Back in October when I got a chance to use a pre-release 14″ MacBook Pro with M1 Max processor, I openly questioned whether this laptop could replace my venerable iMac Pro. Four months later, I’m back with an update.

A good amount has happened since then, for example:

After Effects: Explores the Cores

Yes, I figured out how to make this render very, very slowly.

After Effects multiprocessing is now a thing, released for Intel and in public beta for Apple silicon. And it’s largely good! It doesn’t speed up the processing of a single frame, but allows After Effects to render multiple frames at once, both for interactive previews and final renders. Not every project is ideal for this kind of optimization. TANK, for example, is the kind of project that benefits greatly from re-using cached information from one frame to the next.

But I do have a rather heavy After Effects project from Circle of Stone, the one that I talked about at IBC 2019. I used After Effects 3D and expressions to create procedural flying car traffic for a futuristic matte painting shot. Like TANK, I used hundreds of layers to create the final effect. Unlike TANK, this project multi-processes well, and doesn’t require any features or plug-ins that aren’t yet running on Adobe’s M1-optimized After Effects public beta.

Circle of Stone spaceship pass only, rendering in Adobe After Effects. Shorter bars are better. iMac Pro as tested: 3 GHz 10-Core Intel Xeon W, 128 GB 2666 MHz DDR4, Radeon Pro Vega 64 16 GB.

In just four months even Adobe, who were famously late to the Mac Intel transition, have optimized quite a bit of After Effects for Apple's processors. While we’re not all the way there (crucially, I am still not able to run the TANK benchmark project from my previous post), the proposition of replacing my desktop machine with this portable powerhouse became even more pressing.

The Display: The Best There is, but Not Perfect

I’m of two minds about the MacBook Pro display and Apple’s mini-LED HDR displays in general. On one hand, they look great, have excellent color accuracy out of the box, and compete favorably with both professional HDR reference displays and Good Computer Monitors. On the other hand, if Apple bills them as being good enough for professional HDR video color grading, they have to figure out how to close the gap between zoned-backlighting, which does have artifacts despite all of Apple’s cleverness, and true individual-pixel HDR.

The Hardware: As Good as You’d Hope

The laptop is a solid workhorse. Only a few issues have come up during my time with it:

I noticed that the display would frequently seem dim when I opened the laptop after some time. I’d have to tap the F2 key a few times to get it where I’d like it. This seemed to go away after I turned off “Slightly dim the display while on battery” (in the Battery section of System Preferences), but I don’t recall ever needing to do this with previous Apple laptops.
You may recall that I didn’t post any benchmarks of copying files off an SSD via the built-in card slot. This is because I was getting strange behavior that I wound up reporting to Apple, where the copy operation would hang for a long time before initiating. This seems to have been cleared up in non-beta macOS updates since I first encountered it. SSD copying is now just fine.
Ug. My Return key is sticking, just a little. Just enough to be annoying.

The notch turns out to be very much not a problem day-to-day. But having owned the 12.9″ iPad Pro, it’s frustrating to have a lesser front-facing camera on this more-expensive, more-pro, more-always-making-you-aware-of-a-camera’s-presence device. This is not a huge deal breaker for me though, as I am not a person whose participation in a meeting is enhanced by camera clarity.

Everything else that you’d hope would be great about this hardware, is. The battery life is as promised, engendering iPad-like charge-it-once-every-few-days habits. The HDMI port is hugely useful, the cooling works so well you’ll never know it’s there, and the function keys are great to have back, alongside Touch ID.

So it's a solid machine, a fast machine, a reliable machine. Is it ready to be my daily desktop driver?

But It’s Still a Laptop

Even in light of these findings, I never could fully insert the M1 Max to into the role of my venerable iMac Pro.

My iMac Pro is not just a computer, it’s a workstation. I use every one of its eight USB ports (four USC-C, four USB-A), plus a hub, and the 10-gig ethernet jack as well. I run color control surfaces and audio DACs, a Stream Deck and multiple external RAIDs, and even a second display.

What makes a computer powerful, for my workflow, is not just processing power. It's connectedness, and presence. It’s speakers and microphones and ingesting CFAST while rapidly recalling raw files from fifteen years ago. It’s the power of side-by side displays that remind me in the morning of what I was working on the previous day, because nothing has moved and a dozen apps are still running. It’s desk space and disk space, and most importantly, head space.

So while I absolutely adore this laptop, it has not replaced my desktop, which is why I’m hopeful and excited about whatever Apple may have in store for us tomorrow and for he rest of the year.