AWESOME! M1 Pro Macbook Pro 16" & Cubase 11 first impressions

Cubase
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Hi,

so I did the plunge and bought myself a brandnew M1 Pro Macbook Pro 16" (32 GB Ram, 2TB HD)
My former machine was an Macbook Pro Intel 16" from 2019.
That machine was performing kinda Ok CPU wise, but the fans were constantly running and i had frequent overheating issues especially with an external monitor connected.

I did not expect the transition to be smooth at all and was prepared going through a transition period of a couple of weeks.
Well, after 2 days, the new machine was up and running extremly well.
I did not do a complete clean install, but all Apps and Plugins were installed new one by one.
Took me a whole day to do this. Actually not to bad considering that i use Macs since the early 90’s, so one can imagine that there are A LOT of Apps, plugins and documents on my HD.

Cubase 11 Pro runs very good even under Rosetta 2.
In fact I have never had a better user experience with Cubase on a Mac!
The UI acts extremely smooth, absolutely comparable with the performace on a good PC.
Zooming, scrolling, editing, moving things around, openig editors and so on is super fast, reliable and a pure joy to work with. Also under heavy load with big projects Cubase 11 stays perfectly responsive. The vast majority of all my plugins run fine under Rosetta 2. Most of them even better than before. Some like NI Kontakt are bit problematic but that should be sorted out in the near future. But Kontakt is still workable as far I can tell for now.

Cubase did not crash once until now, all projects load fine.

The M1 Pro Macbook Pro 16" is a completely different machine than my previous one.
No Fan noise - complete silence! Oustanding performance even under Rosetta 2 (!)
I am looking forward to the release of cubase 12 and all plugins to run natively on Apple Silicon.

That machine should be fine for serious audio work at least for 5 maybe 10 years.
So, the new M1 Pro/Max Apple machines are a big step in the right direction in my view.
I do now understand the hype about these machines, they are truly awesome!

The future looks bright! :slight_smile:

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Glad you’re enjoying your new MacBook Pro. I too made the leap and I agree with your assessment. Making music has never been so buttery smooth even with large projects that my Intel Macbook Pro was struggling to keep up with. In general, the Intel Macbooks seem to have had issues with the way thunderbolt 3 worked especially with external displays. This is an issue of the past with the M1 Macbooks. :slight_smile:

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I just got the MacBook Pro 16" M1 - 16gb. It’s a beast. I’d had a 2018 top of the range (can’t remember the specs but 16gb - 6core i7 roughly)

I had to freeze track after track just to keep it going. Fan noise, constantly at about 90+ deg C.

I’ve just opened the last project I worked on and I’m at 46 deg C, all tracks unfrozen with an Antelope Audio Orion in the thunderbolt running a project at 48k with 0.7ms latency! and the CPU just won’t budge. I.e. it’s well below a quarter of the way up in Cubase.

What is this Voodoo?

I’ve been wanting to replace my desktop for a long time and just have one machine that does it all. This absolutely fits that bill - I’m actually really astonished how well it works!

I’ve had zero plug in problems and am thoroughly loving making music not fixing problems! - Absolutely recommended here!

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Short Update.
Still very happy here with C12 on my MBP M1 Pro 16".
Everything works super smooth.
Have not heard the Fans at all, even on more demanding projects.
That machine is so awesome.
It’s really the computer I was waiting for since the early 90’s when i begun to do music related work.
Nothing more to add here, and that’s a good thing. :sunglasses:

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