Oh yeah, this is completely true. It would be a shoebox that barely ran Windows 98 and it wouldn't make much difference, and Apple's tools have completely failed to keep pace with this reality.
Makes sense why the framerate is so bad during some of the playback scenes. Also makes sense as multiple editors will be sharing the same editing tasks and it’s easier to share a single resource with the scenes loaded that are connected to local storage, and manipulate remotely, versus trying to pull that content to your machine and then push it back.
Bingo. So many decisions made perfect sense once I realized Apple is basically a lifestyle brand that makes electronics, and Microsoft is a massive bureaucratic B2B conglomerate. Totally explained Microsoft’s ineptitude with consumer facing products (remember Windows Phone? Zune?), yet they have a stranglehold on the business world. This is the opposite: Apple is designed for locking individuals into its lifestyle (or ecosystem, if you prefer), and has mostly given up on enterprise facing products.
Heh, it sure would be nice if they made a computer that was explicitly for getting work done (hell, they could call it a "workstation"). I miss the days when big tech still saw a market for this ...
What are you referring to? Microsoft’s developer tools are top notch. I’d pick visual studio over Xcode any day of the week - Xcode is so crazy buggy that I don’t know how anyone at Apple gets work done on it. And VSCode is probably the most popular ide on the planet.
They own GitHub, they make Visual Studio Code, they made C#/.NET open-source and cross-platform, they added Linux support to Windows (twice), and they created WinGet, just off the top of my head.
They do - that’s the point of the Mac Pro. The problem is software. Lots of expensive pcie ports won’t help much when you can’t put a GPU in any of them to use cuda and such.
There’s also so much inefficient, bloated crap that ships with modern macOS that I would never pick it for a proper workstation these days. I have CPU meters in the system tray, and there’s always some stupid process gobbling up all my spare cycles. The other day it was some automatic iPhone backup process. (Why was that using so much cpu, Apple?). Sometimes it’s indexing my hard drive, or looking for faces in photos, or who knows what stupid thing. It’s always something, and its almost always first party software.
In comparison, the cores on my Linux workstation are whisper quiet, and usually idle at 0%. The computer waits for me to give it work.
There is no reason to care about this. There's two or three different mechanisms that stop background processes from having any effect on actual work you're doing.
(Namely background QoS, it only runs on the efficiency cores, and more expensive activities stop when the user is active.)
If you're having an actual specific problem report it with Feedback Assistant. If you aren't, I recommend removing all that useless monitoring stuff and getting an outdoor hobby.
As an actual performance engineer I've basically never in my life gotten a useful report from someone looking at those every day. Although other vibes based bugs like "I feel like my battery life is bad lately" often do find something.
"System activity" isn't a valuable user metric because not all CPU %s are equal and CPU % isn't a consumable resource. Fans, battery life, case temperature, some others are.
System activity can certainly cause problems like paging out all the file cache pages you wanted to use when you get back to the machine. It doesn't have to though.
This might be a bit autistic of me, but I don’t trust that random processes sitting on 100% cpu are serving me in any way. I don’t think I want this sort of background process to run on my computer at all.
Are those programs written well, or are they using so many cycles because they’re inefficient and slow? And when did I ever opt in to this? Spotlight has slowly gotten more and more horrible over time. Half the time I use it to invoke system preferences it can’t find it. Or it can’t find the applications folder. If Spotlight is this terrible, why is the hard disk indexer so busy? Is it any better engineered than spotlight? I doubt it. Likewise, I don’t want photoanalysisd looking at my photos. I don’t use that “photos by person” feature. Why does it use hour upon hour of cpu time to make this feature available - just in case I use it later I guess? Get lost.
I really wish Apple stopped adding random crappy features to macOS that I don’t use - but which burn cpu cycles. Instead, fix your shit. Indexing is fine if you make spotlight actually be good again. Photo analysis is useful if I decide it’s useful and turn it on. And maybe if Xcode and SwiftUI weren’t such a buggy, crash ridden, undocumented mess, then maybe, maybe, I’d trust you more to run random background processes.
As it stands, I don’t trust Apple - particularly their application teams - to be good custodians of my cpu.
You say that - and then I looked up and saw AMPDevicesAgent sitting at 95% CPU for the past - well, who knows how long. What even is that? Oh, some iphone sync thing. Why is it running while my laptop is on battery? I don't want my battery going flat in order to background sync my phone. In fact, I turned background phone sync off in finder a few days ago. Why is it even running?
Are these processes behaving properly or is it in some stupid infinite loop? I can't tell. Is it considered acceptable by apple for background processes to make my efficiency cores sit at 100% utilisation more or less all the time - even when I'm on battery power? How much will that reduce my laptop's battery life?
I can't tell. I have no way to tell. Its all an opaque jungle of processes running processes. Half of them are buggy half the time, and I don't know which half. It gets more complex and stupid every year.
I swear, macos seemed to run better 10 years ago when I had a computer that was many times slower. Strangely, at the time, there were no constant background processes chewing up CPU all the time like this. Tell me, how is any of this stuff making my computing experience better?
I think my preferred computer has a fast, modern CPU and software from a decade or two ago. Off the top of my head, I can't name a single feature added in macos in the last decade that I actually care about. (Excluding support for modern hardware.)
Huh? I don't find battery life to be that easy to notice. Most of the time I use my laptop, I'm at home - and I'm only on battery power because I sat on the couch and I'm too lazy to reach over and plug my laptop in. The battery goes flat sometimes on zoom calls, or when streaming. But I don't know how many hours I should expect the battery to last while on a zoom call.
The only way I could tell that my battery life has gone down would be by doing actual tests - but those are notoriously difficult - because I can't use my laptop at the same time. (Or, I guess I can - but I'd need to use it the same way across tests). It sounds like days of work to test my battery life with and without transient background tasks. I don't even know how I'd test that - because I don't know how to turn all that stuff off for the control.
I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly.
I hear you that complaining online probably won't help. But can't see how complaining about battery life in feedback assistant would help either. The situation is crappy.
> I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly.
Don't worry, I am literally telling you to do this. Apple is made entirely out of bug reports. It's their job to handle them.
I would say that you shouldn't put too much effort into it, simply because of burnout.
I use a MacBook not because it's the best software for development, but because it's the hardest to virtualize.
Our project supports the three major desktop operating systems. I have Windows and Linux VMs that I can switch to when I need to test something on those OS. No serious corporation is going to risks Hackintosh.
TBH it's still possible to use a macbook air as basically a fancy unix-like workstation that has great battery life, and not buy into any of the apple ecosystem. No icloud account, no icloud backup, no iphone, no use of itunes or appletv, no apple synchronization of anything. The day that stops being viable is the day I stop buying them.
The extent of my 'cloud' involvement with apple is the operating system software update mechanism and having an account to download Xcode, so that I can install compiler + macports on a new machine.
They use Oracle mail servers for their corporate e-mail. Ironically, the direct descendant of the Sun Internet Mail Service software I wrestled with back in the early 2000s.
As part of its new U.S. investments, Apple will work with manufacturing partners to begin production of servers in Houston later this year. A 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility, slated to open in 2026, will create thousands of jobs.
Previously manufactured outside the U.S., the servers that will soon be assembled in Houston play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advanced security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing. The servers bring together years of R&D by Apple engineers, and deliver the industry-leading security and performance of Apple silicon to the data center.
I would like to use this comment to mention Parsec. It's unbelievable how much snappier it feels compared to the default Screen Sharing. What is their secret sauce?!
I just wish it didn't require an internet connection for authentication
>How would it not require an internet connection lmao, it's a remote connection tool
I'm kinda surprised you've managed to be on HN for 5 years and never come across the concept of a "LAN" or "VPN" before, but I guess you're one of today's lucky 10000. To the first, sometimes you have machines (or VMs) local to your own network but in another physical location that you'd like to be able to access from your own system. It's a fairly significant use case, and one where no internet connection is involved whatsoever. For example it's generally desirable to locate powerful (and in turn generally loud) servers and associated gear (including environmental control, redundant power etc) in physically isolated locations from where the humans are working for noise reasons if nothing else, though security and efficiency are important as well. While it's possible to pipe raw video over IP, a quality remote desktop solution will generally be more flexible/scalable and doesn't require special (expensive) extra hardware and potentially additional fiber.
And for systems located on other LANs remote from your own, you can use a VPN to link them securely as if they had a direct physical (though higher latency/more jittery) link, again avoiding any exposure to the public net. That then reduces to the above. In both cases it's desirable to have zero unnecessary 3rd party dependencies.
It's not snark, in your reply you for whatever reason cut out the context at the end of the sentence. "Lucky 10k" is referring to this xkcd comic [0] which I thought was a pretty good one and I've tried to take to heart. I was genuinely surprised, but that's the point, what one thinks is "common sense" or "everyone knows" is always going to be brand new to someone every single day. It's happened to me lots, and is one of the delights of HN, to learn about a whole new set of use cases you've never considered before. In this case maybe it will lead them to consider how it might be useful in their own offices or homes for that matter. Making a powerful machine run quietly is both challenging and can be fairly expensive. But if you have the physical space available, then you may be able to just use powerful, cheap loud fans by virtue of putting it in an area of a basement or the like away from living space/home office and accessing it remotely. Depending on how you do so the quality can be the same as if you were sitting in front of it.
