But that’s it, no upgrading or tweaking is possible.Ī PC gives you a lot more to work with and experience and understanding of the machine if you build it yourself.
The Mac Studio is a plug-and-play device that you can’t upgrade and will likely give you solid performance. The real question is what you want from a machine. You can likely pick up some more current parts for a PC today and get performance equivalent to the Mac Studio. The problem was that rewinding wouldn’t play back at all. Fast-forwarding did start stuttering after a minute, though dropping quality to half supported 2x fast forwarding. That compares more directly to the M1 Pro-equipped MacBook Pro. Export time was 4 minutes 10 seconds on the PC. Opening the same file on the PC took 23 seconds, which is 7 seconds faster than the Mac Studio. There were some frame drops on the second playthrough and with reverse playback.
Playback and scrubbing was also practically perfect in full quality. That’s the best result he has seen so far from any test. Using a standard 8-minute Premiere Pro test project the Mac Studio took around 30 seconds while the export took 2 minutes and 38 seconds. Video editing does tend to push requirements for performance up a notch. Nobody actually cares about what is in a computer as long as they get smooth performance for whatever they are trying to do. The potential raw power of PCs and upgradeability do help though.īeyond that, what matters at the end of the day is the user experience. PCs can’t quite pull this off as well as you can build a machine with a variety of different parts from different vendors that sometimes don’t perfectly work with each other. Software developers can take full advantage of the chips since they can tune everything to work with very few different parts which scale wonderfully. Keith does point out that many of the advantages gained from Apple Silicon come from the tight integration between macOS and the hardware. He took a base model M1 Max Mac Studio and compared it to a custom-built PC for video editing.Īs always, we are going to have to look at the core specs before we get started. If you want to see how it holds up you are gonna have to put it up against something else, and that is where Keith Knittel has been investigating. It doesn’t even seem to have nearly the same premium cost as the most recent Mac Pro. Did Apple truly nail it with the Mac Studio? The M1 Max chip alone seems to give it loads more power than your average user could need and it comes with specific optimizations for video editing.