Critical insight to 2018 MacBookPro


I thought to share this one because like myself, many creative types are using macs and are looking at the latest iterations of Apple machines with growing confusion. It’s really great that I dont have to upgrade now :thinking:

Who is not familiar, the guy talking in the linked video is Louis Rossmann, owner of independent Apple repair shop in NYC and great advocate for the ‘right to repair’ movement. In youtube, he is mainly doing educational content, teaching people to fix common hardware problems of apple devices and promoting his own business. He has good insight from his daily work with Apple motherboards and is also doing a lot for the community. You can get in touch with him via https://www.rossmanngroup.com

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this is so disappointing and frustrating. wtf was apple thinking?

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Breaking news Apple designs another product thats designed to fail, who would have thought that the most overpriced computer company that dominates the majority of the market would have ulterior financially driven motives?

Edit: just thought and that comment comes off as snarky my bad, didn’t mean to sound like a prick but this video is nothing new really. I use apple products myself, mostly for comfort as I’ve used them for some time. my 2015 Mac Is still serving me pretty well and I’ve been really happy with my iPad Pro for music stuff and my iPhone and having it all connected and working well together, but I’m the past I’ve had various iPhones/iPods go from functional to obselete within 1 update. I’m not happy with how Apple is, and I’m aware of the huge flaws, planned obselesence, restricted repairability etc but any company of that scale is gonna turn into that, there’s too many hands in the pie and that’s not gonna change.

They are absolutely not gonna turn round and start caring about the little man, the end user and innovation. We’re lucky enough to get a year warranty (which has covered me with several devices) but beyond that it’s pretty much pay the man for another ride or leave. Shitty business model but we’re all still here using macs eh. It’s not really you get what you pay for with apple, kind of more you pay for what you get, thing is you do know what you’re getting. Pretty laptop with a nice UI that works flawlessly with your phone and tablet, and I don’t think I’ve ever really used a different tablet and been satisfied with it honestly. I’d say everyone knows the score at this point

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Replaced my 2014 MacBook Pro with the latest release. Went with the downspecced 6 core i7 model and 32gb ram. Solid improvement so far and the new keyboard is decent. Touch Bar is 50/50 cool and weird. Doesn’t run hot. Ordered replacement cables from aliexpress to replace all my usb-a cables with usb-c, for about $50 total. No Dongles. Pretty stress free update so far, so perhaps your mileage may vary and ignore the hype?

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Good to hear, I hope it stays that way

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Yeah, I’m not even going to tell you what era macs I’m still using :smiley:

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I plan to upgrade my 2013 retina mbp to this one. Don’t care about all of these YouTube “reviewers”. Firmware update is on the way, will solve most of the problems.

For intensive cpu usage (computer music?) i would buy a Workstation (Lenovo or Dell?) or maybe Mac Pro but i don’t think that such a small box like a macbook pro could run intensive Hi-end cpu usage without any heat/power problems…
I am sitting in front of a Lenovo P50 for my work, It is almost twice the weight of the MacBook pro, runs cool and has ventilation everywhere, replaceable hard drive / stuff Inside ect…and hey it is still very portable for all that power.

Of course a Macbook Pro can do that, a lot of us are using them to make music. What’s cpu intensive usage ? I use the NI Komplete suite and other sound processing tools (Soundtoys, Izotope, etc…), never had issues. It certainly doesn’t run hot, in fact it’s much colder than the Dell laptop I was using before.

The i9 is a really powerfull processor. If the box has thermal issues or CPU power issues performance could be seriously diminished…

My bet is that the MBP is designed for the main processor (i7) not for the optional processors in order to remain as light as possible and control the costs. It would be too expensive to design specific parts for the i9 and other optionals. so performance is “resulting” from the integration of the i9 in a i7 case design. I am right for sure but this is pure speculation! :yum:

What’s cpu intensive usage ? I use the NI Komplete suite and other sound processing tools (Soundtoys, Izotope, etc…), never had issues.

Off the top of my head from personal experience: VCV Rack, some Reaktor ensembles, u-he Diva and Bazille, Aalto with 4+ voices, Kaivo, Audio Damage Quanta have all struggled at various points with my 2013 Macbook.

i also had problems with Diva and Keyscape with my Macbook pro 15 2015… not enougth power to keep the buffers low…sold it.
But those news intel 6 cores seem really fast! Hopefully the standard version of the MBP 15 (i7-8750H which is crazy fast) won’t suffer from the same problems as the i9s!

A bit off topic (and perhaps illinformed)…

But i thought there was some issue with music production that software wasn’t taking advantage of multicores and piling the work on one and therefore effectively making the advantage of multicore moot?

This is really frustrating - what are the alternatives? I seriously tried to work with Windows 10 on a second boot drive and gave up after Windows deleted some files of mine because they were “dangerous” and infected with malware (which they were not, it just had issues with the way the old iLok key works). Each and every time I meet someone on stage using a windows machine something bad happens. At home it´s easy, just build a hackintosh. But on the road?

And btw: I run multiple instances of Diva, Repro, Omnisphere and other stuff that runs heavy on cpu without problems on my MBP 2015.

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Generally you can only use a single CPU thread for each track on your daw. Multiple thread for one track is rarely possible, especially for real time audio processing.
So if you want low buffers lets say for live performance (my application would be playing keyscape with an FX chain on a single track) you have to choose a CPU with a high single thread performance.
For big mixing sessions with a lot of tracks and higher buffers bearable, multithread performance will probably become the limiting aspect of your proc, but frankly for multithread nowadays intel processors have more and more cores and are crazy fast. the single thread performance is not really upgrading with the newer generations, though.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/

cheers

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I am pretty sure that the MBP 15 i7 version is not stated to have such problems!
These are early tests done with the highest spec’ed mac (i9)
The standard i7-8750H should have no problems and still be very powerfull, but wait and see…

wow, thats some good knowledge, thanks for that :pray:
So the live usage you should aim less cores and higher clocking?

Still happy with my resent mbp purchase - this just confirms that I did the right thing. I sold my Imac recently to get more mobile - and bought a 2015 15" second hand, the best mbp if you ask me - still has “normal” USB, SD card reader ect… I’m really not a fan the new mbp’s.

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Generally higher clocking = better single thread performance (for a given processor generation)
Check the charts https://www.cpubenchmark.net/
You will see that if you use a single track, a cheap core i3 can compete with some of the latests i7 regarding single thread performance.

I use my computer like an audio mixer with realtime effects (1 to 16 tracks simultaneously with realtime processing).
So I need high single thread perf beacuse i use very demanding VSTs like Keyscape but also great multithread performance because of my max track count. (i have a core i7-7700 on a HTPC, works ok).

Also keep in mind that the spec of the processor doesn’t mean anything if the other components doesn’t follow, which seem to be the case with the MACBOOK PRO 2018 I9.
Meaning, at the end of the day the complete computer benchmark has the last word over the pure Cpu tests like CPUbenchmark.

Last but not least, you can always increase your latencies tweaking the audio buffers and drastically unload the CPU. Let’s say you have 20ms of round trip latency. Is it really important in a live situation, as long as your Daw compensates for these delays?
there are tricks like “zero latency hardware monitoring” build on most audio interfaces, and other tricks like Ableton’s “reduced latency when monitoring” that will help you work in these situations.

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This is all steller info. Thank you.

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