Yeah, I really see the difference in these numbers which you yourself linked; and of course these are multi-core benchmarks which have even less bearing upon work in your DAW. I am not shopping for a $1500 computer for myself. They are both 3.5 ghz clock speed, with the mini having 2 more cores. Here's where you explain how this is reflected in Logic performance. I'll wait around for that to happen.... maybe someone qualified to actually answer that can chip in. Or you can supply some links to more info which doesn't support your point. This shows a 14 "point" score difference. This is effectively 0 difference, thanks for wasting my time.


MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2023)
Apple M2 Max @ 3.7 GHz (12 cores)
2732

MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2023)
Apple M2 Max @ 3.7 GHz (12 cores)
2732

Mac mini (2023)
Apple M2 Pro @ 3.5 GHz (12 cores)
2647

MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2023)
Apple M2 Pro @ 3.5 GHz (12 cores)
2638

MacBook Pro (14-inch, 2023)
Apple M2 Pro @ 3.5 GHz (10 cores)
2633

Mac mini (2023)
Apple M2 Pro @ 3.5 GHz (10 cores)
2631

 

Last edited: May 4, 2023

Sorry mate. I use the macs (imac and macbook pro) when I need to compose on Logic Pro. Otherwise I see no difference at all (meaning: I obtain the exact same results both on PC and MAC). I would have agreed with you 20 years ago regarding mac stability VS PC unreliability (I can remember all the PITA on W98 and the PC users' first sighs of relief when windows XP came out; I only used MAC then, that was a forced choice for most musicians), but not today. I completely ignored that Apogee converters thing and the LA NY LONDON phantasmagorical legendary studios. My bad (not being myself a pro and not living there I can afford to give a xxxx).

 

Last edited: May 5, 2023

If you don't even understand how VSTs multicore (maybe check the big 'Multicore' button at the top on Diva's AU GUI on Mac which makes a MASSSIVE difference in DAWs when you use a few instances and prevents it maxing a single core) then I'm done discussing with you. Serum also uses multi-cores very well too even in Logic.

As someone who used Logic also for their main DAW between 2010-18 the way to use multiple cores is not to route things though single buses and tracks (which makes them run on a single core) so you have to consider how your bus routing is set up in your project to maximise performance across the cores. If you open up 8 instances of Serum with no bus routing on 8 tracks you'll literally see all 8 threads used (assuming you have an 8 core CPU).

I do also note though that you didnt post the fastest Xeon Intel YOU recommended from a Mac Pro. Oh yes thats half the single core speed of any of them so yes any M2 is a mile better than your Intel recommendation, which was the exact point I made in my first reply and this is the 2019 Pro and he wont get one of those for $1500, more likely a 2013 which is about 5% slower still per single core.

Mac Pro (Late 2019)
Intel Xeon W-3275M @ 2.5 GHz (28 cores)
1379

or the fastest last MBP Intel - you've got the later iMac yes, but even thats barely more than half the M2 single core speed at just under the 1700 mark.

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2019)
Intel Core i9-9980HK @ 2.4 GHz (8 cores)
1373

Keep carrying on about how much better Intel are than M2 though.

 

Last edited: May 5, 2023

I did not post the rest of the list because of its text formatting. You were comparing the Mini M2 to the 14in M2 Macbook. The difference is negligible per your linked list. I said that I think the ~$500 upgrade from 8-16gb price for a Mini is a joke. You could buy 2 of them for nearly the same price and run Audiogridder between them with nothing additional but an ethernet cable.

Which is pretty ironic, to say RAM does not matter at all. If you look into the main specs differences between the newer, more expensive m2 machines; why is Apple upgrading the memory bandwidth to 400mbs vs the under 200mbs of earlier models? Take a wild guess. And how about the recent discount of 100$ on the mini, is Apple doing this because they "care about their customers"? Or is it because of how low their actual manufacturing costs are for these machines.... they are faster but cheaper. i mentioned this 2 pages ago. It is due to Economy of Scale. When they prove to not be durable past your warranty period (+1 day) your only remedy will be to shitcan it. People talk about different energy efficiency too, like they are Greta Thunberg. And then turn around and buy a machine that will end up in a landfill or the ocean.

