Monday October 18, Mac Rumors Abound

[zxcvbnm098]

I find it amazing that only myself and Mark Zeger are the only ones on here who are furious that the baseline Pro just got bumped from $1300 to $2000. My 2014 Pro has a non-crappy pre-butterfly debacle keyboard, HDMI port, SDMC slot, 2 Thunderbolt ports, 2 USB3 ports, MagSafe power adapter. No thanks Apple, I'll see what you do with the next Air, YOU GREEDY A** IDIOTS.

 

I have no inside knowledge regarding the price bump, but I do know from a friend that does manufacturing business with China that shipping has gone exponentially out of sight in the last few months, to the point where he is moving some of his manufacturing to Mexico.

 

For something like this, where it has been in development for months in specialized Chinese factories (and cannot easily moved elsewhere), it would not surprise me to learn that it was slated to be a lower price at launch. I'd bet that a good portion of the price bump is because of the dramatically increased transportation costs and bottlenecks.

[Stokely]

If that's true--and I've heard the same about other products--then many other things are about to be jacked up if they haven't been already.

 

That's if you can actually find anything in the first place. If I can sell my Moxf8, I'll be probably getting a PC4--but they like many other things are pretty scarce.

[Docbop]

What I've read some chip and related manufacturing has already moved to India and other locations. I think a good thing to spread manufacturing out over the globe. Like working in IT for large corporations backups and key servers we had at multiple locations so if one region of the world had a major problem we were covered by other locations. As we put it when designing systems... How many levels of "Murphy" can we afford protection against.

[ElmerJFudd]

Apple has been focusing more and more on the video market and and view audio as just a fringe benefit.

 

Agreeing with this since 1995.

 

Video is king. It drives the market and in turn drives tech development. The truth is, a DAW box doesn"t need a high end graphics card. But the way Apple tiers their hardware - the machines with faster processor, more RAM, more storage also have the better graphics card which definitely increases cost and price for us. The M1 in the current mini and iMac models has proved to be really good at crunching plugins. If you don"t do video editing the 14' MacBook Pro at $2000 starting price may be overkill. A mini, iMac or the base 13' MacBook Pro will do the job.

[Adam Burgess]

 

Video is king. It drives the market and in turn drives tech development. The truth is, a DAW box doesn"t need a high end graphics card. But the way Apple tiers their hardware - the machines with faster processor, more RAM, more storage also have the better graphics card which definitely increases cost and price for us. The M1 in the current mini and iMac models has proved to be really good at crunching plugins. If you don"t do video editing the 14' MacBook Pro at $2000 starting price may be overkill. A mini, iMac or the base 13' MacBook Pro will do the job.

 

I'm no hardware expert, but are fast GPUs not used for more stuff these days? Bitcoin mining, for example, doesn't involve much video rendering, but they're definitely using machines with powerful GPUs.

 

If programmed that way, could reverbs/impulse responses and other processor-heavy stuff be handed off to a GPU�

 

But, yes, I replaced my fully loaded 2012 MBP last year for a base M1 Mac mini - only cause the MBP died for a second time. Was a fab machine.

Very happy with the mini, so grabbed a base MacBook Air, too. Working fine with Mainstage live. The mini works harder at home with Logic and heavier plug-ins, but does a grand job.

[KuruPrionz]

 

Video is king. It drives the market and in turn drives tech development. The truth is, a DAW box doesn"t need a high end graphics card. But the way Apple tiers their hardware - the machines with faster processor, more RAM, more storage also have the better graphics card which definitely increases cost and price for us. The M1 in the current mini and iMac models has proved to be really good at crunching plugins. If you don"t do video editing the 14' MacBook Pro at $2000 starting price may be overkill. A mini, iMac or the base 13' MacBook Pro will do the job.

 

I'm no hardware expert, but are fast GPUs not used for more stuff these days? Bitcoin mining, for example, doesn't involve much video rendering, but they're definitely using machines with powerful GPUs.

 

If programmed that way, could reverbs/impulse responses and other processor-heavy stuff be handed off to a GPU�

 

But, yes, I replaced my fully loaded 2012 MBP last year for a base M1 Mac mini - only cause the MBP died for a second time. Was a fab machine.

Very happy with the mini, so grabbed a base MacBook Air, too. Working fine with Mainstage live. The mini works harder at home with Logic and heavier plug-ins, but does a grand job.

 

Adam, how much RAM is in your Mini? Curiosity question, I just got one and am still configuring it. I went with 16 gb RAM, which is currently the maximum available. There isn't an upgrade path, I've been using a 2014 MBP with 16 gigs for a few years and it's pretty OK, all review indicate the Mini will eat it's lunch.

[Adam Burgess]

 

Adam, how much RAM is in your Mini? Curiosity question, I just got one and am still configuring it. I went with 16 gb RAM, which is currently the maximum available. There isn't an upgrade path, I've been using a 2014 MBP with 16 gigs for a few years and it's pretty OK, all review indicate the Mini will eat it's lunch.

 

My 2012 MBP had 16Gb RAM and 2x internal SSDs. I really liked it.

My Mini and MacBook Air are both base models with 8Gb RAM with my libraries and sessions on a 2TB external SSD. They open everything I've ever done without a hitch.

 

The first day of the Mac mini was so disappointing⦠I don't know if it was indexing drives or backing up, or something, but it wouldn't play the simplest project at all without stuttering or hanging.

I went to the pub to contemplate what a mistake I'd made. When I got back - all was well and has been since. It's excellent.

Had to install everything manually after a spectacular failure of the old laptop - don't know if that was a factor.