Ah you got me I guess, didn't think of the VPN case. It does seem like an asterisk in the grand scheme, especially since the applicability of this tech in LANs is very limited (there's no lag in LAN, and it's already internet in the sense that it uses IP, you would need to consider an ethernet framing tool or a unix socket tool like X11 for truly local-remote protocol), so this would only useful in this network-virtualized VPN ecosystem (and also in scenarios where you want to ensure no third party handles the data, by self hosting the server part of parsec)
What is clear to me is that Parsec belongs to a newer breed of remote tools, inline with TeamViewer and AnyDesk, that primarily respond to the need of post ISP firewall era, where by default ports are blocked, so peerless remote tooling becomes harder to install and administer, these have a client-server-client based architecture. And Parsec builds upon this architecture by placing some secret lag reducing sauce on their Server instead of just authenticating and forwarding.
My guess is that they have a proprietary predictive and interpolation based OS algorithm tightly coupled to the OS UI, and this secret sauce lives and is closed source on their backend, so you would kind of need to host a third server in the middle, maybe we will see a competitor for a VPN niche, or an open source alternative.
If an open source solution arises, I bet that it would require an installation of a server, and it would probably start with X11 or Wayland tight coupling.
Cloudless Fluid requires a Teams Enterprise subscription. Or one can manually enter IP addresses. Their default is cloud mediation, so yes, they presume a working internet connection.
Try Moonlight, similar tech but open/no cloud auth. Works better over local networks though as opposed to internet (which you need to set up via vpn/portforward etc)
This bummed me out, but it looks like it's not? From the Sunshine (server) GitHub page[1]:
Sunshine is a self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight. Offering low latency, cloud gaming server capabilities with support for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs for hardware encoding. Software encoding is also available.
Sunshine/Moonlight are awesome, but fwiw in this specific context it's worth noting that macOS support with Sunshine is still extremely experimental and janky. It's Homebrew only for now, and when I tried it out last the main release didn't install at all, only the beta. And then locally even over a 10 gig network while the image quality was great the latency was abysmal, even before other oddities. I will say this is enormous improvement over even a year ago, but given the initial gaming focused use case I suspect that (not at all unreasonably!) they've prioritized client capabilities when it comes to Macs for now.
Last I looked, they didn't support passing through USB devices like Wacom tablets or edit controllers or space mice. I am eager for that stuff to work so that I can start using moonlight/sunshine for more of my work.
Is there a free alternative to Screen Sharing that is more performant? I'm just surprised at the latency and cpu usage of Screen Sharing on my lan. (Mac specific)
Is it really just authentication? I thought the whole screen data was passed through an intermediate server, but I can see how a peer 2 peer system would be more efficient. I can't imagine the wonky NAT hacks that need to take place though.
Avid does have a cloud based solution. This isn't that.
It's a clever way to have your media centralized and yet have access to editors all over the world.
And a modern AVID system does not struggle with a few editors accessing the same footage.
First of all it's usually a proxy format and Secondly the storage can deliver a combined 800MB pr box sustained for x number of editors at the same time.
Nothing these days "struggle(s) with a few editors accessing the same footage".
AVID hasn't been at the forefront of video editing since the Avid/1 / ABVB days. They sell a reasonably usable program with horrible hardware (since Meridien hardware - it's good they finally let us use other hardware such as BlackMagic), but never truly fix large problems. People therefore stay on a specific version of the software for ages, because everyone is scared of new and different bugs.
AVID's shared media offerings are tenfold the cost of other storage options simply because they have a flag on the mounted volumes that tells Media Composer to allow project and media sharing. "800MB pr box sustained" means nothing because anyone can do that easily with commodity hardware.
In other words, AVID is milking their cash cow and they really don't innovate or even try to offer a good product.
Apple, on the other hand, destroyed their professional editing products, then replaced them with decent tools, but ones that are worlds different. Many people have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, if you want to edit 8K ProRes, Final Cut Pro makes it simple on any ARM-based Mac.
First, facts don't rely on the amount of experience the person sharing them has. But I do get that it's easier to take someone at their word when they have lots of experience, so yes, I've worked on all sorts of projects of all sizes.
I think you've been sold a bunch of ideas. For instance, Avid has no dependency on Blackmagic. They use Open IO, which means you can use any card that supports Open IO, whether Aja, Blackmagic, Bluefish, Matrox, whatever.
Nexus / ISIS isn't special. The flag is literally just a flag that tells Media Composer to enable bin and media sharing. It can be enabled on any kind of sharing - NFS, AFS, SMB, et cetera. For example, check out Mimiq software for enabling it wherever you want.
It's just that you get everything wrong, if you had real experience you would know that.. for a fact.
AVID depends on Blackmagic if you knew what you were talking about you would know (this is where you Google i bet)
The NEXIS hardware/software isn't just a flag, another visit to Google
First, I don't use Google, but that's not the point.
Second, please tell me how the fact that you can use no video interface card or Aja means you're dependent on Blackmagic.
Third, please tell me how bin locking on ISIS / Nexis is different than bin locking on third party shared storage with the AVID sharing flag turned on.
You've offered literally no searchable facts. If I search for anecdotes about how ISIS / Nexis are different, I'm only going to get marketing fluff.
So offer something of substance. Claiming someone is wrong without even saying what they're wrong about is not how any of this works.
AVID sells AVID branded Blackmagic hardware, come again how they aren't dependent, and as you know from your vaste fact based AVID experience that has been a problem since Apple Silicon.
Bin locking is half the story, the AVID Client enables link aggregation to the NEXIS storage, 4 NICS = 4 times the bandwidth, you won't get that with 3rd party hacks.
The NEXIS Storage uses a AVID custom filesystem that does what you claim isn't special, delivers sustained 800MB even if 20 clients are reading files.
Now please, before you make more fact based claims, i have used and still use the 3rd party "bin lock" solutions when I have special cases, and i can promise you, an ordinary file server does not compare when many clients are hitting the storage.
Substance delivered, lets see if there is a chance of someone learning something.
All I can say is that you've been sold selling points. I appreciate the attempt, but:
1) How does AVID selling Blackmagic hardware make that a dependency? You can just as easily buy Aja hardware. "This depends on that" means it requires it. AVID systems do not require Blackmagic hardware at all. If you think they do, please explain.
2) Bin locking and media sharing (client specific paths in "OMFI MediaFiles" and "Avid MediaFiles") is a flag that is either off or on. That has nothing to do with all of the other things that have been sold to you as "special" about AVID storage.
For instance, link aggregation has been built in to macOS since the early days of Mac OS X. Also, it really doesn't matter. If you want something that literally does 4 gigabytes a second, you can do that all sorts of ways with current Macs - no need for multiple NICs.
Anyhow, speed is largely irrelevant for editing systems. The only time speed matters is if the storage can't keep up. You're not watching video at 2,400 frames per second as you're scrubbing through video at 100x speed, so people who are concerned with "800 MB" (you're not even saying per second, or anything like that) are no different than the people who want the wanna-be muscle car that puts out 500 horsepower but that are just going to and from the store. Who cares? If you care, you know. If you have the need, you know. If you're working on 4K uncompressed, you're not doing it on shared storage, anyway - that's just silly. But if you REALLY need to do 4K uncompressed on shared storage, guess what? You're not using AVID, because it can't support that :)
Otherwise, "800 MB" is just a sales number. I just build a NAS for less than $2500 that does 1.2 gigabytes per second, and I wasn't even trying to make it fast.
> i have used and still use the 3rd party "bin lock" solutions when I have special cases, and i can promise you, an ordinary file server does not compare when many clients are hitting the storage.
Those are two different things. If you choose to conflate them, that's up to you, but I can easily show shared storage that makes AVID's look outright pokey, particularly with twenty clients, just as I can show you software that turns the AVID bin locking off or on, so you're not fooling anyone by trying to suggest that all bin locking file servers are somehow inferior, or that they're inferior because they support bin locking, or whatever way you want others to think they're connected.
They're separate things. You do understand that, right?
I hope you take away from this that there are more products than just the half a dozen that are most common, and that products outside of the post world often make products in the post world look ridiculous, if in part because the ones in the post world are a generation older and multiple times the price. But because people in the post world don't know any better, they more often than not spend literally ten times the going price to get something with an AVID sticker on it, even when you can show them that the AVID product is just a rebadged Seagate storage array or whatever.
1) You don't think they depend on Blackmagic when they have sold their hardware to their customers.. what?
2) Let me quote someone, you:
"AVID's shared media offerings are tenfold the cost of other storage options simply because they have a flag on the mounted volumes that tells Media Composer to allow project and media sharing".
So what is what? And i knew you would come with a long write up about "link aggregation" you don't understand it, not a surprise!
But at least you use a car reference, AVID is the Ferrari, the "I CAN BUILD A NAS" is the useless muscle car. And of course they have gear that can handle uncompressed Footage, please, they are the standard for winning an Oscar.
I take away from this that you have no idea of how this work, it's not called "bin locking servers" that's just software. And it's not the hardware that makes a NEXIS special, it's the AVIDFS. I am only writing this for others that might read this so they understand.
I spent some time a while back thinking about a web-native video editing tool with very lightweight client demands. This came up after watching all those LTT videos about their storage & networking misadventures around the editors. It seems something approximating this (or superior to it) has already been developed.
