How Will Apple Silicon Change Music Production? Explained by an Audio Engineer
If you are on social media a lot, you might have heard about Apple switching to ARM, meaning they are ditching Intel CPUs and making their own. It’s a monumental move from Apple and it’s going to significantly change modern computing.
Since you are reading this article, I’m assuming you are a musician, a music producer, an audio engineer or a combination of some or all of those, and you are curious about how this change will affect you.
This announcement has been discussed extensively by TechTubers and tech websites, but very few gave thoughts to the music production side of things, as usual. So, as an audio engineer, a power user of Mac and Windows, and a fan of tech, I’m going to discuss how, in my view, Apple’s switch to ARM-based Macs will impact music production.
As usual, if you prefer to see some nice visuals, you can watch my YouTube video version of this:
How Does a CPU Work?
Before I dive into how this will affect the music industry, I want to provide some technical context as to why Apple is doing this.
Let’s take a very quick look at how a CPU works.
To put it in very, very simple terms, CPUs contain very tiny transistors made out of silicone, and electrical currents can pass through them, which will then become a combination of 0’s and 1’s that are essentially doing all the computing in your computer. Nowadays, there are usually billions of these transistors in a computer CPU.
As you may already know, CPUs are getting smaller and smaller* over the years, and companies are not doing that just for fun. The smaller a CPU gets, the less power it will consume to do the computing, but more importantly, all the parts inside a smaller CPU will be closer together, and so it takes less time for electrical currents to travel among them, which will in turn make the CPU faster.
*Referring to the die size
This graph shows that the die size of CPUs is getting smaller and smaller over the years.
Why Is Apple Making Their Own Chips?
So we know that we want to have the CPU as small as possible so it can be faster and more energy efficient, now let’s compare the CPUs made by Intel, AMD, and Apple, and more importantly, how they have progressed over the recent years. You will quickly see why Apple is switching to their own CPUs, and why this is a good thing for people in the music industry like you and me.
Right now, in July 2020, Intel’s smallest CPU is 10nm, and they really struggled to get there.
In comparison, Intel’s competitor, AMD, have moved onto 7nm processors in 2019.
Apple is faster than both of them—in 2018, Apple have already developed their 7nm chips, which are the A12 and A12X Bionic, and are also the first 7nm chips to be used by the mass public. And this year, Apple is expected to release their 5nm chip.
Apple is basically ahead of both Intel and AMD.
Obviously, it’s not just about the size. According to Geekbench, Apple’s 7nm chip is more powerful than a lot of laptop CPUs, but at the same time, consumes less energy, meaning longer battery life. Additionally, Apple’s 7nm chip doesn’t require active cooling systems unlike most laptops, which means the device can be smaller, like the iPad Pros.
Apple’s 7nm chip in last year’s iPad Pro, A12Z Bionic, which is essentially a 2-year-old chip, is so powerful that it can be used for desktop computing and it can run very taxing professional tasks, like editing a 5GB, 24K resolution photo in Photoshop, playing back 3 streams of 4K footage with effects and color grading, and rendering 3D animations and models.
That’s just nuts! I have a custom build PC with Intel Core i7-6700k, 32GB of RAM, SSD, RTX 2060, and I can’t even scroll through my photos in Lightroom smoothly, or edit 4K footage in quarter resolution.
To sum up, when you compare Intel’s processors and Apple’s processors that are on the same price range, Apple’s processors are more powerful, consume less energy and are easier to cool.
While they haven’t officially made any dedicated desktop processors, Apple have proven to themselves and to the world that their Silicone team is extremely capable of creating powerful chips, which is why they want to just make their own for the Macs instead of relying and waiting on Intel.
What Does It Mean for musicians, music producers and audio engineers?
If you look around your music circles, you will probably notice that a lot, or even most of your musician friends are using a laptop. If you are a musician yourself, you know how useful and important portable laptops are when it comes to playing live shows for example.
A laptop is almost like the fundamental tech equipment for musicians. Even in a lot of plugin promo videos and photos, they always show musicians using laptops.
Professional music producers and audio engineers are different. Most of us do our work on a desktop computer, simply because we need the studio monitors and we have hardware gear that is hooked up.
However, portable laptops are playing a more and more important role in our jobs because we can’t always be in our studio, and being able to do some audio work on-the-go just opens up more opportunities for us. For example, Nolly Getgood, a famous metal mixer, said he did a lot of his earlier records entirely on his MacBook Pro using headphones—he was only able to do that because laptops were already powerful enough to do professional audio work.