 

But, when I got the MacBook Air, I stuck a cable between them, used the Migration assistant and in 40 mins, both machines were identical and the laptop worked from day one.

 

Actually, the performance is so good, it's what convinced me to get a new laptop just for Mainstage.

[Lady Gaia]

I'm no hardware expert, but are fast GPUs not used for more stuff these days? Bitcoin mining, for example, doesn't involve much video rendering, but they're definitely using machines with powerful GPUs.

 

GPUs are so mind-bogglingly capable that they have indeed been coerced into doing a variety of other tasks, but they're really best suited to specific families of problems where massive data-flow parallelism gains you more than the awkward nature of getting data into and out of its computation pipelines loses you. It's not really my field of expertise, so I wouldn't say I could apply my intuition well to tell you what would and wouldn't work well GPU accelerated. I can state that most plugin vendors wouldn't have anything like the revenue stream required to do the work across a variety of platforms and GPU architectures, because it requires reframing the problem quite dramatically and targeting a range of different APIs on different systems.

 

Maybe some day we'll have a standard that makes sense for this sort of thing? A way to write audio processing pipelines in an abstract fashion that can be automatically translated to run on a variety of hardware? It's just smacks more of pure research than commercial product development at the moment.

 

Still, even where there are commercial opportunities for hardware acceleration, we've seen those who know what they're doing choose to design something different than GPUs for the task. Sony's PlayStation 5 architecture, for instance, has a distinct dedicated design for audio processing in their "Tempest" engine that they use for psychoacoustic spatial location of sounds and convolution reverb.

[Docbop]

I'm no hardware expert, but are fast GPUs not used for more stuff these days? Bitcoin mining, for example, doesn't involve much video rendering, but they're definitely using machines with powerful GPUs.

 

GPUs are so mind-bogglingly capable that they have indeed been coerced into doing a variety of other tasks, but they're really best suited to specific families of problems where massive data-flow parallelism gains you more than the awkward nature of getting data into and out of its computation pipelines loses you. It's not really my field of expertise, so I wouldn't say I could apply my intuition well to tell you what would and wouldn't work well GPU accelerated. I can state that most plugin vendors wouldn't have anything like the revenue stream required to do the work across a variety of platforms and GPU architectures, because it requires reframing the problem quite dramatically and targeting a range of different APIs on different systems.

 

Maybe some day we'll have a standard that makes sense for this sort of thing? A way to write audio processing pipelines in an abstract fashion that can be automatically translated to run on a variety of hardware? It's just smacks more of pure research than commercial product development at the moment.

 

Still, even where there are commercial opportunities for hardware acceleration, we've seen those who know what they're doing choose to design something different than GPUs for the task. Sony's PlayStation 5 architecture, for instance, has a distinct dedicated design for audio processing in their "Tempest" engine that they use for psychoacoustic spatial location of sounds and convolution reverb.

 

 

I know from my days most programmers have trouble with multi-threaded programming it's bear to debug. But distributed programming like using the GPU cores for processing is an even more specialized area both in programming, debugging, and if like my day special compilers and support libraries. R&D for music software is already very high for what is a niche market.

[zxcvbnm098]

To put an exclamation point on this, I spoke again to my friend who does manufacturing in China. He told me today shipping is running at 10X what it was 18 months ago. Then it was about $3500 per container to get it to the US from China; he's saying it's now $35,000. Chinese factories are also dealing with mandatory power cutbacks, also hampering supply chains. Apple is really stuck on this...I don't think there's any way they can move out of China in for the foreseeable future for manufacturing.

[Lady Gaia]

To put an exclamation point on this, I spoke again to my friend who does manufacturing in China. He told me today shipping is running at 10X what it was 18 months ago.

 

Apple will likely benefit from long-term contracts to keep them from the vagaries of spot pricing. With reduced capacity shippers are obviously encouraging stiff competition for the unusually small number of uncommitted containers, but it'll come at the expense of smaller manufacturers more often than established businesses they can't risk alienating. Apple has already moved some manufacturing to Vietnam and can indeed accelerate the process given strong reasons to do so.

[Theo Verelst]

Chip shortage can make it interesting to order something currently in stock. Comparing the Apples with for instance a razorblade or other ~$2.5k fast 4k Oled notebook might be interesting, with the new processor tech it might be fairer to take a heavy Pad processor (also arm) to compare instead of the x86's.

 

T

[Docbop]

What I was reading a day or so ago is Intel has been building more chip manufacturing facilities and start do more making chips for others. Guess it would be like Samsung does making screens and things for other smartphone companies. Apple was supposedly going to open some manufacturing in India don't know if that is just assembly or chip making. Big problem with chip making is it is HIGHLY toxic and why a lot of places won't allow it. When I first moved to Boston I was up in Hudson MA where DEC used to have chip making facilities. All sorts of medical and birth defect issues in the area skyrocketed and eventually DEC closed chip making plant down.

[Lady Gaia]

with the new processor tech it might be fairer to take a heavy Pad processor (also arm) to compare instead of the x86's.

 

The x86 processors aren't top of the heap when it comes to efficiency, but they're still delivering the highest performance levels both for single-core and multi-core of anything in the consumer space. It just turns out that quiet, cool, battery-powered performance matters for a whole lot of people. In the consumer Arm CPU race Apple is definitely the pace setter. The best Android devices top out around 62% of Apple's offerings in single-core workloads (the M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max / A15 are all pretty much the same for single-core performance.) Once you get into multi-core things get even more lopsided with the 10-core M1 Pro / Max coming in around 3.5x the fastest Android devices.