Apple Silicon has been knocking the competition out of the water. Sure, there are some use cases where a dedicated GPU might be more beneficial, but Apple's SoC is a powerful tool to have in your kit.
In this week's "Deals of the Week," we look at three different M2 products that can elevate your filmmaking workflow.
The iPad Pro
Apple's iPad is a unique tool that has forcibly carved out a place for itself in our modern world. When it was first released, finding use cases for the tablet was difficult, at least for me.
Now, it has become a consistent part of my workflow in pre-production, during production, and in post. With the M2 chip, the iPad Pro is now more powerful, allowing creatives to bring a color-accurate reference display to set and utilize DaVinci Resolve to edit.
iPad Pro M2 Chip
This iPad Pro is supercharged by Apple's M2 8-Core chip with a 10-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine, a Liquid Retina display, Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax), a 12MP Ultra Wide camera with Center Stage, and 40 Gb/s Thunderbolt connectivity.
The MacBook Air
While the Air has never been a workhorse for creatives, with most choosing to opt for a Pro model, it is a computer that punches well above its weight. Its fanless design keeps things quiet but also limits what your machine can do performance-wise.
Having said that, I've used an M2 MacBook Air for Resolve, Blender, and Photoshop without issues. It'll struggle with 8K footage, but cutting BMCC 6K BRAW hasn't given me any issues.
MacBook Air M2 Chip
The Apple M2 integrates the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, I/O, and more into a single system on a chip (SoC). Utilizing 2nd-Gen 5nm process technology. The M2 features a 100 GB/s memory bandwidth and was also designed to speed up video workflows by adding a next-gen media engine and a powerful ProRes video engine for hardware-accelerated encode and decode. This means the M2 can play back more streams of 4K and 8K video.
The Mac Studio
For those creatives who want an extra punch, the Mac Studio is the next step up. This is the flagship desktop that attempts to extract every ounce of performance out of the M2 series SoCs.
Sure, there's the Mac Pro with Apple Silicon, but the cost and portability of the Mac Studio make it an attractive solution for editors, DITs, and social media creatives alike.
Apple Mac Studio M2 Max
With the M2 Max 12-core processor at its heart, the compact Apple Mac Studio features 32GB of Unified memory, a 30-core GPU, and 512GB SSD. This system is designed to support up to 10 streams of 8K ProRes video playback in addition to hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, and ProRes RAW encoding and decoding.
