Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
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Check out The Verge review as well, equally as good and practical.
My Windows PC died last week (perpetual unfixable bootloop from my crappy mainboard), so I had to take a trip to Micro Center for a new CPU and board. I wandered over to the Mac section and, yes, the 16" screen is just stunning. It's even better than the screen in the new 12.9" M1 iPad. HDR in FinalCut was really amazing. If they put these displays in the 27" iMac replacements, it's going to be very hard to not buy one.
I’m writing an article positing that the MacBook Pro just did for desktops. Who would buy a desktop Mac now, when you can just get one of these and dock it to a monitor and peripherals via Thunderbolt?
There seems to be no downside to using one of these over an iMac or a Mac mini. What do you all think about that? I need some opinions for my article.
I was talking to a guy at the store who was looking to replace his 27" iMac for doing CAD work. His main use case is for 3 large monitors where the color accuracy, HDR, etc aren't important. He wanted the new M1 Mini but they were out of those, so he was looking in to what the display and portability on the 16" would get him. It didn't seem like those points actually registered much with what he needed, but being able to dock the MacBook into a three monitor setup did. I think he would have been happier with an M1 Pro Mac Mini and three monitors.
For me personally, the 5K screen of the iMac is just about perfect for Xcode. I have been wondering about a setup with a 16" MacBook and the 12.9" iPad though. That might be a pretty slick and flexible setup with the Universal Control feature. I probably have two or three more years left in my iMac though. If Apple has a 6K display and a good Mac Mini at that point, I'd probably go with that.
Performance is so good there isn’t, as you said, a downside. Other than the lack of decent 5K displays as good as the screens In the MacBook Pros.
I’d rather have a MacBook Pro connected to an external 27” ish display than an iMac with similar performance.
However, there’s clearly going to be another big leap in performance in the Mac Pros. The rumour from Gurman is that there will basically be 4x M1 Maxes on one SOC in the new Mac Pro with up to 40 CPU cores and 128 GPU cores. He was right about the Jade C chop and Jade C die SOCs which are the M1 Pro and Max respectively. So his Intel (see what I did there
) was spot on.
There will always be the need for ever more powerful desktops.
But the MacBook Pro might have ‘done for’ the consumer desktop. Otherwise know as the iMac.
But if the only way to get a big display as good as the new 14 and 16 screens was with an iMac then I’d buy an iMac Pro for work.
It all depends on the display.
MacBooks have something an iMac or Mac Mini doesn’t have – a built-in UPS
@klownshed I bet the iMac Pro and Mac Pro will be insane. But this MacBook Pro is already too much power for most musical uses. I guess if you're scoring movies you might prefer more RAM? I\even then, though, these SSDs can stream faster than RAM from a decade ago, I hear.
If I was to be, I would say there won't be an iMac Pro. There's not really any need for one in the lineup; A chip with 40 CPU and 128 GPU cores will need a lot more thermal headroom than any iMac enclosure will allow.
The old iMac Pro was a failed attempt by Apple to retire the Mac Pro. My Guess is that the big SOCs (4 x M1 MAX!) will go in desktops without displays.
But that's just a guess.
For most of us, indeed, the MBP is more than enough, and for many of us the M1 Max with its GPU cores is totally unnecessary (the RAM bandwidth is double in the Max, but you're hardly likely to hit the kinds of bottlenecks for audio where an M1 Pro isn't already overkill).
Pro musicians that use massive sample libraries will love a Mac Pro with space for loads of easily swappable SSDs.
If I had to guess, I'd say the new bigger iMacs will have the exact same chips as the new MacBook Pros. M1 Pro and M1 Max and the new desktop Mac Pro (possibly much smaller chassis?) will have the monster chips. Hopefully the Mac Minis will also get the M1s Pro and Max. I reckon they'd already have them if Apple could make enough chips; I bet they'll struggle to meet demand just for the MacBook Pros.
And meanwhile, the new iPhones will get a new A16 chip that will eventually become the basis of M2 (unless they skip a generation and base the M2 on the A17 which is fairly likely).