The way you develop & manage the proxies appears to be the biggest part of the battle in making things go fast. There's no reason for editor workstations to be operating with the full res native material unless theres a targeted reason to do so.
Before Covid your idea was the one everyone was pursuing, including AVID with a embarrassing system that i never saw a in a satisfying version.
With Covid remote access became the norm and the online/proxy workflow more or less died. Avid still has a working version (better than the original) but it's widely used.
Proxies are used for several reasons, expensive storage, heavy codecs at high bitrates or multicams.
They are typically avoided whenever you can because the online part of a proxy based workflow can be a challenge. And especially if you have tight deadlines you want all the variables out of the way.
That is a pile of contradictory statements. And since you're upset by that idea and unwilling to re-read what you wrote, here's some spoon-feeding:
"With Covid remote access became the norm and the online/proxy workflow more or less died"
No; remote access DEMANDS a proxy workflow, since you're not going to edit full-resolution files over the Internet. So it did not "die;" just the opposite. Witness the entire "camera to cloud" marketing mania that swept NAB a few years ago. That's based entirely on the rapid upload of proxy files to begin editing ASAP.
From NAB last year:
“We introduced the [Blackmagic Camera] iPhone app a little while ago,” said Bob Caniglia, director of sales for the company in North America. “You can shoot with that phone, work with the cloud service, share proxies. The camera to Blackmagic cloud to Resolve workflow started with the camera app. The Ursa Broadcast G2 [camera] is now in beta for that software too. That's a good direction on where we're going.”
But back to your assertions: "Proxies are used for several reasons, expensive storage, heavy codecs at high bitrates or multicams. They are typically avoided whenever you can because the online part of a proxy based workflow can be a challenge"
That makes absolutely no sense. You just claimed that proxies are used to avoid "heavy codecs at high bitrates" but then claim "the online part of a proxy based workflow can be a challenge." But you neglected to provide a single example of what's so "challenging" about it, especially when you just cited proxies as an advantage.
Thus, since you pushed the issue, we see that in fact it is you who has no idea what you're talking about. But hey, keep insulting other users.
LTT is probably not a good/representative example for anything. They'll do infra stunts for content, then it will fail and they'll get content from the failure and content from the new thing. It's in their interest to be slightly on the bleeding edge and slightly janky while having access to subsidised hardware.
And I mean that in a completely positive "it's awesome" way. Just... not the problems anyone else should be facing.
I Avid too. And manage two sizable (300+ virtualized editors) on-premise VDI systems, and one bigger(somedays 600+) AWS-based one that holds more Adobe than Avid. Remote experience is a bandwidth and latency thing more than anything else, but the technology is limited - for example you can't do a good ProTools system virtualized with a control surface and sync can be a real pain to sort out. As for Avid's solutions to the problem: they do it a couple of ways:
- Composer/Nexis all hosted on Cloud (AWS): fine, but pricy and the Nexis experience is meh
- Composer hosted Cloud/Nexis hosted on Prem: actually works well, but you need to have a direct-connect to AWS (the network can be pricey)
- Composer on on-premise VDI/Nexis hosted on Prem: works really well, and I have a bias towards this instead of fully in cloud for not only security reasons since the TCO is less
- Composer Cloud (or whatever they call it today - used to Composer Sphere): this is a setup where instead you stream real-time proxy to the Composer from MediaCentral. You can download hi-res media if you need to. It works ok, but it more suited for News workflows. Security is a thing with this solution.
- Adobe/OpenDrives on AWS: I mention this, because we do this too. This has all sorts of things to talk about, and is pretty good, but, again, you gotta know what you are doing.
For the on-premise ones, VMWare is our Hypervisor of choice, and, yup, we are looking for other options. And we have all the usual IT problems: domain management, updates, roaming desktops, etc.
If you are looking for 3rd-monitor image viewing (like in the old days with hardware), you can swing NDI or 2110. NDI is ok, and for 2110 you need a network and router to handle it.
The "600+, AWS" detail is great to read, as confirmation that this kind of thind does work. We're urrently setting up remote AWS systems and finding a lot of moving parts for getting smooth playback while editing in AE/PPro.
If you have time to expand on the "bandwith and latency thing", I'd love to hear more. Even a "you need to be geographically within X miles of the instance" ballpark figure would be wonderful to know.
Looks good, don't see the drawback for this usecase
"These editors aren't working on Macs, per se. They're working around them. Sure, there's an Apple logo in the top-left corner (two, actually), but it feels superfluous, knowing that the software isn’t directly on the machine and it just as easily be running on a Windows or Linux box a thousand miles away"
But the source AND target of the remote connections are both macs, pretty straightforward
the point they make is that if you're using a remote desktop program to remotely edit videos you don't need a mac on the client side.
what would have been a far better PR is if Final Cut offered enterprise solution with "server" part that holds videos and does the heavy lifting and "client" part that works with miniatures doesn't let you export anything to disk and all that
I'm not advocating for vendor locking, it's not what I said. I said if they wanted to advertise macs for enterprise video editing they should have implemented this in FCP natively.
This however wouldn't be vendor locking because remoting would still be an option.
Instead they've shown that remote desktop is the most reliable way to do this kind of job because there isn't anything better.
It looks like an absolutely brutal way to edit video[1], even with an incredible internet connection. This is a compromise courtesy of the reality of the Apple hardware ecosystem and not some sort of ideal way of working.
Sometimes I play Civilization through an RDP connection to my desktop box below my desk over a dedicated ethernet connection and that's bad enough. Trying to do full video editing, with critical concerns over every pixel, color and timing....oof!
[1] - as they note, you can see him doing it over the remote connection and it looks hurky-jerk disastrous.
I was a diehard PC person but getting colors to display right and consistently on Apple hardware is much easier… so I admitted defeat.
p.s. I’m the guy that will point out that one of your white lightbulbs has a slight greener tint over your other white lightbulbs (aka it’s not slight to me).
It’s crazy how much of a mess color management is on Windows, even now. I used to try to use a calibrator-produced profile for my gaming PC’s monitor but keeping it applied was hacky and it still didn’t work everywhere.
It is pretty obvious that their use of Apple hardware is forced on them by Apple for this show.
As said in TFA, he could have had a Chromebook on his desk. And for that matter he could have been remoted into a massive server from that Chromebook with a cluster of virtualized GPUs, hosting a dozen editors on a monster backbone. Apple has nothing like that, so instead they have like a NAS connected to a dozen Macs back in the office to host a dozen editors. It's super dodgy, and is a limit, and, as is the point of the article, kind of highlights some serious gaps in Apple's hardware ecosystem.
They're using Avid and Ableton for this show, and then some third party remoting to connect to the Macs. This wasn't really an Apple-first production.
If the discussion was about the best way to play games remotely, your curious would be a great sneer. But it isn't. It's about someone doing full-screen video editing over a remote connection. And FWIW, remoting Civilization is a magnitude easier than full-screen video editing, so my comparison was to something much simpler.
I don't only play Civilization. In fact the reason I have the Windows box under my desk is for CUDA work on a big GPU while my main computer is an M4 Mac. And FWIW, Steam Remote Play is utter dogshit compared to RDP. RDP is actually one of the best remoting technologies.
Still can't make highly dynamic desktops super ideal remote.
For all the failings of Google at running the service as a product to consumers, Stadia actually worked. GeForce Now/others are still around. It's absolutely down to the connection, but the technology's there.
Indeed, I still have a GeForce Now "founders" subscription as my son uses it, and I did originally use it to scratch the Civilization itch. At least until 2k got greedy and removed it.
But...wait...just looking and it appears that Civilization has joined GFN again. Apparently they saw GFN as a selling point for 7 so they offered it again. Huh.
> It turns out that RDP is one of the best remoting technologies.
I was very surprised by this too. I think it was Windows 8.1, when going from one machine to another, was basically a no-compromise experience for most gaming, except for FPS—the latency was always a little too high.
Nowadays I can use Parsec over WiFi at 4K and almost can't tell the difference. Almost. And only with a controller.
There's a lot of things that are possible and even adequate, but not a good idea unless you're sure that the org will not cheap out on Internet connection or other necessary infra.
Well, it is similar to RDP with H.264 (and yes, you can do H.264 in RDP, and yes, the text has no artifacts), but not RDP where it regards authentication.
I'm surprised at this point Apple still doesn't have some sort of solution for cloud/remote editing integrated into Final Cut. What I mean is a native desktop GUI but with the video files streaming from a remote location for the previews, thubmnails, etc. Heck, the GUI could even be a web app.
If the GUI is running locally I don't think latency would be that bad given that you're not on the other side of the world and you have a decent connection.
> requirements in its EULA that seem designed to protect its hardware business above all else
To get this you have to understand Apple's business model. They sell style, quality, and exclusivity, and ease of use. They can't ensure those things if they separate the hardware from the software. I'm sure they would love to make money from software licenses without the hardware. But it would end up creating new problems that would dilute the value of their product.
The proof is in the pudding. They're the most valuable company in the world because of their limitations, not despite them.
I use Keynote to make my presentations, and one time I wanted to build a presentation with someone else. I asked my friend who has worked at Apple for 20 years, "How do you guys build Keynote presentations together? There doesn't seem to be an easy way to do that?".
