MacRumors reporting several macOS Monterey features unavailable on Intel-Based Macs, doesn’t bode well for continued Intel Support

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors has a report on several features that are only available to M1 macs.

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.

Adobe Premiere Pro speeds on an M1 reported officially

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.

Launch 50 percent faster, Open projects 77 percent faster, Save projects 168 percent faster, Gradient wipe effect 90 percent faster, Lens Flare effect 66 percent faster.

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.

Apple Music’s new streaming Spacial Audio and Lossless

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.

WOW.

Jarle Leirpoll has a must read article on Premiere Pro’s Render Quality and Bit Depth at Frame.io

Jarle Leirpoll, the author of the book Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro and who runs the awesome site Premiere Pro.net, has written an absolute must read article at Frame.io on Premiere Pro’s Render and Bit Depth settings.

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.

OWC’s Rocket Yard on how to get 67% more performance on an external drive on an M1 Mac

OWC is reporting on what is obviously a bug with M1 Macs, because you shouldn’t have to connect a second display to get full speed write on the thunderbolt ports, but at least for now it seems you do.

Man Big Sur has been having some serious software issues when it comes to drives (losing support for SoftRaid for a full versions was huge!).

EDIT:

Since writing this OWC has figured out more ways to get the speed boost, check it out.

Bloomberg on new Apple Silicon for MacBook Pro, Air, Mac Mini and the MacPro

Bloomberg is reporting on rumors of the new versions of Apple Silicon. There will be a redesigned MacBook Pro, then MacBook Air, new lower end MacBook Pro and finally the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

The next M1’s will support 64 gigs if RAM with 8 high energy cores and 2 energy efficient cores and either 16 or 32 graphics cores. The M1 currently 4 high performance and 4 efficiency with 8 graphics cores.

The chips for the Apple Silicon MacPro will have 20 and 40 core with either 16 or 32 high performance cores and either 64 or 128 core graphics. 

Let’s hope the MacPro doesn’t top out at 64 gigs of combined RAM, but the rest of the specs sound impressive.

If performance scales with the cores, the performance will be impressive.

2 Applications to keep your Mac apps up to date

 

or

So I have been a longtime user of MacUpdate, a web site that keeps a library of more than 32,000 Mac Apps in an easy to find interface, where you can search by Free, paid, on sale, or top rated, or recently updated. So it will update your existing applications as well as help you find new apps.

The problem is the use the MacUpdate Desktop app, it is a $20 subscription for 6 months, and I have had a subscription for a long time, but it is not without it’s issues.

First off I have a long standing re-occuring issue with my login, where the app freezes and stops getting updates, and you have to log out, but when you try to log back in your login does not work. And the only solution I have found is to contact support and have them reset my password to a generic, and then you can change the password and it works for a little while before the problem occurs once again.

Another issue with MacUpdate Desktop is Mac OS Big Sur, because MacUpdate Desktop does not run at all on Big Sur, which is on version 10.16.3 already, so a new version seems a long time coming, especially for a subscription app.

An alternative to MacUpdate is MacUpdater 2 from CoreCode. Unlike MacUpdate it is a one time purchase (at least for version 2, as there is an upgrade from versions 1), and can be had for $14.99 to $35.00 depending on the version.

It also has a Priveleged Install Helper tool so you can install apps that require a password with a single click, and you can have it make app backups of recently installed apps in case one doesn’t work.

It is also Big Sur and Apple Silicon native, which is a big plus. And it has as dark mode unlike MacUpdate. As is the price, which is certainly better.

So I would recommedn MacUpdater from CoreCode and it is what I will be using from now on.

Engadget is reporting that Apple’s M2 Processor has entered production and could arrive by July

Engadget has the news, and that it will again be SOC or system on chip, so integrated CPU, GPU and AI processor.

I am still hoping for eventual external gpu and memory for system and gpu, but that could be unlikely, but hopefully this will at least have support for more than 16GB of Combined RAM and a better GPU.

I hate having Mac’s future so up in the air again. At least with Intel we had a roadmap. Now we will will never know what is coming. And the pro machines won’t cone until the end of the 2 years and I will likely be disappointed with the results, at least at first.

AppleInsider reports that Mac OS 11.4 has added support for AMD Big Navi 6800, 6800XT and 6900XT

 Wesley Hillard at AppleInsider is reporting that MacOS 11.4 adds support for AMD Big Navi graphics cards 6800, 6800XT and 6900XT.

This is great news, Big Navi are what are in the new Xbox Series X and Playstation 5, are more powerful than anything in the current MacPro. It would be awesome if these cards were to be released for the MacPro and even better if they were to be added to an Pro variant of the M1 with PCI card and hopefully thunderbolt eGPU support.

There is the possibility that the M1 cards will never support PCI based graphics cards, and that would really be a shame, but this keeps the possibility alive.

Big Navi should be great for both Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. I would still prefer the addition of NVIDIA, but that is unlikely to ever happen.

The Hidden cost of Apple changing it’s hardware architecture for editors and motion graphics artist is plug-ins

 

So of course Apple is moving to the M1 processor for all of it’s computers, moving away from intel. This is the 3rd hardware switch Apple has made, from it’s initial motorola processors, to power pc, to the ARM based M1 processors. And while the current M1 is very fast, but not a pro processor, especially with shared graphics and normal ram and a limit of 16 GB of total RAM. 

For everyone sticking with Apple this will eventually mean new hardware to move to M1 from Intel, though for a few years at least Apple will continue to support Intel hardware.

The hidden cost though, that is something different, and for a professional editor or motion graphics artist the hidden cost is plugs-ins.

Plug-ins can be an expensive investment, but can really help your workflow and speed things up and let you do things that couldn’t do without them. And the move to M1 will certainly be a paid upgrade, even for those still on Intel hardware. And those plugs in upgrades can cost hundreds, and over the upcoming period there are going to be a lot of upgrades to M1.

And while DaVinci and Final Cut Pro X already run on M1’s and the Premiere Pro Beta runs on M1, to get your old plug-ins to run you have to run them via Rosetta 2, which means running the Intel based versions of the host software to get the plug-ins working. And that is going to mean running the software slower through emulation, and could cause many issues and add more stability issues.

Now of course subscription based plug-ins will have the price included in the subscription, but the lack of more money for the upgrade might mean a lot longer before they upgrade to M1, even if it should mean they should upgrade sooner since you are already paying monthly or yearly for the software.

And yes the fact that our Intel Hardware will last a few more years with upgrades means that the upgrades will happen over a few years, so we can pay it, but for me it is a lot of plug-in upgrades, that will be followed by an expensive hardware upgrade to whatever form Pro M1 Macs take.

And of course their will be the exceptions, companies that treat their customers correctly and will upgrade to the new architecture without charging anything. One such company is RE:Vision Effects, which I got an e-mail from and they are developing M1 versions of the current versions of all their plugs ins. And have already released OpenFx and Twixtor M1 betas for FXPlug versions and RSMB for FXPlug is next.