Apple’s annual Spring event launched this week and we got one big surprise! It was rumored that most of this event would be updated products in some of their lower price ranges (the iPhone SE & iPad Air). While this was true, Apple surprised us with the announcement of the Mac Studio, a complete rework and rebrand of the Mac with the power, speed, capability unlike anything before it. 

Apple started by announcing the “last” chip in the M1 family, the M1 Ultra. It boasts a 20-core CPU, up to 64-core GPU, Up to 128GB of unified memory, and 800GB/s memory bandwidth. In short this means up to 3.8x faster CPU performance, 4.5x faster GPU performance and up to 3.0x faster machine learning when compared to the previous generation. This chip, coupled with the new Mac Studio features and its amazing Studio display, are yet another leap in innovation for Apple. 

For companies like Pathfinder, this has a lot of value. It means we can render video and 3D design pieces much more quickly. One of our mixed videos that has both video and graphic elements currently can take up to 6 hours to render. We are estimating this time will go below 2 hours, saving us a huge amount of time and machine load. This allows us to work faster and provide more value to our clients.

It can also help us cut costs to make 3D graphic stills and video more accessible to our small business clients, upping their marketing game to better compete with large companies and franchises. We are constantly working to push our capabilities to bring the best quality and new options to clients, and the Mac Studio will be helping us make another jump forward to do this!