Similarly, sometimes an audio engineer might just need to go to a home studio to engineer a record, or a music producer might to fly to a different city or country to producer a record.
The point is, portable laptops are very helpful to people in the music industry. Just imagine being able to run Logic Pro X, or any other DAW, fully in something as thin and portable as the iPad Pro. I don’t think anyone would say no to that—in fact, in the last few years, many people online have already been asking for professional apps for the iPad Pro.
A mockup of Logic Pro X running on an iPad Pro.
If touring musicians can run Logic Pro X, Main Stage, Ableton Live, or whatever you are using, on a thin and lightweight device like the iPad Pro, it will make their lives easier because they can have lighter and less luggage, use smaller stands and even position the device better in their rig.
Just imagine, if you are a keyboardist, instead of having a laptop sitting there, with the laptop keyboard that you barely use during the show taking up a whole bunch of space, you can have just an iPad, running a full DAW, mounted on your synthesizer.
Another point I want to make is that, musicians, music producers and audio engineers today are not just creating music, but we are also creating visual content like photos and videos. (I mean, if you are not, that’s something you should definitely start doing.)
However, only creating visual content is not enough to capture people’s attention, because people are now used to seeing photos and videos with high production values, and people are associating high quality visual content with professionalism.
So what this means is that as a musician, music producer or audio engineer, you might want to invest in a good camera to take some snazzy photos and to produce some 4K video content. And what do you need to edit those 50MB RAW photos and 4K video footage? A capable computer.
It’s already common knowledge that you can edit RAW photos and 4K footage in iPad Pros and iPhones smoothly and render them very quickly, which means that now with Apple developing their own chips for Macs, people like you and me will be able to do our full-fledged music production AND produce 4K videos on very, very portable laptops.
One other benefit of Apple switching to their own processors is that it will allow apps to have native compatibility among iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, meaning that you could be working on a Logic session on your Mac in your studio, and a few hours later, you go to your band’s rehearsal space, you can open the same session on your iPad, mount it on your keyboard, and start jamming.
What about Windows?
If you are a Windows user, this change will most certainly affect you as well.
Whether you like Apple or not, the fact is that Apple has always had huge, lasting impact in the tech world. Apple created the first GUI-based computer available to the public, they popularized touchscreen smartphones, they dominated the tablet market, they popularized smartwatches….you get the idea.
In case you didn’t know, Microsoft have already released an ARM-based laptop last year, which is the Surface Pro X. But unlike Apple’s announcement, Microsoft’s switch barely made any splashes in the news, on YouTube, or on social media in general. Microsoft just don’t general as much hype as Apple do.
Microsoft Surface Pro X—an ARM-powered Surface laptop
So with Apple making this move—assuming the switch will be successful—many laptops in the future, Mac or Windows, will most likely be ARM-based, which means that Windows users will also benefit from the higher performance, lower energy consumption, reduced heat dissipation, and increased portability.
Should I get an ARM-Based Mac when it comes out?
Apple said in WWDC that ARM-based Macs will come out as soon as the end of this year. So a question you might ask is, should I get it? Or, I’m planning to get a new Mac soon, should I wait for the ARM-based Mac?
This is a tricky question because no one knows how good or bad the first generation ARM-based Macs will be. One thing we do know, though, is that there WILL be software compatibility issues. Even if you use Logic, all your third-party plugins will probably not work—it took Slate Digital FIVE months to make their plugins compatible for macOS Catalina, so with a significant change like this, my guess is that they are going to take forever to make their plugins compatible.
On the other hand, getting Intel-based Macs once ARM-based Macs are out means your machine is going outdated fast, especially if you are hoping to get 10+ years of use out of your Mac, which is pretty common in studios.
I think the ideal thing to do is to wait at least two years before getting an ARM-based Mac, and in the meantime, don’t get a new Intel-based Mac. I said two years because Apple said that’s how long they expect the transition will be.
Conclusion
Personally, I’m very excited about the change; I see a lot of potential in ARM-powered Macs. I know a lot of people are feeling it’s doom and gloom because of the compatibility issues such a switch will cause, but there’s always going to be a transition period when a big change happens in tech, or in any industry, right? We shouldn’t be holding back innovations just because we are scared of change.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments! Happy mixing!
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