He said, "We don't collaborate at Apple because of the (perceived) risk of leaks. None of our tools are built for collaboration". Apple is famously closed about information sharing, to the point where on some floors every office requires its own badge, and sometimes even the cabinets within.
So it doesn't surprise me that their video editing tools are designed for a single user at a time.
Edit: This happened about six years ago, they have since added some collaboration tools, however it's more about the attitude at Apple in general and why their own tools lag on collaboration.
Edit 2: After the replies I thought I was going crazy. I actually checked my message history and found the discussion. I knew this happened pre-COVID, but it was actually in 2013, 12 years ago. I didn't think it was that long ago.
That's a weird answer, Keynote can shares presentations, and multiple people can work on the same presentation in real-time, either on the macOS/iOS or the web version.
The feature has been available for years: https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/keynote/tan4e89e275c/m...
The collaboration features were introduced in 2013 on the web version, and in 2016 on the native versions. And maybe check which features are actually not available before dismissing it.
The documentation always refers to the current versions of the software, and the latest version of iWork always requires being on latest or near-latest OS. Collaboration also requires all clients to be on the latest version of the software.
Well the issue is that stories from “friends of friends” tend to get super unreliable very fast. Unless someone is coming on the record as having been employed themselves, stories from friends are almost always a lot of BS.
Huh. At my last company, probably less so presentation collaboration (in my case, less though still some if I were co-presenting) but shared documents with editors and so forth were huge. Better built-in workflows would have been nice ut it worked well enough with a bit of discipline, e.g. once you do a handoff you (mostly) don't make further changes unless you noting a typo or something.
I worked at Apple over a decade ago and no idea what OP is talking about.
There is plenty of collaboration in the company but it's typically constrained to the current project you're working on. And working in enterprise companies today it is no different.
I seem to recall an anecdote from a colleague that interviewed with one of Apple's security teams. The actual room where the interview took place was locked from the outside and you had to use a badge reader on the inside to leave. I guess they didn't want folks wandering if someone needed to make a restroom break, but I can't help but wonder about issues like, say, a fire...
A few times in my life I really had to get through a locked door and asked myself "What would Kojak do?" and always got through with at most three kicks.
One wonders how well that is tested, as well as what happens if a fire goes detected, or if someone's badge stops working, or if there are technical difficulties with the badge reader or its infrastructure...
There are far too many things that can go wrong with such a setup.
I have personally worked in buildings that had a "badge readers all stopped working for a while" problem. Fortunately, the badge readers only affected ingress and not egress, and only controlled exterior doors and labs; that's easily solved with a doorstop and a person checking badges. I can very easily imagine what could have happened in those buildings if a badge was required to leave a conference room.
And if you want to make that scenario terrifying, imagine being there on a weekend or holiday.
> I can very easily imagine what could have happened in those buildings if a badge was required to leave a conference room.
The facilities team and fire marshal are also easily capable of imagining this, already have, and you can ask them about it.
In this case the doors would fail open, or are made of glass and can be broken down. It's not a /really/ secure location. It's just a tech company that likes to seem secure during work hours. After hours of course the janitors get to see everything.
You are utterly missing the point, to the point that you are analyzing this conversation through entirely the incorrect lens, in an effort to belittle.
In an effort to steelman your comment, you may have incorrectly interpreted the earlier "I wonder how well that is tested" as "this is unsafe and illegal" rather than "among the many things wrong with this, this has increased the number of things that can go wrong, and is less safe on an absolute scale, whether or not it's strictly legal and up to code", and then assumed everything else in subsequent comments was about fire safety, rather than being a series of points in support of locking people into a building is a bad idea.
You are asserting the competence of the fire marshal, as an argument in a conversation about locking employees and interviewees and visitors inside a company's office rooms.
What you may think was happening here: "heh, nerds think they're smarter than the fire marshal and nobody involved thought of this until they came along; of course there'd be a way for sufficiently capable humans to get out of a room if something went wrong, and of course this will have been made to pass fire code, which is the only thing being talked about here".
What was actually happening here: While with sufficient analysis (which has most likely been done) it is possible to provide a sufficient degree of fire safety to make it not against fire code to lock people into a building, that doesn't make it right or zero-cost or risk-free, nor does it alleviate the stress and potential problematic-but-non-fatal situations that could arise. At no point was the primary purpose of the comment "people might burn in a fire", even though the risk of that is not zero at any time and has likely been raised (within presumably-acceptable-to-fire-code levels) by such a setup.
When I said "I can very easily imagine what could have happened", I was not imagining a fire burning down the people with the building inside. I was imagining how few failures it would require to end up with people being trapped in a room for long enough to reach the level of stress required to physically break out of a room, compounded by having worked in labs where the air conditioning was sometimes woefully insufficient.
It takes a lot of stress to get normal people to the point that they're willing to break windows or doors or walls in order to escape a room, and nobody should be subjected to such things, because there's zero security justification for a company locking people inside at any time.
More importantly, the HQ is built in California, which despite appearances isn't a capitalist dystopia but a local government dystopia.
Any random local government staffer is the most powerful person in the universe and obeying them is a religious edict. Apple has zero power to disobey anything in the fire code and they're probably not even capable of imagining doing so. That's why the random suburb they're in has the best public schools in the country and all the houses are like $5 million.
As an example there's currently a big empty lot next to said HQ where the mall used to be, because a random woman on the city council has blocked apartment construction for the last decade, because she thinks Apple employees will move in and molest local high school students.
Grenfell Tower was fireproof as originally designed. The problem was renovations that compromised the original design, by adding highly flammable cladding panels to the exterior that allowed the fire to spread easily around the entire building.
Power failure is a best case. I've observed firsthand cases of "badge access system went down, none of the doors open". That's less of a problem for external doors that allow people out but not in, because it can be solved by propping the door and posting a guard who checks badges. It's a massive problem when conference rooms and offices lock people in.
there is also the earthquake issue where interior doors (badge access or no) can become jammed. thus god invented the crowbar. my Big Company emergency response team folks all had one. also good for head crabs.
I've been working at Apple for almost 12 years. While secrecy is indeed paramount, once a tool is internally blessed, we collaborate normally using it. Keynote collaboration is actually pretty standard nowadays.
Opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.
Didn't the article say some floors require keys for different offices and sometimes filing cabinets.
That implies every floor is different which matches what you are saying.
Most of the stories that have come out felt like they were the image Apple wanted to give. It started with Apple going after missing iphone that was left at a bar. We've heard those working on latest design for the next iphone were sequestered away from the rest of the company. I've always thought it was marketing spin and I'm glad we have an ex-apple employee confirming this. Back in the 'Lisa' days Apple did split and silo divisions, Apple did closely guard new iPhone designs with very few leaks happening but the rest of the mythology is more marketing.
I think you are drawing the wrong conclusions here. I have never worked at Apple, but know many people that have. Every team is different but the overarching theme is that they are very secretive internally, especially around hardware. They are so secretive that someone I know was working on a project that their own manager wasn’t allowed to know about.
Was it like a temporary assignment to another team? Did the manager at least know what team that was? Or have any idea when the employee is going to return full-time to the tasks of their primary team?
Apple uses functional organizational structure. Every product needs a cooperation of all functions to produce results. So engineer on os team working on drivers could be working on driver for the new hw part, but other team members including their manager are not necessarily disclosed on that hw.
Anything Apple gets attention. But any large organization does various forms of segmentation. Many of these stories are “true”, but also bullshit.
I worked for a company that did some work for the federal government. Boring stuff. Their compliance rules essentially required that we firewall the folks with operational access to their data from the rest of the company. We included the physical offices in that to avoid certain expenses and controls companywide.
> Not to mention that blanket statements about Apple are absurd
It isn't absurd as what GP mentions was imported into Amazon by Dave Limp, a former Apple C-suite. It was a terrible culture shock for most of the ICs in my team being reorg'd reporting in to Limp, after Steve Kessel (of Kindle fame), the previous leader, went on a sabbatical.
The company claiming something you said, even out of context, could be interpreted as coming from the company. If you choose to disclose you work for a company, you become a spokesperson for that company unless you disclaim those words (even then, there are other considerations to make regardless of whose opinion is being expressed, because you linked yourself to the company.).
By putting that, they decrease the likelihood of reprocussion in the workplace for things said outside of the workplace.
You can still get in hot water for anything you say that ties back to you or the company regardless if you disclose who your employer is.
This is the grey-area that corporations typically carve out in a social-media policy so that employees can engage in discussions around their employer without being on behalf of their employer.
It's still a perilous position to put yourself in as an employee. Innocent and innocuous things can always be misunderstood or misinterpreted.
What happens when you use that disclaimer and are self-employed though?
Both are designed to replicate the same functionality as Concurrence and Quantrix (itself a clone of Lotus Improv) both by Lighthouse Design, who made lots of apps for NeXTSTEP and were purchased by Sun.
Steve Jobs used Concurrence on a ThinkPad and also a Toshiba laptop to make presentations prior to Keynote (which I believe was created internally for him at first) even while back at Apple.
I wouldn't be surprised if their attitude toward remote collaboration probably changed pretty significantly around 5 years ago. But fair enough that it may not yet be a primary consideration in all of their software.
Obviously a huge bias here (I work for Figma), but it’s one of my favorite things about Figma Slides. The product still has a ways to go, but man being able to actually be collaborative and not feel like you’re fighting against the software is a game changer.
