Appropriate Mac Studio for Logic Pro X and other music software

I am in the market for a Mac Studio, but I do not know which one will be powerful enough/overkill for what I typically do. I use a lot of plugins such as EastWest, Spitfire, etc., with Logic Pro X and Dorico 5. My compositions range from 80-track Logic projects to symphonies in Dorico.


Currently, I am using a 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip. Typically, I have infrequent system overload issues with Logic (I always work from an external drive), but I would like for the program to flow better.



Thanks in advance!

Chien-Tai Chen

Posted on Jul 10, 2024 03:06 PM

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Jul 10, 2024 05:51 PM in response to citynoah

I know this will be an unpopular opinion among the loyal Apple users frequenting this forum, but I believe most Logic system overload problems on Apple Silicon are not because of insufficient complete processing power, but because of sometimes very uneven distribution of loads onto a specific core, mostly when using processing-heavy 3rd party plugins on the mix bus.


It feels that optimisation has been neglected here and partly even like a regression compared to load balancing on earlier Intel Macs. Apart from the number of actual performance cores, the increased CPU speeds of newer models, sometimes at the cost of higher cooling needs, are a certain advantage, about 20 percent per generation from M1 to M2 to M3.


To sum it up, in my opinion the actual problem is the very uneven use of processing power among cores when using 3rd party plugins, and that is something that right now mostly brute force is fixing via higher clocked and then more heavily cooled CPUs, just like in the late Intel Mac era.


Mac Studio or not does not make a big difference here, even though the number of performance cores are maxed out compared to other Macs, and the possible RAM and SSD/NVME memory are greater.

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Appropriate Mac Studio for Logic Pro X and other music software

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