Popular with graphic designers, music producers, video editors and all other creatives, Apple's Macs have been leading the charge in high-powered and affordable computing for years. Whether it's the specs of the machines, Apple's OS or just the aesthetically pleasing nature of the devices, Macs are never far from the top when it comes to our preferred computing devices. That said, Apple's device diversity means that some of their machines work better than others at particular tasks. For a portable, lightweight and easy to use web surfing machine, a MacBook Air will win every time. However, for more heavyweight tasks such as video editing, these machines may struggle which is where iMacs come in. In this particular article, we'll be looking at the best Apple devices for using Premiere Pro, Adobe's industry-leading video editing software.
iMac Pro
- With the new Premiere we have a lot of issues. Premiere is alway crashing. Iam also use Media Composer & FinalCut Pro X on a Mac Pro. Without Problems. At the moment the Premiere seems not ready. For 'real' Editing on a MAC.
- Unfortunately, your MacBook Pro was a 2010 model, which falls outside of the 'extended' support window, and is thus deemed 'obsolete.' And officially, your mid-2010 model can be updated to OSX 10.13 ('High Sierra'); however, that version might no longer be available from Apple. Thus, you're stuck with 10.11 ('El Capitan').
For this list, we'll start at the top with the awesome iMac Pro. As the name suggests, this machine is for pro(fessional)s who need super high power computing to get big jobs done quickly and to a high standard. Projects such as music production, photo editing and video editing are a breeze on this machine. When it comes to bigger projects such as rendering the video etc. the machine still takes some time to get this done, but completely outperforms all other Apple devices. The screen on the iMac Pro is Retina 5K and can support a billion colours using all of its 5120 x 2880 pixels. The machine offers, 8, 10, 14 and 18-core processor options and comes with 32GB RAM as default which is configurable up to 64GB or 128GB. This machine is the most powerful ever produced by Apple and although a custom setup could offer higher specs, the all-in-one appeal of the iMac is hard to ignore.
Mac Pro
(Side note: Try using DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro on the 13-inch MacBook, since Adobe Premiere Pro doesn't seem to be too optimized.) As much as I enjoyed the raw power the 16-inch offers.
The Mac Pro is a high power machine, capable of performing both basic and advanced tasks without breaking a sweat, despite being 5-6 years old. Upon release, the Mac Pro was one of, if not the best Mac for high power computing tasks, however, with the evolution of software and recent releases of new Apple devices, the Mac Pro has been edged off of the top spot by the iMac Pro.
That being said, the Mac Pro still retains an appeal for certain tasks. It was, and is aimed at a very specific audience of people, not for the average Joe that wants to surf the web, but for professionals that have graphic intensive and computing intensive jobs. Avenues that can really benefit from the Mac Pro include architecture, medical imaging and 3D design. Because of the age of the Mac Pro, very high end video editing is slightly out of reach for the machine, but for anything less than elite tier video editing would be fine. When using multiple layers of high resolution video, you may run into frame rate issues depending on how the machine is configured, this is definitely something to bear in mind, but certainly won't stop you from getting the job done.
Apple will soon be shipping a 2019 version of the Mac Pro and if it incorporates equally powerful or even higher specs than the iMac Pro we may have a beast on our hands. Remote support software for mac. The current machine is definitely still usable for computing intensive tasks, however, if you're after the most elite performance machines, we recommend holding your horses until the 2019 release.
iMac
Everyone's favourite all-in-one desktop solution, the iMac is probably the best affordable and powerful computing solution on the market at present, unless you're building your own setup which can be timely and frustrating. For people that want to plug and play, the iMac is a perfect desktop choice. Not only ideal for day to day tasks such as browsing the web, word processing and watching videos, but also for more labour intensive jobs such as music production, and image and video editing as well. If you're going to be taking on bigger jobs, we'd suggest checking out the higher spec options with increased RAM and improved processors, just to make sure you're not slowed down on the job. If you're making high-grade film and TV productions, maybe the iMac Pro would be better suited, but for anything less than elite-tier jobs, the iMac will certainly tick the box and for a lot less money.
MacBook Pro
The MacBook Pro is Apple's answer to portable, high-power computing. The 2018 model offers 16GB of RAM that is configurable up to 32GB, comes with a 6-core processor and boasts Radeon Pro 555X graphics. The obvious and immediate benefit of the MacBook Pro is the portability of it, unlike most of the others on this list, you can complete the work anywhere with no worry about packing up equipment. This is a clear benefit and will make a huge difference for some people, although for others it will have little impact. When it comes to video editing, MacBook Pros can struggle, especially when you're stacking multiple 4K video layers. One or two layers are just about managed with no stuttering but adding any more will cause delays to the playback. For YouTube content creators and people that aren't filming extremely complex videos, the MacBook Pro should work just fine, however, for anything that requires a little more work, we'd definitely suggest looking towards an iMac.
If you're looking to grab yourself a Mac, either to edit videos or for other tasks, why not check out our range of second hand Apple computers for sale. All devices are maintained and checked by our qualified technicians so you can rest easy that your Mac will continue to perform well for years to come.
It seems that there's something a little off with the latest release of Premiere Pro for users running on a MacBook Pro. After a user posted to the Adobe Forums that Premiere Pro seemed to have blown the speakers on his 2-month-old 2018 MacBook Pro, other users responded with similar reports.
Andripeetso claims that while working on a project in Premiere Pro with the volume set to about half, he suddenly heard a loud screeching noise, and when it stopped the speakers were very quiet. Upon restarting, he says they were clearly blown.
I Was working on a project, macbook volume was about on half, when suddenly an audio bug occurred with really loud screatching noise and not letting me pause it. After it stopped, the speakers were really quiet, and after the next restart they're clearly blown. Initially I blamed the hardware, though the same thing happened a day later with my Sony 1000X-M3 headphones, luckily the headphones are ok, but that did give me a heart attack.
– andripeetso
The original discussion started back in November 2018, but since then others have come forward to say that they've experienced the same thing. Adobe Tech Support responded to one of the users suggesting that this was Apple's fault. Another user was advised to change the audio hardware mapping in Premiere Pro, by disabling the default audio input.
Adobe Premiere On Macbook Pro
Neither Apple nor Adobe seems to want to take responsibility for this one, with each seemingly blaming the other. However, a piece of software should not be able to kill hardware in your computer so easily. Even if it is an Adobe bug that's caused the problem, why does the Apple operating system allow software to let such a thing happen?
Macbook Pro Laptop
One affected user told MacRumors that he was quoted a $600 repair bill by Apple to fix the issue. He says Apple claimed was so expensive because they need to replace the entire top case assembly – which includes the speakers, keyboard, trackpad and battery. I don't know about you, but that seems excessive to me. I'm sure Louis Rossmann would agree, too.
Regardless of whether or not Adobe caused the issues, why is Apple's hardware not protected against things like this? For what a MacBook Pro costs (and then costs to repair), you'd expect it to have such basic hardware protection features built in. The dynamic speaker has been around since 1925, so it's not exactly new technology. And it certainly shouldn't cost $600 to replace.
Given how long this 'undocumented feature' appears to have been going on, multiple versions of Premiere Pro may be affected. For now, it seems that changing your default input may prevent the issue from popping up and save you a repair bill.
Running Premiere Pro On Macbook Air
Have you had this happen to you? How did Adobe and Apple respond?
[via Macrumors]