Video is a harder game due to the processing and data requirements, but I know that there are a lot of startups trying to make it collaborative first. I’m really excited for that to be the default.
A quick note on this for non-editing folks: in context, a "proxy" here is a low-res version of your actual footage. It's common to use them while editing a cut together, and then to replace them with the full-res versions at the very end.
Isn't it also true that Apple have dozens of different scm / developer platforms scattered around the company? e.g. some teams use gitlab, others phabricator etc etc
I think so as I just saw this on their jobs website:
> We are seeking an experienced Software Architect specialized in source control systems to join our dynamic team. The ideal candidate will have expertise in designing, implementing, and managing systems like GitHub, GitLab, Perforce, Bitbucket, and Artifactory.
>Apple is famously closed about information sharing, to the point where on some floors every office requires its own badge, and sometimes even the cabinets within.
“Severance” is exactly how Apple’s New Product Security and Public Relations organizations would like all employees to be, to an absolute T. However, the rest of the company is much more pragmatic and understands well the value of collaboration and employees having enriched lives that they share with the workplace, since that leads to greater innovation and works well as a recruiting tool as well.
They were BSing you or working in a different part of the company than SWE.
Back in the day Keynote files would just be passed around via a shared server so you and the people you were collaborating with could make and merge changes between them, eg I’d do one part of a presentation, Rick would do another part, and we’d copy our slides out of and paste them into each others’ decks to get a complete version for rehearsing with. If we had notes for each other, we’d give each other the notes out of hand rather than just directly change each others’ slides.
There’s a lot of mythology that people just make up about how secrecy works at Apple. It’s mostly sensible.
>So it doesn't surprise me that their video editing tools are designed for a single user at a time.
The editors of Severance are actually using Avid. For music composition they're using Albeton. Neither are Apple products. The remote desktop product they're using is Jump Desktop.
While the show is an Apple TV+ show, and they happen to use to Macs in the process, this has shockingly little to do with Apple tools or products.
>but it was actually in 2013, 12 years ago. I didn't think it was that long ago.
I know some people will say this is because of age. But I want to suggest I often thought of COVID years 2019 to 2023s as a single year / event. For reasons I cant quite fathom. So when I think of 2015 it would only be like a 2023-2019, 2018, 2017, 2016. So around 4-5 years ago.
Except "uncle that works at Nintendo" is a meme because Nintendo of America is a small business doesn't develop almost anything, whereas "friend that works at Apple" is less unreasonable for an American tech worker forum to purport.
> We don't collaborate at Apple because of the (perceived) risk of leaks.
That sentence, by itself, is more or less correct (from my 26 years at Apple). However, it suggests/implies things that are not correct.
1) In case you got the impression: Apple certainly does not design software to be non-collaborative simply because it would enable sharing/leaking when used within Apple. I would say that Apple has been focused since Day 1 on a mindset where one-computer equals one-user. The mindset was that way really until Jobs was fired, discovered UNIX, and then returned with Log In and Permissions. To this day though I think collaboration is often an afterthought.
So too do they seem to be focused on the singular creative. I suspect Google's push into Web-based (and collaborative) productivity apps (Google Docs, etc.) forced Apple's hand in that department — forced Apple to push collaborative features in their productivity suite.
2) Of course Apple collaborates internally. But to be sure it is based on need-to-know. No one on the hardware team is going to give an open preso in an Apple lunchroom on their hardware roadmap. But you can bet there are private meetings with leads from the Kernel Team on that very roadmap.
That internal secrecy, where engineers from different teams could no longer just hang out in the cafeteria and chat about what they were working on went away when Jobs came back. It probably goes without saying it was rigorously enforced when the iPhone was a twinkle in Apple's eye.
The internal secrecy was sold to employees as preserving the "surprise and delight" when a product is finally unveiled but at the same time, as Apple moved to the top of the S&P500, there were a lot of outsiders that very definitely wanted to know Apple's plans.
3) Lastly, yes, plenty of floors and wings of buildings are accessible only with those with the correct badge permissions. I could not, for example, as an engineer badge in to the Design floor.
Individual cabinets needing badge access? I have no idea about that. I am aware of employees hanging black curtains in their office windows when secret hardware would come out of their (key-locked) drawers. (On a floor that is locked down to only those disclosed, obviously the black curtains become unnecessary.)
This matches my experience. In addition I was advised/strongly encouraged to "go dark" on social media and refrain from ever discussing work at lunch, even with teammates.
My badge only worked where I had explicitly been given access, and desks were to be kept clear and all prototypes or hardware had to be locked in drawers and/or covered with black cloths. Almost every door was a blind door with a second door inside, so that if the outer one opened, it was not possible to see into the inner space.
Apple is famously a company that encourages cross functional collaboration, as anyone who’s ever interviewed there could attest to, or known more than your friend. They’re secretive yes, but also collaborative.
You can even read any accounts of famous shipped products to back up that cross functional collaboration has been their culture for many decades. Jobs mentioned it many times, and many articles have been written about it.
Additionally keynote (and the entire iWorks suite) has had collaborative editing for years now.
I suspect your friend is likely misinformed or not reliable?
>...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
>Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
Nope cloud and local processing is always gonna be 2 things and not one will replace the other. Cloud has been around, and if you look at games nobody wants to play their game thru a service like Stadia.
Ultimately / objectively I agree, but subjectively I'm not so sure -- I recently gave NVIDIA GeForce NOW a whirl (cloud gaming, $19.99/month (cheaper prepaid) for an 'Ultimate' account which instantly connects you to an RTX 4080 VM + HDR + max 240fps) and it just works. Super smooth, realtime gameplay at max graphics.
I wanted to test it out given that my son was looking to upgrade his PC and not only are component costs through the roof, there's barely any inventory to be had if you were trying to buy exactly what you want! (thanks, resellers...)
It's not a perfect setup obviously -- really only ideal for AAA games with cloud saves, no mods, etc (Cyberpunk 2077, that kind of thing), and I won't make the argument that it's ultimately better than local for gaming (it's not), but I will say that in my experience, the hardware-rendered framerates are through the roof, it streams seamlessly at high resolution, and I could see envision a scenario where video editing on an appropriate VM should be virtually indistinguishable from local.
Couldn't the traffic be LAN? Everyone keeps mentioning 'over the internet' - the device they're doing the editing on could be in a different room in the same building over gigabit++ speeds.
The reason is to never allow anyone (even the editors) to have actual access to the show's files/images. Remote software can prohibit copy/paste, file transfers, and screenshots. I worked in a post facility with 100s of people all remoting in to a server rack down the hall.
I've seen NICE DCV be used for this too. Amazon bought them, so it's free if the server end is on AWS, but they will also sell you licenses for your own hardware too. It's essentially 4k60 video streaming where the video is your desktop and they use all the tricks they've developed for media streaming here as well.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] thread* More powerful machines centrally located
* COVID-19 practices make lots of people in one place undesirable
* It's easy for rogue editors to steal stuff, and this prevents that
When the people using your tools hate the tools, that isn't a good sign.
They own GitHub, they make Visual Studio Code, they made C#/.NET open-source and cross-platform, they added Linux support to Windows (twice), and they created WinGet, just off the top of my head.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/
There’s also so much inefficient, bloated crap that ships with modern macOS that I would never pick it for a proper workstation these days. I have CPU meters in the system tray, and there’s always some stupid process gobbling up all my spare cycles. The other day it was some automatic iPhone backup process. (Why was that using so much cpu, Apple?). Sometimes it’s indexing my hard drive, or looking for faces in photos, or who knows what stupid thing. It’s always something, and its almost always first party software.
In comparison, the cores on my Linux workstation are whisper quiet, and usually idle at 0%. The computer waits for me to give it work.
(Namely background QoS, it only runs on the efficiency cores, and more expensive activities stop when the user is active.)
If you're having an actual specific problem report it with Feedback Assistant. If you aren't, I recommend removing all that useless monitoring stuff and getting an outdoor hobby.
As an actual performance engineer I've basically never in my life gotten a useful report from someone looking at those every day. Although other vibes based bugs like "I feel like my battery life is bad lately" often do find something.
The “bug” here is system activity I’m not deliberately invoking.
System activity can certainly cause problems like paging out all the file cache pages you wanted to use when you get back to the machine. It doesn't have to though.
Are those programs written well, or are they using so many cycles because they’re inefficient and slow? And when did I ever opt in to this? Spotlight has slowly gotten more and more horrible over time. Half the time I use it to invoke system preferences it can’t find it. Or it can’t find the applications folder. If Spotlight is this terrible, why is the hard disk indexer so busy? Is it any better engineered than spotlight? I doubt it. Likewise, I don’t want photoanalysisd looking at my photos. I don’t use that “photos by person” feature. Why does it use hour upon hour of cpu time to make this feature available - just in case I use it later I guess? Get lost.
I really wish Apple stopped adding random crappy features to macOS that I don’t use - but which burn cpu cycles. Instead, fix your shit. Indexing is fine if you make spotlight actually be good again. Photo analysis is useful if I decide it’s useful and turn it on. And maybe if Xcode and SwiftUI weren’t such a buggy, crash ridden, undocumented mess, then maybe, maybe, I’d trust you more to run random background processes.
As it stands, I don’t trust Apple - particularly their application teams - to be good custodians of my cpu.
