12 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores on the M3 Max is quite impressive, and it’s quite interesting that the M3 Pro now seems to be an entirely different chip as opposed to being a cutdown version of the Max.
But how have they not added an AV1 encoder at least to the higher-end chips yet? They advertise these chips as video editing beasts and they can’t encode AV1? Meh.
The companies behind the AV1 standard (including Apple) were investigated for a potential antitrust breach relating to the way patents for the AV1 standard are licensed.
The format is heavily patent encumbered and the patent pool is available “free as in beer” with a whole bunch of conditions that mean they’re definitely not “free as in freedom”, and that’s the part the EU had questions about… thankfully the EU shut down their investigation six months ago but at one point they were threatening Apple with a $40 billion fine - which likely put the brakes on any serious AV1 investments. You’re a lot less likely to see the maximum fine if you’re just a member of the standards body and not actually using the technology in your products.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if Apple announces a firmware update that unlocks additional hardware support AV1 encoding on every computer they’ve sold in recent years. They did that with VP9 after patent issues with that format were sorted out.
… in the mean time, do your editing work in ProRes, do your proofing work in HEVC, and accept the fact that encoding AV1 will need to be done overnight. It’s not really the end of the world. Video editors have done overnight exports for decades.
It’s obviously not the end of the world, it’s just something I expect from a premium product targeted at video editing in 2023/24. Well, for editing it’s not mandatory, but say you’d want to livestream something (there’s more than streaming games, remember), you’d be stuck with H.264 on most streaming platforms - now, or in the future.
In the “PC world”, AV1 encoding is quickly becoming the norm and all current dGPUs of all three manufacturers (Nvidia, AMD and Intel) support it. $200 Intel GPUs support the feature.
As a consumer or professional I couldn’t care less why Apple didn’t implement AV1 encoding (yet). Fact is, it’s not there, and if it’s required for my use case, that makes the M3 lineup a bad choice. A trillion dollar company should be able to figure out their patent issues on their own.
While it’s true they enabled VP9 hardware decoding via software updates, an encoder is a bit of a different beast.
It’s simply a negative point, that’s all I’m saying.
I thought fixed hardware encoders were always lower in quality than software ones anyway. That’s my experience with h.264 in multiple contexts.
While this is true, AV1 software encoding is so terribly slow that it’s completely impractical for anything remotely resembling live-streaming.
That’s true. I guess I was being really reductive there.
It is funny that the Apple Presentation in the teaser image is following the color scheme of Fortnite Weapons with Uncommon (Green), Rare(Blue), Epic (Purple) leaving out the last category Legendary (Gold)
Maybe the Ultra will be gold.
Might be far fetched though.
