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New MacBook Pro Pricing: 14-Inch Model Starts at $1,999 and 16-Inch Model Starts at $2,499
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Got Maxed out Air M1 specifically for music production and I still believe it is best notebook for music makers and sound engineers simply because it has no fan! Record, mix, the power is there to do much more than my previous MBP 15 2015 could and you work in complete silence, it is a blessing. + more portable and more battery life if you need to work somewhere, so for musicians I think MBA is still the best. But, these new MPB are great, love them, would pick 14” as my next laptop, several years from now, I guess. Or if they will do better fan-less design I would choose that one with no hesitation.
The problem ain't the surface but the hanging cable. It's not always possible to have a perfect neat desk with no cable management problems specially if, as you say, it's meant to be on the move so you will be working in different environments with it. Magsafe has saved my laptop multiple times, I can imagine what would have happened if it was charging through USB C (yet you still have the option to do so, that's giving users more options rather than forcing them to use just what you want them to use).
They pretty much un-did all the changes Johny Ive did to the Macbook Pro 🤣
I think someone forgot to put Face ID components, and they were like, oh crap, oops, okay, let’s just go with it.
I'm hoping to buy with my Xmas bonus, but I worry the supply chain issues will make it near impossible to find at that point? You can't even get a new iPad right now.
Hmm, I am not do sure. To do recording? Of course.
But to run Logic with 100 channels with so many plugins?
Well said. I didn’t read any of the rumors ahead of time, and I was blown away by today’s event. People have been begging for the Touch Bar to be removed and for the return of an SD card slot and MagSafe. Apple finally listened and made all of those changes. They also gave us brand new, insanely fast CPUs, GPUs, and SSDs. They also gave us a brand new display that blows every previous MacBook display out of the water. The list goes on, and yet all anyone can say is “bUt ThE mEnu BAr eXTeNds 3 pIxELs beLow tHe NoTCh.” LOL, SO WHAT?!?
Apple didn’t do much to promote it. They limited it to the MacBook Pro, and after its initial release didn’t really mention it much.
Not really. I’ve got a usbc to display port cable for my monitor. Never use Sd cards. And when I travel to my office have usbc power there so I don’t need to carry the brick.
So now we got a thicker heavier 16” with less useful ports. What’s the point. Just give us 6 usbc and keep it compact please.
going to have to check how bulky they are in store, but looks more like a Mac mini M1X and 2022 MacBook Air for me.
I haven’t tried Logic on my Air, but it has been far better than I expected a fanless computer would ever be, so I expect it would indeed work. A quick web search gave this quote that indicates a mini would easily surpass that by so much that even the lack of fan shouldn’t reduce the track count that much.
“In a new video published by YouTube channel PresentDayProduction, we can see an M1 Mac mini handle over 1000 plugins, 128 samples, and 195 channels in Logic Pro, all till it eventually runs out of resources.”
Of course, the MacBook Pro would do even more, as it should, but the Air is pretty amazing as a fanless notebook. Time is money, so a lot of people will be able to justify the MB Pro, but, that said, there are a lot of things you can do with an Air that you would have had trouble doing with a Pro a few years ago. As a computer user for 40 years this stuff is like science fiction compared to when I started.
I have the 2020 M1 MBP with only 8 GB of RAM, and I'm not even close to running out of CPU. I think most people should know that 100 track songs aren't necessarily the norm. If you look at the Billie Eilish "Ocean eyes" project file, It's only 36 tracks, with a nearly a third of those being vocal tracks. Even my super high usage plugins that got recompiled for M1 max out at something crazy like 140 instances - something you'd realistically never do.
I agree with you, @bgillander , compared to when I had my first iBook with Reason running on it in 2002, this is science fiction and pro level studio for only $1299.
I know it felt good to type that, but come on man.
Where have you been the last decade? Apple has charged even more for ultra large SSD upgrades in the past… this is nothing new.
Also, just looking up a random Dell laptop (XPS 13), they charge $550 to upgrade from 256 GB to 2 TB, which is $314 per TB, so an 8 TB upgrade, if it was available, might cost about the same as Apple charges. That’s not even factoring in the fact that the SSDs Dell uses aren’t as fast.
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Yeah, I almost did my grumpy old man “You kids nowadays and your 100 channels!”, but I was too upbeat today from the pure wonder of what was just introduced! I remember trying to get 4 tracks working in Quad by Turtle Beach in the mid 90’s and it was brutal. And the storage it used on my brand new affordable $500 1 GB hard drive (neither the price nor the GB is a typo, although I may be low on the price) seemed massive. Reading the price complaints today takes me back to my first 105 MB Quantum SCSI hard drive (yes, 105 MB) that I bought at the cost price of $800 CAD from the computer shop I worked at in 1989. To me, today’s MacBook Pro intro was like they introduced a couple of spacecraft and everyone seems to be complaining that they cost more than a car. They are priced accordingly, and I’m trying to come up with a business model to justify one for myself.
I've felt the same, made sure to order my iPhone 13 Pro, 14" MacBook and 3rd Gen AirPods the second they went on sale. Luckily I got the 13 Pro on release day and have a scheduled delivery for the MacBook and AirPods of the 26th.
Maybe you should actually try the Air, as I personally guarantee that the fan won’t run too much.
I still remember my parents buying our first real computer back in the 90s. It was $2000, equivalent to around $3600 or more today, and came with a 166 MHz processor and something like 32 MB of RAM and 3 GB hard drive 🤣.
I was putting it into perspective for a friend.
Arguably the most powerful consumer CPU and GPU in 2021 are the AMD 5950X and Nvidia RTX 3090 with ~20bn and ~28bn transistors respectively. The chip - a single piece of silicon - that Apple is putting inside of a 14" MacBook has more transistors than those two monster components combined, ~48bn vs ~53bn. As an electronics engineer and someone deep into the world of processors this is mind blowing stuff. I don't think people realize just how powerful a chip Apple has thrown down here and yet if the numbers are to be believed - incredibly efficiency at the same time. I don't know the system TDP of the MBP but I imagine it's under 100W. Those two chips will easily push 400W and will likely go as far as 600W in the right situation.
I'd go as far as to say this is a bit of a reckoning for the rest of the chip industry, I can't think of another piece of consumer silicon that comes close.
I'm measuring transistor counts, not outright FLOPS.
I should also add, an RTX 3090 has a RRP of $1,500 and a 5950 $700. Apple gives you more silicon, plus an amazing display, speakers, mics, I/O for $2.8k with the M1 Max.
I remember similar stories. I remember my dad buying a GB hard drive for the first time and being astonished. I think he paid £200 at the time and this was probably two decades ago. I can now buy terabytes of blistering SSD's for the same amount.