The Mac Studio and Studio Display for Creative Professionals ⇥ fcp.co

Peter Wiggins, FCP.co:

We sat down with Xander Soren, Director of Product Marketing, Pro Apps, Tom Boger, Vice President of Mac & iPad Product Marketing and Shelly Goldberg, Senior Director, Mac & iPad Product Design. 

Shortly after the announcement of the Mac Studio and Studio Display at the Peak Performance Apple event, we had the pleasure of talking to three Apple executives about the new machine and how the creative pro would benefit.

This is a good and wide-ranging interview that dances around a question I have been thinking about for a while now: what capabilities do high-performance products like these unlock for a creative professional? It is great to see how much faster they are at compiling applications or rendering video, but I wonder what new things people will attempt on machines like these which may have been too daunting before.

Here is a little example from my own work that is nowhere near as computationally demanding: I often receive vector drawings as Adobe Illustrator files, but I prefer working in Sketch. Sometimes, these drawings will have thousands of points, particularly if it is a vector object that is supposed to resemble a more analogue style. While Illustrator handles these files easily, it is one of the things that Sketch struggles with on my iMac, so I am disincentivized to use this style of illustration. If I had a faster Mac, I bet I would have an easier time manipulating these objects in Sketch, and would use this style more often.

I wonder what the equivalent of that is in terms the higher-end Mac Studio customer may grapple with. What style of 3D modelling will be enabled by these faster computers? What motion graphics will someone be encouraged to explore now that their computer does not hang every time they attempt an effect? That is the sort of thing I am curious about.

Also, I thought Boger’s description of the Studio Display was funny:

It’s the best display we’ve ever made for the Mac, it also makes it a great display for the rest of our Mac product line at an accessible price point.

Sorry to anyone who bought a Pro Display XDR.