Apple announces new Mac Mini, Air + 13" MBP featuring their own M1 chip.

[Sascha Franck]

On the MBP with M1 processor, Diva on Rosetta2 plays 120 voices - if MultiCore is turned off.

Wow, that seems incredible.

[Sascha Franck]

Why would Apple sell them at such reasonable prices.

Because it's their entry level models. I mean, look at other entry level laptops. They're still a lot cheaper. And in case people don't exactly need all that much power, there'd be no reason to buy any Mac at all anymore in case even the low end models would start at, say, 2k already.

Besides, in case you don't need all the horsepower, things aren't that "reasonable" anymore already. I mean, there's *plenty* of laptops costing *way* below €1k and even the smallest Macbook Air comes at €1.1k. And nobody with a sane mind would buy a laptop with just 256GB of storage space. Make that 512GB and you're close to 1.4k already.

And fwiw, that's where Apple is making unholy amounts of money already. An SSD upgrade from 256 to 512 kicking in at €224? What planet are they living on? Even the fastest, most reliable kickass SSDs aren't even half of that. And yet, pretty much every Macbook customer will go for that update (or even for 1TB). This is where Apple is still milking their customers as if there's no tomorrow. Around €200 in their pockets for *zero* extra work with each and every sold Macbook.

[chagzuki]

Why would Apple sell them at such reasonable prices. Bit like the "lost leader" idea that I was taught in retail many years ago, sell something at cost to get people in the shop. It may be that early adopters have got themselves a bargain before the prices are raised drastically when new models start appearing in 2021.

I'm not sure they're that cheap... once you factor in costs for a reasonable ssd size and ram. Though it seems 8 gigs of ram may be enough... need more evidence on that front. If I wanted a 1TB ssd and 16GB ram that takes it up to £1650. I haven't looked at Windows laptops for a while but back around april it looked like the costs for good Ryzen machines were coming down substantially. Though the Macbook Air has a great display, it's still a good price.

I got lured for the first time into the Apple ecosystem a couple of years ago, due to the fact that the 2018 iPad was and still is so good. I made a somewhat odd decision to then buy an iMac, but only on the basis that I could upgrade ram and ssd myself, plus it was refurbished and at a very good discount. So I avoided the Apple tax.

Apple make sure always to stagger the improvements of their products. It might have seemed odd that they'd got to a position where their industrial design/form factor was looking dated compared to Windows laptops, but I guess they knew that the processor change would blow the competition out of the water. So retaining the dated form factor is a smart move, as it'll incentivize future purchases when they overhaul that aspect.

The Mini could now fit in a case the size of a walkman. Interesting times.

[dellboy]

And nobody with a sane mind would buy a laptop with just 256GB of storage space. Make that 512GB and you're close to 1.4k already.

From what I have read a base Mac mini with just 8GB and 256 ram would be all I need coupled with a decent USB 4 hub to power extra drives and monitors. For a professional music studio that wants to load Spitfire VSTs into ram it would be no good, but for an average hobbiest music maker like myself it would seem that the base Mac Mini might do the job fine.

Fast NVME drives in external cases have come down a lot in price and can read samples off disk almost as if they were ram some people have speculated.

[Sascha Franck]

From what I have read a base Mac mini with just 8GB and 256 ram would be all I need coupled with a decent USB 4 hub to power extra drives and monitors.

Sure, with a Mini, internal storage is way less of an issue than with laptops.
I'd likely go for the 16GB version, though, even if you're not into orchestral scoring. I've seen someone decoding a video in some 8 vs. 16 GB test and the 16GB machine was noticeably better.
And you won't be able to do anything about it later on.

[Markus Krause]

I totally agree with you about the SSD and RAM upgrade pricing. It's a rip-off.
I've been hesitating whether I buy the 'cheap' Mac Mini with 250 GB SSD or the 'big' one with 500GB which costs €224 more. I decided for the 'cheap' one which I now regret. Only 200 GB are left after a clean system install. It's also impossible to replace the SSD.
Yesterday I bought a new Samung 860 EVO with 500 GB for €59 (!) from amazon. And prices for SSDs will go lower further.
8 GB RAM is not much, especially when you edit videos or use sample-libraries. The M1 uses shared/unified memory where the graphics-card and the CPU compete about the resources. The graphics-card does not have own video-RAM

[rod_zero]

It is a shame that apple charges so much because this new chips show real promise and probably big performance gains for the higher models

[Passing Bye]

Apple's greed aside, how much would one need to pay to get laptop with similar CPU and battery performance, thermal characteristics and retina display from other vendors?

