We are very serious about reviewing phones, both in writing and video. Our YouTube channel has grown to 1.5 million subscribers and we post about three videos a week. To put things into perspective, we churn out about 2 hours of video each month and get that nearly 5 hour B-roll video produced by our video crew.
So it’s very important to have a lean workflow. We have tried to constantly improve it over the years. We won’t go into detail, but we started with Sony’s Las Vegas editor, struggled with Adobe’s Premiere for a few years, and now we’ve mostly turned to DaVinci Resolve as our editor of choice.
Our computers are custom PCs with Nvidia cards. But when Apple’s move to ARM happened and we saw the potential it had for video work on a better optimized platform, we decided to give it a try.
We first bought the base model MacBook Air with M1 processor, 7 GPU cores, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. That might not sound like much, but thanks to built-in H.264 and H.265 video encoding, faster unified memory, and DaVinci Resolve optimizations for the M1 processor, the Air can happily edit 4K video like a much more powerful computer.
So far we have produced around 40 videos with the MacBook Air and can attest to its merits as a computer for video editing. While not as easily quantifiable as speed, it is its stability and reliability that have impressed us the most. For some reason, we’ve had no luck with Windows-based PCs and have gotten used to the occasional crash which, while it doesn’t stop, is certainly extremely irritating.
The Air works, pardon the cliché, and we haven’t had any crashes with DaVinci Resolve since we switched to macOS.
But the air is simply not powerful enough for our needs. Basic video editing works perfectly fine, but as soon as we start adding our animations, text layers and titles, color corrections and we have to resort to not only half the resolution, but quarter resolution reproduction. This makes it difficult to manipulate color accurately. The Air didn’t cut it, so we got the basic Mac Studio, hoping it would give us the best of both worlds.
So why the base model Mac Studio? Well, it is doing the job and its price is not prohibitive. It comes with an M1 Max processor with 10 CPU cores (8 powerful and 2 efficient), 24 GPU cores, 32GB RAM and a 512GB NVME drive. It comes in a premium retail package with a well-padded moving center platform that the Mac Studio sits on during transport, ensuring nothing can happen to it on its way to you.
The M1 Ultra version seemed like an overstatement at double the price – the money we felt could have been better spent on other parts of the video production process.
Our unit’s retail package includes a single braided power cord and a single black Apple sticker.
Mac Studio Unboxing
It also comes with doors and we love the doors. We would connect a keyboard and mouse to the Air and have a dongle that enables an SD card slot and an HDMI connection for an external monitor. The Mac Studio has all of these ports, plus 4 Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, 2 full-size USB-A ports, two additional USB-C ports on the front, and an ethernet port.
It’s also a very portable small computer, especially compared to a desktop PC, even with smaller form factors. Speaking of computers, yes, technically we could have gotten a PC for the money we paid for the Mac. A quick online check shows we could have built a Ryzen 9 5900X machine with a 12GB Nvidia RTX 3060 and 32GB of RAM. at a slightly lower price than the Mac Studio.
But that car would be a lot bigger, a lot louder, and it wouldn’t ultimately give us the experience we want. We’ve never found Windows systems to be really bad, but ARM-based Macs fit much better into our workflow.
Ports, ports, ports
So how does Mac Studio help? The firm’s biggest gain is time. We work on 3 to 4 videos per week and 14 videos per month. Each video requires different types of work, from cutting and color grading, to stabilizing shaky footage and finally rendering the video and doing other things in the meantime, creating a thumbnail for YouTube, doing other work-related tasks.
We watch each video for errors and sometimes, not often, we need to render a clip multiple times. Hey, sometimes we even have to re-do an entire video, because a manufacturer sowed a major last-minute firmware update that fixes something on a device. All of this adds up to the minutes, hours and days we spend on our computers editing videos. Mac Studio saves us a lot of time.
To put things into perspective, we ran our usual video production on the Mac Studio and MacBook Air, side by side, and compared the results. The Studio has a big power advantage over the Air, but in regular tasks like starting the computer from cold or opening DaVinci Resolve, the M1 and M1 Max processors aren’t much different. Sure, the Mac Studio would launch DaVinci Resolve just as quickly for the first time and all subsequent times, while the MacBook Air would take a lot longer on first boot.
When you stabilize a 26-second clip, the disparity in processing is exposed. The Mac Studio took just 14 seconds, more than three times faster than the Air. The trend continues in the timing of exporting a full GSMArena video review – the Mac Studio was three times faster than the MacBook Air.
A note on the power consumed by these machines. The MacBook Air would draw a maximum of 35 watts when exported, while the Mac Studio would draw around 75 watts, much less than its maximum rated power consumption of 370 W. The fans were not audible at any point, which is a clear advantage of the Apple’s transition to the more efficient ARM architecture.
By combining the time saved during tasks like stabilization, rendering, and exporting, we can round off around 14 minutes per video saved using Mac Studio on MacBook Air. Multiplying it by the 14 videos, on average, that we made a month and we get a total time saved of 196 minutes per month using Mac Studio as the primary video computer. We have been saving about three and a half hours by using the fastest car every month. This results in an annual income of 39 hours, which equates to approximately 5 standard working days per year.
MacOS startup time
Higher is better
-
Apple Mac Studio
16.3s -
Apple MacBook Air
16.8s
DaVinci Resolve 17.4.6 boot time, first boot
Higher is better
-
Apple Mac Studio
5s -
Apple MacBook Air
17s
DaVinci Resolve 17.4.6 boot time, second boot
Higher is better
-
Apple Mac Studio
4s -
Apple MacBook Air
5s
DaVinci Resolve 17.4.6, 26s clip stabilization
Higher is better
-
Apple Mac Studio
14s -
Apple MacBook Air
47s
DaVinci Resolve 17.4.6, clip export in 10:39 min (Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max review)
Higher is better
-
Apple Mac Studio
3:56 min -
Apple MacBook Air
13:48 min
DaVinci Resolve 17.4.6, clip export in 11:15 min (Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra review)
Higher is better
-
Apple Mac Studio
7:17 min -
Apple MacBook Air
24:08 min
So all in all, switching from the MacBook Air to the Mac Studio saves us nearly 40 hours a year, just as a result of the M1 Max’s increased computing power. That doesn’t take into account all the other ways this machine can be used for our needs here on GSMArena.com.
During our time working on Mac Studio, we haven’t encountered a single hiccup. Videos run smoothly in their native 4K resolution, adding color correction or animations and titles doesn’t cause noticeable issues.
For us, that investment is worth it. We plan to use Mac Studio as a mainstay of our video production for years to come. Mac reliability is legendary and is well demonstrated here at GSMArena headquarters.
As for our trusty MacBook Air, we plan to continue using it for years to come. We’ve been relying on it for a couple of months and it has proven its worth. It’s a tiny machine that weighs next to nothing and is a valuable tool to have on the go.
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