, as my Emotica XDA-1 Supports 24bit 192kHz, which is what the lossless goes to. Now the 16bit 44.1kHZ, sound good but the higher quality ones, especially The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Wow.
In Music you can see a symbol in the corner if it is lossless.
And if you click on it it tells the bit rate, and every track is different.
And the higher bit rates do sound better if you have a DAC that can decode them and good headphones.
Honestly after all these years of using Premiere Pro I didn’t know exactly how all these settings work and when they are affecting things, and Jarle really goes into depth and he ran extensive tests on everything to prove it.
This really should be essential reading for any Premiere Pro user, and his open letter to Adobe is so true, and I just hope they listen. The whole thing should be simplified, which would quickly solve so many users issues with banding on exports.