[Sascha Franck]

Apple's greed aside, how much would one need to pay to get laptop with similar CPU and battery performance, thermal characteristics and retina display from other vendors?

Easy answer: Nothing. Right now, no other machine doing all this in even just a similar manner exists.
The closest might be some MS Surfaces, but in case you really want remotely comparable performance, you're paying around the double price already - and even then the M1 will possibly still run circles around it.
Surfaces are quite nice, though, especially as they double as a tablet, which is a huge benefit for live performances (at least for me it'd be - those keyboards are just plain annoying in case you've got no place to hide things).
But apart from that, there's just no competition atm. And I don't think that's going to change all too soon.

[Passing Bye]

Thanks for the answer Sascha!

[Cinebient]

Another stress test:
So I made a short test with some of my Logic patches. Loading several stacked track with Keyscape. 40 is not realistic and I just used here 512 buffer since its what I use most because my old i7 quad core MacBook (late 2013) was just able to play one of these stacked tracks with 3-4 Keyscape (but plus some extern FX) instances at 1024. 3 at 512.
So this is just my use case and real life test so not sure what that means for others.
But to compare that now to this smaller M1 MacBook which stays still silent all the time.
F.e. I could play 14 instances of Keyscape where each also has its own B2 reverb added.
The sound sources where about 50 % from the LA Grand 30% Wing Tack Piano and 20% a mixture from some of the Toy Pianos. They all had a different microtuning to it while playing 4-6 note chords, some fast glissandos, a fast arp included.
I am really happy since this handles so much more than my old machine and we still talk about not optimised software (I run Logic under Rosetta here).
Also the samples are streaming from my extern Samsung T5 SSD.
So with optimised software, samples streaming from the faster intern SSD it might perform even much better and I could imagine 30-40 instances "dry" Keyscape.
In general the Spectrasonics plug-ins runs really well under Rosetta and I would have never thought that they are not optimised yet if I did not know it.
Indeed, the activity monitor showed me here about 12 GB RAM in usage while playing these 14 instances of Keyscape and 14 instances of B2 reverb.
Then I added another stacked track with 3 Hans Zimmer Strings instances but this was too much (but RAM usage was still only at 13 GB).
So I have the feeling that I run out of CPU power before I get trouble with RAM.
Not sure.
But if the rumoured 16 inch get really 8 from these performance cores it will be a beast of a laptop.
I really like this little M1 machine and this gives me already the power I need.
So i am a happy user so far.
And another short stress test with low buffer settings:
I loaded 6 instances of Keyscape, each with another instrument (LA Grand, Wing Tack, Wurlitzer, Rhodes, Clarinet, Glock Piano all set to polyphony 64).
Again used an own B2 reverb for each instance on top.
Now set Logic to buffer 32, armed all tracks, played some random chords and again fast glissandos etc.....
And all played fine without a drop out here. The MacBook get a bit warm but no fan noise and also not really hot or so.
Again, without optimised software, using extern SSD for samples, no audio interface.

[AnX]

[masterhiggins]