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-wiimote-pairing-macos-...
The bluetooth stack in Windows and Linux does.
Apple's official position is that my wiimotes are the problem and I should buy an Apple supported bluetooth game controller.
Presumably one of these four controllers:
https://www.apple.com/shop/accessories/all/gaming
Are these processes behaving properly or is it in some stupid infinite loop? I can't tell. Is it considered acceptable by apple for background processes to make my efficiency cores sit at 100% utilisation more or less all the time - even when I'm on battery power? How much will that reduce my laptop's battery life?
I can't tell. I have no way to tell. Its all an opaque jungle of processes running processes. Half of them are buggy half the time, and I don't know which half. It gets more complex and stupid every year.
I swear, macos seemed to run better 10 years ago when I had a computer that was many times slower. Strangely, at the time, there were no constant background processes chewing up CPU all the time like this. Tell me, how is any of this stuff making my computing experience better?
I think my preferred computer has a fast, modern CPU and software from a decade or two ago. Off the top of my head, I can't name a single feature added in macos in the last decade that I actually care about. (Excluding support for modern hardware.)
If the battery life is less than you expect then there's a problem. I think that's pretty easy to notice.
It sounds like that's a bug though, you should report it. Posting on random forums about it won't cause it to get fixed.
The only way I could tell that my battery life has gone down would be by doing actual tests - but those are notoriously difficult - because I can't use my laptop at the same time. (Or, I guess I can - but I'd need to use it the same way across tests). It sounds like days of work to test my battery life with and without transient background tasks. I don't even know how I'd test that - because I don't know how to turn all that stuff off for the control.
I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly.
I hear you that complaining online probably won't help. But can't see how complaining about battery life in feedback assistant would help either. The situation is crappy.
Don't worry, I am literally telling you to do this. Apple is made entirely out of bug reports. It's their job to handle them.
I would say that you shouldn't put too much effort into it, simply because of burnout.
Our project supports the three major desktop operating systems. I have Windows and Linux VMs that I can switch to when I need to test something on those OS. No serious corporation is going to risks Hackintosh.
The extent of my 'cloud' involvement with apple is the operating system software update mechanism and having an account to download Xcode, so that I can install compiler + macports on a new machine.
I’m fairly sure they don’t use iCloud which is why some of that stuff is still less than desirable.
We can probably assume that Microsoft uses some kind of Exchange set up and Google will use a version of Gmail.
Whenever I meet with people from Apple, it’s over WebEx.
I heard a rumor that they use some Oracle enterprise groupware, which is presumably https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Beehive
I don’t find it all that surprising:
- Sun/NeXT were doing stuff together before Apple and NeXT merged
- Lots of Java stuff at Apple immediately following the merger including a Cocoa-Java bridge and WebObjects is rewritten in Java
- Oracle/Sun stuff doesn’t need to be run on Windows
- Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were good friends
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...
Opening a New Manufacturing Facility in Houston
As part of its new U.S. investments, Apple will work with manufacturing partners to begin production of servers in Houston later this year. A 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility, slated to open in 2026, will create thousands of jobs.
Previously manufactured outside the U.S., the servers that will soon be assembled in Houston play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advanced security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing. The servers bring together years of R&D by Apple engineers, and deliver the industry-leading security and performance of Apple silicon to the data center.
I just wish it didn't require an internet connection for authentication
This would make sense in VPN environments though.
I'm kinda surprised you've managed to be on HN for 5 years and never come across the concept of a "LAN" or "VPN" before, but I guess you're one of today's lucky 10000. To the first, sometimes you have machines (or VMs) local to your own network but in another physical location that you'd like to be able to access from your own system. It's a fairly significant use case, and one where no internet connection is involved whatsoever. For example it's generally desirable to locate powerful (and in turn generally loud) servers and associated gear (including environmental control, redundant power etc) in physically isolated locations from where the humans are working for noise reasons if nothing else, though security and efficiency are important as well. While it's possible to pipe raw video over IP, a quality remote desktop solution will generally be more flexible/scalable and doesn't require special (expensive) extra hardware and potentially additional fiber.
And for systems located on other LANs remote from your own, you can use a VPN to link them securely as if they had a direct physical (though higher latency/more jittery) link, again avoiding any exposure to the public net. That then reduces to the above. In both cases it's desirable to have zero unnecessary 3rd party dependencies.
Unnecessary snark.
----
0: https://xkcd.com/1053/
What is clear to me is that Parsec belongs to a newer breed of remote tools, inline with TeamViewer and AnyDesk, that primarily respond to the need of post ISP firewall era, where by default ports are blocked, so peerless remote tooling becomes harder to install and administer, these have a client-server-client based architecture. And Parsec builds upon this architecture by placing some secret lag reducing sauce on their Server instead of just authenticating and forwarding.
My guess is that they have a proprietary predictive and interpolation based OS algorithm tightly coupled to the OS UI, and this secret sauce lives and is closed source on their backend, so you would kind of need to host a third server in the middle, maybe we will see a competitor for a VPN niche, or an open source alternative.
If an open source solution arises, I bet that it would require an installation of a server, and it would probably start with X11 or Wayland tight coupling.
It's a clever way to have your media centralized and yet have access to editors all over the world.
And a modern AVID system does not struggle with a few editors accessing the same footage.
First of all it's usually a proxy format and Secondly the storage can deliver a combined 800MB pr box sustained for x number of editors at the same time.
Yes I avid feel free to ask.
One of the main reasons it's used in larger post houses is the hardware and software support that is world wide with people on site if needed.
AVID hasn't been at the forefront of video editing since the Avid/1 / ABVB days. They sell a reasonably usable program with horrible hardware (since Meridien hardware - it's good they finally let us use other hardware such as BlackMagic), but never truly fix large problems. People therefore stay on a specific version of the software for ages, because everyone is scared of new and different bugs.
AVID's shared media offerings are tenfold the cost of other storage options simply because they have a flag on the mounted volumes that tells Media Composer to allow project and media sharing. "800MB pr box sustained" means nothing because anyone can do that easily with commodity hardware.
In other words, AVID is milking their cash cow and they really don't innovate or even try to offer a good product.
Apple, on the other hand, destroyed their professional editing products, then replaced them with decent tools, but ones that are worlds different. Many people have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, if you want to edit 8K ProRes, Final Cut Pro makes it simple on any ARM-based Mac.
It's their dependency on Blackmagic that's been there biggest problem the past 5 years.
Meridian was light years ahead of the competition. The firewire based adrenaline sucked.
And you won't find anyone complaining about their DX series just to bad they dropped that.
And your really not understanding the way avid nexis works if you think it's just a flag
I think you've been sold a bunch of ideas. For instance, Avid has no dependency on Blackmagic. They use Open IO, which means you can use any card that supports Open IO, whether Aja, Blackmagic, Bluefish, Matrox, whatever.
Nexus / ISIS isn't special. The flag is literally just a flag that tells Media Composer to enable bin and media sharing. It can be enabled on any kind of sharing - NFS, AFS, SMB, et cetera. For example, check out Mimiq software for enabling it wherever you want.
The NEXIS hardware/software isn't just a flag, another visit to Google
Second, please tell me how the fact that you can use no video interface card or Aja means you're dependent on Blackmagic.
Third, please tell me how bin locking on ISIS / Nexis is different than bin locking on third party shared storage with the AVID sharing flag turned on.
You've offered literally no searchable facts. If I search for anecdotes about how ISIS / Nexis are different, I'm only going to get marketing fluff.
So offer something of substance. Claiming someone is wrong without even saying what they're wrong about is not how any of this works.
Now please, before you make more fact based claims, i have used and still use the 3rd party "bin lock" solutions when I have special cases, and i can promise you, an ordinary file server does not compare when many clients are hitting the storage.
Substance delivered, lets see if there is a chance of someone learning something.
1) How does AVID selling Blackmagic hardware make that a dependency? You can just as easily buy Aja hardware. "This depends on that" means it requires it. AVID systems do not require Blackmagic hardware at all. If you think they do, please explain.
2) Bin locking and media sharing (client specific paths in "OMFI MediaFiles" and "Avid MediaFiles") is a flag that is either off or on. That has nothing to do with all of the other things that have been sold to you as "special" about AVID storage.
For instance, link aggregation has been built in to macOS since the early days of Mac OS X. Also, it really doesn't matter. If you want something that literally does 4 gigabytes a second, you can do that all sorts of ways with current Macs - no need for multiple NICs.
Anyhow, speed is largely irrelevant for editing systems. The only time speed matters is if the storage can't keep up. You're not watching video at 2,400 frames per second as you're scrubbing through video at 100x speed, so people who are concerned with "800 MB" (you're not even saying per second, or anything like that) are no different than the people who want the wanna-be muscle car that puts out 500 horsepower but that are just going to and from the store. Who cares? If you care, you know. If you have the need, you know. If you're working on 4K uncompressed, you're not doing it on shared storage, anyway - that's just silly. But if you REALLY need to do 4K uncompressed on shared storage, guess what? You're not using AVID, because it can't support that :)
Otherwise, "800 MB" is just a sales number. I just build a NAS for less than $2500 that does 1.2 gigabytes per second, and I wasn't even trying to make it fast.
> i have used and still use the 3rd party "bin lock" solutions when I have special cases, and i can promise you, an ordinary file server does not compare when many clients are hitting the storage.
