Composer/sound designer looking to upgrade to a better studio Mac - but which?
 

I’m a film and TV composer and sound designer. I’ve currently got a 2018 Mac Mini in my studio but it’s starting to feel sluggish and doesn’t always handle everything I want it to do (many plug-in instances etc). Im ready to invest in an upgrade, but not sure what I should go with - a high spec iMac, or a newer Mini? A Mac Pro would be great but seems pretty insanely expensive.

Also not quite clear to me whether it’s safe to go with M1 yet, or whether there will be too much software I depend on that won’t run on it.

Hope someone can give some advice on this.

Re: Composer/sound designer looking to upgrade to a better studio Mac - but which?
 

Apple Silicon is not safe yet, and until Avid first releases native PT all of the plugins are running on Rosetta too.


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Re: Composer/sound designer looking to upgrade to a better studio Mac - but which?
 

Thanks - according to the Avid website Protools 2021 is ok.

Re: Composer/sound designer looking to upgrade to a better studio Mac - but which?
 

Apple Silicon disables a lot of things, PT is not running natively but on Rosetta


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Re: Composer/sound designer looking to upgrade to a better studio Mac - but which?
 

It’s a terrible time to buy a new Mac right now for this kind of work. Particularly because of the slowish transition to M1. If you can hold out for a bit it might be worth it for you.
Maybe upgrading to more Ram for your 2018 Mac Mini or doing a clean install of the OS if you’ve done several OS upgrades over the years. You don’t provide any system details or Pro Tools details so it’s hard to know if any Avid hardware is even compatible with an M1 machine yet. Any HDX or HD Native is currently not compatible.

Re: Composer/sound designer looking to upgrade to a better studio Mac - but which?
 

I agree. Last transition from PPC to Intel took four years until everything was fine. Latest G5 models (2005) were golden, and the first really usable Mac Pro was the 2009 model.


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Re: Composer/sound designer looking to upgrade to a better studio Mac - but which?
 

Thanks - this is helpful. Also really annoying (but that's on Apple/Avid, not anyone here). Will look into a RAM upgrade!

Re: Composer/sound designer looking to upgrade to a better studio Mac - but which?
 

i'm in similar situ. well sort of - I've been running a 2012 mac mini in 10.95 anf PT 10 hd for quite some time

I juts went to high sierra and PT 11 HD as I bouught HD video card at last..

I want to stay in high sierra for a while ( waiting for the M1 to come right )

Thinking about say a 6 ro 12 core Trash can with 32 or 64 Gog ram. to keep me going. ( I get a fair few ram errors now )

any thoughts on this?