 

Last edited: May 5, 2023

I never mentioned anything about memory prices at all previously (try and stay on topic eh this was purely an ARM/Intel discussion between us) and thats a shitload of assumptions in one post re reliability. I've had 4 Macs so far (2010 iMac, 2011 Air, 2013 Pro, 2019 MBP) and the only issue on any of them was bleeding into the LCD on the iMAC due to the heat of the components behind it on that model (known issue) and the LCD was replaced under Applecare at 3 years old - I have the last 3 machines and they're all still running perfectly and none have had a single issue since new whatsoever. Only time will tell whether the ARM stuff is less reliable.

The new ARM stuff are cheaper because they're not paying Intel a shitload for CPUs now never mind the fact that the lower heat/power means savings elsewhere as well. I'll take massively lower power consumption and double the speed over Intel any day of the week and that's based on the 3 Intel Macs I still own.

 

Enough of this thread for me

 

Last edited: May 5, 2023

I did, earlier in the thread before your posts. It's the reason why I haven't spent the whopping 600$ on a Mini. Because I do not need one. The more expensive new Macbooks have pre-M1 pricing nearly, for very little additional performance. $1000 more for a 200 megahertz improvement of clock speed? Not going to happen.

My workflow is the same as it has always been., and I stem almost everything. When my Serum (and almost never Falcon or Kontakt), needs more CPU available to it, I bounce/freeze in Logic, disable the AU plugin and all other FX on the channel, I Move it to the top of my session and Hide it. Should I make some sort of choice or mistake within the synth plugin which I want to change later on; It's right there with no work lost. The workflow on a machine which is all CPU and low memory is to leave everything as Midi and running off the CPU.

This is why when I ask about Multi-Core performance of Logic, you don't answer and start talking about Serum and Diva instance counts. Because the CPU-centric workflow of such a machine leaves you trying to pile on more and more instances from the same software synth (as you run out of resources). A few more instances of Serum or Diva are not going to make my tracks any better than they are. They might even get worse, with most sounds all coming from the same sound sources.

You cannot comment upon the "life cycle" of m1 and later machines, because you do not know when they will randomly just die. Apple are amazing at engineering products with Planned Obsolescence built in. People very frequently get 10+ years with a Pro tower machine. You might have to go to a landfill to visit your Mini in 5 years or less, with all the work you didn't think to stem out lost. Or factor in the additional cost of an external SSD and another $100+ for Apple care.

planned ob·so·les·cence
noun

1. a policy of producing consumer goods that rapidly become obsolete and so require replacing, achieved by frequent changes in design, termination of the supply of spare parts, and the use of nondurable materials.

I did not post the Apple Silicon machine's CPUs are slower than Intel. My main point is that when you are shopping around (and on a budget) sometimes the brand newest technology is absolutely full retail price, and by reviewing your options you may actually find a much better deal.
with people selling their Pro tower machines to get faster CPUs;l they are getting rid of them for Dimes on the Dollar. The Silicon computers will be perfect terminals for someone doing Cloud Computing with Adobe, far more than they were designed to work with Audio.

I'll take a 128mb ram, 12 core 2.7 ghz , 2 x 3gb GPUs, 2 tb internal SSD, Gigabit ethernet, Open-Box/new Catalina pre-installed (so we know the approx date of build), server over a little Mini any day of the week. 10 bucks for a crossover cable and Audiogridder with a second machine will more than cover any additional CPU gain from the 600$ mini. Any day of the week dude. If Diva's cpu consumption is such a problem; Bounce-in-Place problem solved, or wait 10 minutes for a Moog to warm up. Even Serum is not as much a cpu drain. Focusing on one number is like buying an electric unicycle to drive to work because it has one really great wheel. A single 100+GB Time Capsule backup cuts it's internal storage effectively in half.

https://eshop.macsales.com/configure-my-mac/UAGA1LP7IXXXZGH

 

Last edited: May 5, 2023

Why would I go into so convoluted way of working, isn't reason for getting better machine to actually don't do any of that, bounce endlessly, buy expensive hardware synths without recall, hook up servers, stay on older version of DAW and OS, why, because Apple soldered my RAM which I'm not gonna upgrade even if they didn't, it's 2023 and you can pretty much make music on this things without thinking about processing, without spending fortune, but if you dig that, your call, I spent money so I don't have to work like that.

Only reason I would even consider stuff like that is nostalgia, trying to put myself into some minimalistic mindset, overcoming choice paralysis, than I would not even think about servers or trying to use current tech, would lock myself into that mindset and just work within limitations, stock plugins, one synth and all that stuff.