Another stress test:
So I made a short test with some of my Logic patches. Loading several stacked track with Keyscape. 40 is not realistic and I just used here 512 buffer since its what I use most because my old i7 quad core MacBook (late 2013) was just able to play one of these stacked tracks with 3-4 Keyscape (but plus some extern FX) instances at 1024. 3 at 512.
So this is just my use case and real life test so not sure what that means for others.
But to compare that now to this smaller M1 MacBook which stays still silent all the time.
F.e. I could play 14 instances of Keyscape where each also has its own B2 reverb added.
The sound sources where about 50 % from the LA Grand 30% Wing Tack Piano and 20% a mixture from some of the Toy Pianos. They all had a different microtuning to it while playing 4-6 note chords, some fast glissandos, a fast arp included.
I am really happy since this handles so much more than my old machine and we still talk about not optimised software (I run Logic under Rosetta here).
Also the samples are streaming from my extern Samsung T5 SSD.
So with optimised software, samples streaming from the faster intern SSD it might perform even much better and I could imagine 30-40 instances "dry" Keyscape.
In general the Spectrasonics plug-ins runs really well under Rosetta and I would have never thought that they are not optimised yet if I did not know it.
Indeed, the activity monitor showed me here about 12 GB RAM in usage while playing these 14 instances of Keyscape and 14 instances of B2 reverb.
Then I added another stacked track with 3 Hans Zimmer Strings instances but this was too much (but RAM usage was still only at 13 GB).
So I have the feeling that I run out of CPU power before I get trouble with RAM.
Not sure.
But if the rumoured 16 inch get really 8 from these performance cores it will be a beast of a laptop.
I really like this little M1 machine and this gives me already the power I need.
So i am a happy user so far.
And another short stress test with low buffer settings:
I loaded 6 instances of Keyscape, each with another instrument (LA Grand, Wing Tack, Wurlitzer, Rhodes, Clarinet, Glock Piano all set to polyphony 64).
Again used an own B2 reverb for each instance on top.
Now set Logic to buffer 32, armed all tracks, played some random chords and again fast glissandos etc.....
And all played fine without a drop out here. The MacBook get a bit warm but no fan noise and also not really hot or so.
Again, without optimised software, using extern SSD for samples, no audio interface.

How does Pulsar Modular fare on the two machines?

[Cinebient]

Another stress test:
So I made a short test with some of my Logic patches. Loading several stacked track with Keyscape. 40 is not realistic and I just used here 512 buffer since its what I use most because my old i7 quad core MacBook (late 2013) was just able to play one of these stacked tracks with 3-4 Keyscape (but plus some extern FX) instances at 1024. 3 at 512.
So this is just my use case and real life test so not sure what that means for others.
But to compare that now to this smaller M1 MacBook which stays still silent all the time.
F.e. I could play 14 instances of Keyscape where each also has its own B2 reverb added.
The sound sources where about 50 % from the LA Grand 30% Wing Tack Piano and 20% a mixture from some of the Toy Pianos. They all had a different microtuning to it while playing 4-6 note chords, some fast glissandos, a fast arp included.
I am really happy since this handles so much more than my old machine and we still talk about not optimised software (I run Logic under Rosetta here).
Also the samples are streaming from my extern Samsung T5 SSD.
So with optimised software, samples streaming from the faster intern SSD it might perform even much better and I could imagine 30-40 instances "dry" Keyscape.
In general the Spectrasonics plug-ins runs really well under Rosetta and I would have never thought that they are not optimised yet if I did not know it.
Indeed, the activity monitor showed me here about 12 GB RAM in usage while playing these 14 instances of Keyscape and 14 instances of B2 reverb.
Then I added another stacked track with 3 Hans Zimmer Strings instances but this was too much (but RAM usage was still only at 13 GB).
So I have the feeling that I run out of CPU power before I get trouble with RAM.
Not sure.
But if the rumoured 16 inch get really 8 from these performance cores it will be a beast of a laptop.
I really like this little M1 machine and this gives me already the power I need.
So i am a happy user so far.
And another short stress test with low buffer settings:
I loaded 6 instances of Keyscape, each with another instrument (LA Grand, Wing Tack, Wurlitzer, Rhodes, Clarinet, Glock Piano all set to polyphony 64).
Again used an own B2 reverb for each instance on top.
Now set Logic to buffer 32, armed all tracks, played some random chords and again fast glissandos etc.....
And all played fine without a drop out here. The MacBook get a bit warm but no fan noise and also not really hot or so.
Again, without optimised software, using extern SSD for samples, no audio interface.

How does Pulsar Modular fare on the two machines?

While it still makes problems on both (it sometimes crash Logic) it works more or less the same. Just that I can run 3 X more on the M1 here too.
Lunar Lander works great and without any trouble.
But I have to use the Logic Rosetta version.
In general any plug-in runs better, even under Rosetta, on my new M1 machine.
So all I would like to test now would be some N.I. stuff.
But so far no more N.I. stuff for me anyway in the future and also no new Kontakt libraries anymore.

[masterhiggins]

So NI isn’t going to update Kontakt player anymore for Big Sur? Or are you just saying you’re not using them anymore?