Picked Up the New Laptop!

One week ago, not a single shop had any 16″ M1 Max MacBook Pros in stock and we were told that it would take anywhere from eight to ten weeks to get one; but by some miracle it arrived in just seven days. Using Migration Assistant, Time Machine and a slow portable hard drive, transferring 300 GB of data from our 2019 Mac to the new laptop took just two hours.

The 2021 MacBook Pro miniLED display is pretty impressive, and thanks to a mind-blowing 10,216 mini-LEDs spread out over 2,554 zones, blooming is markedly less noticeable than it was with our Asus ProArt PA32UCX.

With a 32 core GPU, 32 GB RAM and 1TB SSD, Apple Compressor finished transcoding a 46.24 GB ProRes RAW HQ file to ProRes 4444 in a blazing fast 43 seconds, while our 2019 16″ MacBook Pro with 2.3GHz 8 core i9 processor, 8 GB 5500M Radeon Pro and 1TB SSD took an interminably long 12 minutes to finish the job. A 2.34 GB ProRes RAW HQ file took 4 minutes 36 seconds to transcode to HEVC 10-bit in Compressor on the M1 Max MacBook pro, whereas the same file required 10 minutes 58 seconds on the Intel Mac.

On the Blackmagic side, a ProRes 4444 4K 23.98 project in DaVinci Resolve Studio 17 with Dehancer 5.0 film grain and mild noise reduction played back at 4 fps on the Intel Mac, 7 fps on the M1 Max Mac. Disabling noise reduction, the Intel Mac was able to chug along at 7 fps, while the M1 Max MacBook Pro eked out 13.5 fps. Rendering the same file to ProRes 4444 in DaVinci Resolve took 1:23 on the M1 Max, 2:25 on the Intel Mac. So, pretty impressive performance.

During the whole process, the M1 Max MacBook Pro remained cool and silent, whereas the fans on Intel MacBook Pro made a racket. Apps also launch much more quickly on the new Mac and it’s so convenient to be able to watch all of our HDR QuickTime movies and YouTube videos on the MacBook.