 

Last edited: May 5, 2023

You spent what you wanted to spend. Nothing wrong with that. But please do not suggest to other Mac users you walked into Best Buy with 1500 bucks and deliberately left the store with only a 8gb Macbook Air. That would require both of us to be pretty stupid. At least it would be portable.

I wanted to see what this "nostalgia" is about and listened to a track. With all the discussion of how big a cpu hit Diva is; I do not hear anything different synthesis quality compared with any other techno or trance/edm made within the last 20 years. You could make every sound in this with some combination of the DSP56300 Virus emulator, Serum, Surge, Alchemy, Hive, Dune, etc etc etc; and when you were done mixing it you would have the same track. Maybe your Diva is bitcoin mining as a moonlight job.

 

Last edited: May 6, 2023

I did not said or advised anyone to do that, I explicitly talked about my own needs, preference and expectations, not rendering anyone else's expectations and preference invaluable, from the get go I was trying to gather as many info from OP to try to give him as much info as I could, so he can make best choice based on his own needs. This thread is maybe titled wrongly, there's no such a thing, value is in eye of beholder, in this case OP and he only knows based on his needs what is best option for him. Mine and yours probably aren't that.

When I said nostalgia, I meant nostalgia for older tech.

Guess I shouldn't even bother to answer to this, because you totally missed the point of response, but all those stuff take CPU, mixing too, point is working comfortably without much workarounds.

Think it's safe to say we really don't have anything valuable to give to this thread at this point and this will revolve about personal preference to oblivion, let's wait if OP have some questions and go from there.

 

People that are actually suggesting non-apple silicon devices are definitely out of it lmao

 

Why you disliked my response, don't get it?

 

Since this thread is still up and running, how do you deal with plugins like Omnisphere and Kontakt on Mac?
These are the kinds of plugins that you're advised to install on a drive separate from your OS drive, but on a Mac that's not possible since they only have one drive. I mean, the solution is obviously to just install all of these plugins on an external drive, but then you're also sacrificing something I assume, since communication with external stuff tends to be slower than accessing what's directly on the machine. My last external was a USB 2.0 HDD though, so maybe things are completely different now.

 

Things are not completely different now. The plugin resides on the SSD system drive in /plugins/components or /vst3 like all other plugins and the content is stored on an external drive. For some, a symlink is used to your content. My externals are Lacie hdd usb3/tb3 and they have no problem at all keeping up with Kontakt, Omnisphere, Superior Drummer, EzDrummer, or Falcon2; which are some of the main culprits for taking up a large amount of disk space. External SSDs performance are better than hdd; but both have their pros and cons like access/transfer speed vs capacity vs cost, not desirable to constantly be re-writing data to vs mechanical, etc.

There is really no great way around buying an external usb drive with any Macbook (of either kind). With something like a 250gb-500gb internal SSD, you need one anyway for your Time Machine backups. Connecting them to a hub is a bigger concern, so you lose a TB/USB port for the disc; and a good hub can cost ~$200 or more. It's also not very ideal because they do not have any ethernet port, so they use a TB-Gigabit Ethernet adapter for 30 bucks from Apple, calling the adapter "reliable" is a bit of a stretch, and you occupy another usb/tb port. Audiogridder performance via Wifi is not great, to say the least. And if you have an audio interface with ethernet connectivity, like AVB interfaces do; the lack of an ethernet port increases your need for a fast hub when you could just CAT5 that too.

 

Last edited: May 6, 2023

I dont think thats remotely necessary now that you have M.2 NVME SSDs as system drives on modern Mac machines. I've got both Kontakt and Omni running on my 2019 MBP internal with zero issues whatsoever. You're talking over 3500MB/sec (and some 5000+ MB/sec) throughput on these nowadays so light years different to the HDD days.

I always get a min 1TB internal drive though.

 

Take Geekbench to the trash!
You see a double increase in speed. It has not been there and has never been between new systems and previous ones. There is a maximum of 10-15 real percent.
Yes, you see the numbers and you have the initial course of mathematics, the Geekbench application is designed for this. ))))

Fresh versions of Geekbench always show approximately double performance between the latest processors and the previous. Otherwise, who would buy them? ))
How it's done? Very simple. There is no direct, linear dependence in the results of Geekbench, there is a parabola. And to the release of new processors, Geekbench releases a new, fresh version of its application, which already works in another section of this parabole, again showing double performance.

If you want to see more or less real results, then do your tests, for example, starting plugins, which system can work with a large number of plugins.