Those are two different things. If you choose to conflate them, that's up to you, but I can easily show shared storage that makes AVID's look outright pokey, particularly with twenty clients, just as I can show you software that turns the AVID bin locking off or on, so you're not fooling anyone by trying to suggest that all bin locking file servers are somehow inferior, or that they're inferior because they support bin locking, or whatever way you want others to think they're connected.
They're separate things. You do understand that, right?
I hope you take away from this that there are more products than just the half a dozen that are most common, and that products outside of the post world often make products in the post world look ridiculous, if in part because the ones in the post world are a generation older and multiple times the price. But because people in the post world don't know any better, they more often than not spend literally ten times the going price to get something with an AVID sticker on it, even when you can show them that the AVID product is just a rebadged Seagate storage array or whatever.
But at least you use a car reference, AVID is the Ferrari, the "I CAN BUILD A NAS" is the useless muscle car. And of course they have gear that can handle uncompressed Footage, please, they are the standard for winning an Oscar.
I take away from this that you have no idea of how this work, it's not called "bin locking servers" that's just software. And it's not the hardware that makes a NEXIS special, it's the AVIDFS. I am only writing this for others that might read this so they understand.
Please keep this going, I am entertained
The way you develop & manage the proxies appears to be the biggest part of the battle in making things go fast. There's no reason for editor workstations to be operating with the full res native material unless theres a targeted reason to do so.
With Covid remote access became the norm and the online/proxy workflow more or less died. Avid still has a working version (better than the original) but it's widely used.
Proxies are used for several reasons, expensive storage, heavy codecs at high bitrates or multicams.
They are typically avoided whenever you can because the online part of a proxy based workflow can be a challenge. And especially if you have tight deadlines you want all the variables out of the way.
"With Covid remote access became the norm and the online/proxy workflow more or less died"
No; remote access DEMANDS a proxy workflow, since you're not going to edit full-resolution files over the Internet. So it did not "die;" just the opposite. Witness the entire "camera to cloud" marketing mania that swept NAB a few years ago. That's based entirely on the rapid upload of proxy files to begin editing ASAP.
From NAB last year: “We introduced the [Blackmagic Camera] iPhone app a little while ago,” said Bob Caniglia, director of sales for the company in North America. “You can shoot with that phone, work with the cloud service, share proxies. The camera to Blackmagic cloud to Resolve workflow started with the camera app. The Ursa Broadcast G2 [camera] is now in beta for that software too. That's a good direction on where we're going.”
Does that sound like it died? Or https://blog.frame.io/2024/04/11/visit-us-at-nab-2024/
But back to your assertions: "Proxies are used for several reasons, expensive storage, heavy codecs at high bitrates or multicams. They are typically avoided whenever you can because the online part of a proxy based workflow can be a challenge"
That makes absolutely no sense. You just claimed that proxies are used to avoid "heavy codecs at high bitrates" but then claim "the online part of a proxy based workflow can be a challenge." But you neglected to provide a single example of what's so "challenging" about it, especially when you just cited proxies as an advantage.
Thus, since you pushed the issue, we see that in fact it is you who has no idea what you're talking about. But hey, keep insulting other users.
Or... if you prefer to be informed: https://filmmakermagazine.com/120946-new-remote-tools-workfl...
https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/cameras-support-expanding-...
and many many more...
And I mean that in a completely positive "it's awesome" way. Just... not the problems anyone else should be facing.
- Composer/Nexis all hosted on Cloud (AWS): fine, but pricy and the Nexis experience is meh
- Composer hosted Cloud/Nexis hosted on Prem: actually works well, but you need to have a direct-connect to AWS (the network can be pricey)
- Composer on on-premise VDI/Nexis hosted on Prem: works really well, and I have a bias towards this instead of fully in cloud for not only security reasons since the TCO is less
- Composer Cloud (or whatever they call it today - used to Composer Sphere): this is a setup where instead you stream real-time proxy to the Composer from MediaCentral. You can download hi-res media if you need to. It works ok, but it more suited for News workflows. Security is a thing with this solution.
- Adobe/OpenDrives on AWS: I mention this, because we do this too. This has all sorts of things to talk about, and is pretty good, but, again, you gotta know what you are doing.
For the on-premise ones, VMWare is our Hypervisor of choice, and, yup, we are looking for other options. And we have all the usual IT problems: domain management, updates, roaming desktops, etc.
If you are looking for 3rd-monitor image viewing (like in the old days with hardware), you can swing NDI or 2110. NDI is ok, and for 2110 you need a network and router to handle it.
It worked.. Kind a
If you have time to expand on the "bandwith and latency thing", I'd love to hear more. Even a "you need to be geographically within X miles of the instance" ballpark figure would be wonderful to know.
"These editors aren't working on Macs, per se. They're working around them. Sure, there's an Apple logo in the top-left corner (two, actually), but it feels superfluous, knowing that the software isn’t directly on the machine and it just as easily be running on a Windows or Linux box a thousand miles away"
But the source AND target of the remote connections are both macs, pretty straightforward
what would have been a far better PR is if Final Cut offered enterprise solution with "server" part that holds videos and does the heavy lifting and "client" part that works with miniatures doesn't let you export anything to disk and all that
This however wouldn't be vendor locking because remoting would still be an option.
Instead they've shown that remote desktop is the most reliable way to do this kind of job because there isn't anything better.
Sometimes I play Civilization through an RDP connection to my desktop box below my desk over a dedicated ethernet connection and that's bad enough. Trying to do full video editing, with critical concerns over every pixel, color and timing....oof!
[1] - as they note, you can see him doing it over the remote connection and it looks hurky-jerk disastrous.
They're still editing on a Mac, just remotely, which is how you know that this choice is not a compromise caused by the Apple hardware ecosystem.
p.s. I’m the guy that will point out that one of your white lightbulbs has a slight greener tint over your other white lightbulbs (aka it’s not slight to me).
My next step was going to buy a new monitor too but then I was like… F it I’ll just buy a Mac and call it a day.
As said in TFA, he could have had a Chromebook on his desk. And for that matter he could have been remoted into a massive server from that Chromebook with a cluster of virtualized GPUs, hosting a dozen editors on a monster backbone. Apple has nothing like that, so instead they have like a NAS connected to a dozen Macs back in the office to host a dozen editors. It's super dodgy, and is a limit, and, as is the point of the article, kind of highlights some serious gaps in Apple's hardware ecosystem.
They're using Avid and Ableton for this show, and then some third party remoting to connect to the Macs. This wasn't really an Apple-first production.
I don't only play Civilization. In fact the reason I have the Windows box under my desk is for CUDA work on a big GPU while my main computer is an M4 Mac. And FWIW, Steam Remote Play is utter dogshit compared to RDP. RDP is actually one of the best remoting technologies.
Still can't make highly dynamic desktops super ideal remote.
But...wait...just looking and it appears that Civilization has joined GFN again. Apparently they saw GFN as a selling point for 7 so they offered it again. Huh.
I was very surprised by this too. I think it was Windows 8.1, when going from one machine to another, was basically a no-compromise experience for most gaming, except for FPS—the latency was always a little too high.
Nowadays I can use Parsec over WiFi at 4K and almost can't tell the difference. Almost. And only with a controller.
Linus Tech Tips uses Parsec too since at least 2020 for their remote employees for video editing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client
Final Cut Server:
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Server
• https://unflyingobject.com/posts/final-cut-server (2007)
Even DVR hasn't been able to compete even though it's probably the industry standard for grading.
FCP used to hold 60% of the market (by various estimates), and then Apple botched both the transition to FCP X and the Mac Pro at the same time.
Yup, FCP X was released 14 years ago.
To get this you have to understand Apple's business model. They sell style, quality, and exclusivity, and ease of use. They can't ensure those things if they separate the hardware from the software. I'm sure they would love to make money from software licenses without the hardware. But it would end up creating new problems that would dilute the value of their product.
The proof is in the pudding. They're the most valuable company in the world because of their limitations, not despite them.
He said, "We don't collaborate at Apple because of the (perceived) risk of leaks. None of our tools are built for collaboration". Apple is famously closed about information sharing, to the point where on some floors every office requires its own badge, and sometimes even the cabinets within.
So it doesn't surprise me that their video editing tools are designed for a single user at a time.
Edit: This happened about six years ago, they have since added some collaboration tools, however it's more about the attitude at Apple in general and why their own tools lag on collaboration.
Edit 2: After the replies I thought I was going crazy. I actually checked my message history and found the discussion. I knew this happened pre-COVID, but it was actually in 2013, 12 years ago. I didn't think it was that long ago.
That's the main issue. But also this happened about six years ago.
>
> A Mac with macOS 14.0 or later and Keynote 14.3 or later
>
> An iPhone with iOS 17.0 or later and Keynote 14.3 or later
>
> An iPad with iPadOS 17.0 or later and Keynote 14.3 or later
Those OSes were released around June of 2023, so a little over a year?
I think it's kinda bizarre to accuse someone of not "researching" their own recollections. How would one accomplish that?
Keynote works just fine with multiple simultaneous users. I work at Apple (for now) and do it all the time with managers/EPMs etc.
There is plenty of collaboration in the company but it's typically constrained to the current project you're working on. And working in enterprise companies today it is no different.
