I’m reviewing the base M1 Pro MacBook Pro 14″ (8-cores, 14-GPU cores. 16GB RAM, 512BG SSD) £1,899. If you’re thinking of purchasing an M1 computer for Creative Cloud use, you may want to think twice.
Incredible
First off, the laptop itself is incredible. I’ve only ever had Windows laptops, and I’ve been an Apple computer detractor since my 2011 27″ iMac’s performance was superseded by a factor of 2 a year later by an ASUS laptop half its price. I sold the mostly unused iMac in 2013.
I’m now a former Apple computer detractor, because Apple have actually built a computer that differentiates them from the crowd, and that’s thanks to the M1 chip.
I LOVE my MacBook Pro. It’s also the first laptop where I don’t feel compromises have been made to keep down costs. It’s almost the perfect laptop. Jaw-dropping screen and sound, tactile keyboard, robust build, phenomenal battery life, quick and snappy, and this base model gives my desktop PC a run for its money in everything except graphical performance.
Unfortunately
I said this was almost the perfect laptop. I CANNOT RECOMMEND the 2021 MacBook Pro at this point in time (November 2021) if you’re a Creative Cloud user considering this as a primary workstation.
I’ve been using this MacBook for two weeks for client projects. It’s FAST. Thankfully, though, I’ve had my PC desktop to fall back on, because Creative cloud on Apple Silicon isn’t great.
Apple Silicon CC apps are glitchy or missing features. For example, there are a couple of GIF clips on this page that I had to do on my desktop PC, because importing video into Photoshop 2022 on the native Apple Silicon version isn’t available yet (sure, you can export from Media Encoder, but you don’t have control of bit-depth or dithering and therefore filesize).
After Effects 2022 is only available as a beta on Apple Silicon, and the Intel version running through Rosetta 2 doesn’t appear to talk nicely with the Apple Silicon version of Premiere 2022. I’ve had playback and scrubbing freezing on dynamically linked AE compositions. Playback and scrubbing worked for the rest of the timeline, just not linked compositions.
In Premiere, I had a strange glitch in a render that didn’t appear in playback and scrubbing on the timeline (see figure 1). I basically had some videos where people had shot portrait, and I needed to create a blurred background to fill a 16:9 frame. For each person I created a nested sequence, an Add Hold Frame from their video and a Fast Blur effect. Simple stuff. The render glitched on the Apple Silicon version of Premiere, but not on the Windows version.
You could argue that I should be using 2021 Creative Cloud apps rather than the latest 2022, because they’ve had time to mature, and the glitches I’m experiencing are teething problems of new app versions. However, the Windows versions work pretty flawlessly in comparison to CC running on Apple Silicon.
I don’t feel safe completing time critical client projects on my MacBook, because I don’t know where it’s going to fall down.
Display Issues over HDMI
I’ve had display issues with screen flickering when the MacBook is connected to my 4k monitor through HDMI (see figure 2). It’s deeply distracting. At first it seemed intermittent and random, but after two weeks certain conditions seem to cause it. These conditions seem random, though. In the illustrative graphic the flickering occurred when I snapped an After Effects window to the left of the screen. The flickering immediately disappeared when the same AE window was in full screen or snapped to the right.
This make me think the issue is an OS problem, not a hardware problem. The flickering is not permanent, and it’s happening under certain conditions.
Conclusion
Despite these problems, I don’t have buyer’s remorse. The Creative Cloud problems will be resolved in time, as I think the HDMI display issues I’ve been experiencing will.
However, if I was using this as a daily driver for client work, I would not be happy. In fact, I would return it, because it’s not fit for my purpose. Thankfully, I still have my PC for Creative Cloud work and rendering, which means I can enjoy doing bits n bobs and everything else on the MacBook.
Some context for my purchase
I bought this MacBook because I wanted to replace my still very functional, but useless for CC apps 2017 HP Envy. The HP, from the moment I bought it, had struggled with CC Apps (despite marketing claims), and I wanted a laptop that I could do little bits of client work on without tearing my hair out (kind of ironic given the trouble I’ve had with CC on the MacBook).
My daily driver is a custom build from CCL Computers. It has an Intel Core i9-10900, with 32GB RAM and an NVIDIA RTX2060. That my MacBook’s render times – when it works – have been seconds off my desktop PC illustrates the power of Apple’s silicon. I think that performance is why I haven’t returned it. That, and I’ve fallen in love with MacOS.
Figure 1
Weird render glitches. Apple Silicon v Windows renders from Premiere Pro 2022.
Figure 2
External monitor screen flicker. Flicker over HDMI occurs under certain, seemingly random conditions.