 

Not true, if you use same Geekbench version, I don't see increase of 50% in results between 2nd and 3rd gen of Intel, becasue it wasn't 50% increase or between 4th and 5th gen, by your logic they always show 50% and it's not true. Go on Everymac, compare results of same versions of Geekbench across the board, in this case Geekbench 5.

But agree, that's mostly numbers, one really see true state when there's proper benchmark done, like one that SCAN does, different buffers, different usage scenarios.

Apple Silicon power is undeniable, but software that isn't properly coded for it can't take advantage out of it and case is that too many dev's just don't know how to code for macOS properly, let alone for ARM now, there's handful of dev's that got it right and if one isn't using only them, advantages aren't really that applicable.

Here's interesting thread on GS that testifies about that.

Most dev's found a shortcut, have their old code and ARM wrapper internally, same effect as Rosetta, handful only took advantage of new instructions set, most just found a way to port their plugins over.

It's really important to take that in consideration, much more than raw benchmark numbers, Intel will stay relevant for long time, maybe not in Mac land that much, but for audio in general and on Windows. If someone is debating should he move from Windows to macOS, just becasue of potential power of new ARM processors, better not, stay on Windows, that's what most dev's are comfortable with and where they had years of experience already to perfect their creations.

Apple Silicon is little better Linux experience, but too many stuff are using wrappers, there's no clear advantage, you need to really have focused setup around stuff that actually performs great and than you have some kind of advantage.

Another interesting benchmark, across different DAW's on same machine, same platform, with plugin that is known to be highly optimized for AS and there you have old Mac centric DAW as Digital Performer taking full advantage and than Apple's own one that isn't capable of that, Bitwig and Live actually performing as expected, Reaper, not anymore. I did same test with Bitwig and Logic, tried every possible setting in Logic and still could get few more instances in Bitwig and having much better/stable experience. Seems like Bitwig and Ableton guys nailed it for AS. Maybe it's something about Diva, but than, how it performs that great in DP, Logic and Reaper should have same pre-buffering thing at play, they always were few instances apart before.

In my personal situation, more than happy with my purchase, found old most complex project I did on old Windows desktop, un-freezed everything that was problematic, that's 3 tracks of Diva with processing chains, on one track there's layer of 2 Diva's, so 4 Diva instances and all that, so everything is in MIDI now (more instances of Diva, Zebra, Hive and etc), loaded whole mastering chain and I have 40% DSP left in Bitwig alone, but now on 256 buffer, RAM usage is 6GB's, but it was like that on idle, so it's moot, RAM compression really low, no swap. But I use U-He mostly, could take that project on Linux too, Windows, in my case platform is irrelevant and can take full advantage wherever I go. But I knew that before I got myself new machine and odd plugins that aren't available on all three platforms actually work great natively on AS. Probably Linux would take much more wrapping, that's why I didn't used it for audio, all my plugins worked over yabridge, but had better performance on Windows overall.

 

Last edited: May 15, 2023

You do not know how to count, this is what the creators of such applications are counting on. ))
An increase by double is not 50%, it is 100% )
But this is not the point, I did not give specific numbers, but I think that еhe essence of the foregoing by me quite understandable. But not everyone )))

 

Counting on what really, there's no conspiracy there, go and see what actual results are between them and how much increase there is, do your own math, how much increase is from 1032 to 1039 from one gen to an another in single core and 3769 to 4218 in next for multi, they established benchmark and everything stacks up against that in that same version of test. I have been following this for years and nobody advertised anything closely to 50% increase from one gen to next, that's why it took me 10 years to upgrade, until there was actual leap.

I know plenty are confused by the numbers, but that's becasue they aren't really calculating percentages properly, like you said. But didn't stumbled upon false advertising counting on that fact, it would be stupid really and called out immediately, they always find some metric that make percentage bigger than it is, like much bigger track count and stuff like that, but that's how Apple rolls, Geekbench is actually something that establish one benchmark and you can trust it until it changes, than it's probably confusion how something that had 20k result now have 7k, but again, it quickly establish itself again and you can calculate increase again with confidence.

 

Last edited: May 15, 2023

I returned the iMac in favor of a MacMini M2 that went on sale for about $500 incl tax. I was told i could get any monitor, BT mouse and KB. If true, this will be a better bang for buck. I spent way too much of my life glued to a MacBook Pro, and i rarely used the portability.