There are far too many things that can go wrong with such a setup.
Yes, the fire marshal has also thought of the first thing you just thought of to post. They aren't stupid.
And if you want to make that scenario terrifying, imagine being there on a weekend or holiday.
> I can very easily imagine what could have happened in those buildings if a badge was required to leave a conference room.
The facilities team and fire marshal are also easily capable of imagining this, already have, and you can ask them about it.
In this case the doors would fail open, or are made of glass and can be broken down. It's not a /really/ secure location. It's just a tech company that likes to seem secure during work hours. After hours of course the janitors get to see everything.
In an effort to steelman your comment, you may have incorrectly interpreted the earlier "I wonder how well that is tested" as "this is unsafe and illegal" rather than "among the many things wrong with this, this has increased the number of things that can go wrong, and is less safe on an absolute scale, whether or not it's strictly legal and up to code", and then assumed everything else in subsequent comments was about fire safety, rather than being a series of points in support of locking people into a building is a bad idea.
You are asserting the competence of the fire marshal, as an argument in a conversation about locking employees and interviewees and visitors inside a company's office rooms.
What you may think was happening here: "heh, nerds think they're smarter than the fire marshal and nobody involved thought of this until they came along; of course there'd be a way for sufficiently capable humans to get out of a room if something went wrong, and of course this will have been made to pass fire code, which is the only thing being talked about here".
What was actually happening here: While with sufficient analysis (which has most likely been done) it is possible to provide a sufficient degree of fire safety to make it not against fire code to lock people into a building, that doesn't make it right or zero-cost or risk-free, nor does it alleviate the stress and potential problematic-but-non-fatal situations that could arise. At no point was the primary purpose of the comment "people might burn in a fire", even though the risk of that is not zero at any time and has likely been raised (within presumably-acceptable-to-fire-code levels) by such a setup.
When I said "I can very easily imagine what could have happened", I was not imagining a fire burning down the people with the building inside. I was imagining how few failures it would require to end up with people being trapped in a room for long enough to reach the level of stress required to physically break out of a room, compounded by having worked in labs where the air conditioning was sometimes woefully insufficient.
It takes a lot of stress to get normal people to the point that they're willing to break windows or doors or walls in order to escape a room, and nobody should be subjected to such things, because there's zero security justification for a company locking people inside at any time.
Any random local government staffer is the most powerful person in the universe and obeying them is a religious edict. Apple has zero power to disobey anything in the fire code and they're probably not even capable of imagining doing so. That's why the random suburb they're in has the best public schools in the country and all the houses are like $5 million.
As an example there's currently a big empty lot next to said HQ where the mall used to be, because a random woman on the city council has blocked apartment construction for the last decade, because she thinks Apple employees will move in and molest local high school students.
https://x.com/housingvalley/status/1154781703262498816
Opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.
I love reading articles that purport to tell the public how things at Apple work. They're almost always laughably full of shit.
That implies every floor is different which matches what you are saying.
Most of the stories that have come out felt like they were the image Apple wanted to give. It started with Apple going after missing iphone that was left at a bar. We've heard those working on latest design for the next iphone were sequestered away from the rest of the company. I've always thought it was marketing spin and I'm glad we have an ex-apple employee confirming this. Back in the 'Lisa' days Apple did split and silo divisions, Apple did closely guard new iPhone designs with very few leaks happening but the rest of the mythology is more marketing.
I worked for a company that did some work for the federal government. Boring stuff. Their compliance rules essentially required that we firewall the folks with operational access to their data from the rest of the company. We included the physical offices in that to avoid certain expenses and controls companywide.
It isn't absurd as what GP mentions was imported into Amazon by Dave Limp, a former Apple C-suite. It was a terrible culture shock for most of the ICs in my team being reorg'd reporting in to Limp, after Steve Kessel (of Kindle fame), the previous leader, went on a sabbatical.
By putting that, they decrease the likelihood of reprocussion in the workplace for things said outside of the workplace.
You can still get in hot water for anything you say that ties back to you or the company regardless if you disclose who your employer is.
This is the grey-area that corporations typically carve out in a social-media policy so that employees can engage in discussions around their employer without being on behalf of their employer.
It's still a perilous position to put yourself in as an employee. Innocent and innocuous things can always be misunderstood or misinterpreted.
What happens when you use that disclaimer and are self-employed though?
Both are designed to replicate the same functionality as Concurrence and Quantrix (itself a clone of Lotus Improv) both by Lighthouse Design, who made lots of apps for NeXTSTEP and were purchased by Sun.
Steve Jobs used Concurrence on a ThinkPad and also a Toshiba laptop to make presentations prior to Keynote (which I believe was created internally for him at first) even while back at Apple.
Video is a harder game due to the processing and data requirements, but I know that there are a lot of startups trying to make it collaborative first. I’m really excited for that to be the default.
> We are seeking an experienced Software Architect specialized in source control systems to join our dynamic team. The ideal candidate will have expertise in designing, implementing, and managing systems like GitHub, GitLab, Perforce, Bitbucket, and Artifactory.
Many of which take time to be migrated into the mothership.
Real-time collaboration was added in Keynote 7.0 released in Sept 2016.
https://www.macworld.com/article/228811/keynote-pages-and-nu...
The severed floor.
Back in the day Keynote files would just be passed around via a shared server so you and the people you were collaborating with could make and merge changes between them, eg I’d do one part of a presentation, Rick would do another part, and we’d copy our slides out of and paste them into each others’ decks to get a complete version for rehearsing with. If we had notes for each other, we’d give each other the notes out of hand rather than just directly change each others’ slides.
There’s a lot of mythology that people just make up about how secrecy works at Apple. It’s mostly sensible.
The editors of Severance are actually using Avid. For music composition they're using Albeton. Neither are Apple products. The remote desktop product they're using is Jump Desktop.
While the show is an Apple TV+ show, and they happen to use to Macs in the process, this has shockingly little to do with Apple tools or products.
I know some people will say this is because of age. But I want to suggest I often thought of COVID years 2019 to 2023s as a single year / event. For reasons I cant quite fathom. So when I think of 2015 it would only be like a 2023-2019, 2018, 2017, 2016. So around 4-5 years ago.
I’m reminded of my friend in grade school that had “an uncle that worked at Nintendo”.
Not saying he didn’t, but just because someone works there doesn’t mean they know what’s going on.
That sentence, by itself, is more or less correct (from my 26 years at Apple). However, it suggests/implies things that are not correct.
1) In case you got the impression: Apple certainly does not design software to be non-collaborative simply because it would enable sharing/leaking when used within Apple. I would say that Apple has been focused since Day 1 on a mindset where one-computer equals one-user. The mindset was that way really until Jobs was fired, discovered UNIX, and then returned with Log In and Permissions. To this day though I think collaboration is often an afterthought.
So too do they seem to be focused on the singular creative. I suspect Google's push into Web-based (and collaborative) productivity apps (Google Docs, etc.) forced Apple's hand in that department — forced Apple to push collaborative features in their productivity suite.
2) Of course Apple collaborates internally. But to be sure it is based on need-to-know. No one on the hardware team is going to give an open preso in an Apple lunchroom on their hardware roadmap. But you can bet there are private meetings with leads from the Kernel Team on that very roadmap.
That internal secrecy, where engineers from different teams could no longer just hang out in the cafeteria and chat about what they were working on went away when Jobs came back. It probably goes without saying it was rigorously enforced when the iPhone was a twinkle in Apple's eye.
The internal secrecy was sold to employees as preserving the "surprise and delight" when a product is finally unveiled but at the same time, as Apple moved to the top of the S&P500, there were a lot of outsiders that very definitely wanted to know Apple's plans.
3) Lastly, yes, plenty of floors and wings of buildings are accessible only with those with the correct badge permissions. I could not, for example, as an engineer badge in to the Design floor.
Individual cabinets needing badge access? I have no idea about that. I am aware of employees hanging black curtains in their office windows when secret hardware would come out of their (key-locked) drawers. (On a floor that is locked down to only those disclosed, obviously the black curtains become unnecessary.)
My badge only worked where I had explicitly been given access, and desks were to be kept clear and all prototypes or hardware had to be locked in drawers and/or covered with black cloths. Almost every door was a blind door with a second door inside, so that if the outer one opened, it was not possible to see into the inner space.
You can even read any accounts of famous shipped products to back up that cross functional collaboration has been their culture for many decades. Jobs mentioned it many times, and many articles have been written about it.
Additionally keynote (and the entire iWorks suite) has had collaborative editing for years now.
I suspect your friend is likely misinformed or not reliable?
>...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
>Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I wanted to test it out given that my son was looking to upgrade his PC and not only are component costs through the roof, there's barely any inventory to be had if you were trying to buy exactly what you want! (thanks, resellers...)
It's not a perfect setup obviously -- really only ideal for AAA games with cloud saves, no mods, etc (Cyberpunk 2077, that kind of thing), and I won't make the argument that it's ultimately better than local for gaming (it's not), but I will say that in my experience, the hardware-rendered framerates are through the roof, it streams seamlessly at high resolution, and I could see envision a scenario where video editing on an appropriate VM should be virtually indistinguishable from local.
Just food for thought!
https://support.apple.com/guide/final-cut-pro/create-optimiz...
Which is how I’m editing stuff on an 8Gb original M1 Mac Mini and it just works.