After Apple's special M1 event yesterday, Michael Cioni, senior VP of innovation at tech developer Frame.io and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, weighed in on Apple's new Macs powered by the M1 processor.

Cioni pointed out that after the "trashcan" Mac Pro debuted in 2013, Apple received strong criticism in the media and entertainment community for "abandoning" creative professionals. Apple followed up with the redesigned Mac Pro in 2019, that was finally aimed at professionals.

Now the M1 processor on an Mac mini is seen as a possible game changer. On this point, Cioni believes that Apple's M1 Hardware announcements signals that the computer maker is "continuing its commitment to meet needs of today's creative professionals."

Veteran editor Harry B. Miller III said that the new Mac minis in particular "could be huge" for the editing community. "Most of the editing industry is either on old cheese-grater or trashcan Macs. It seems to me the Mac mini with this new chip could easily and fairly cheaply replace all those old units," he says.

"Fox Studios, for example, had been refurbishing cheese-graters to keep them up to date with CPU’s and memory for more complex workflows. It would now be cheaper to replace them with the new Mini."

THR reached out to several professional software developers on Tuesday. Avid didn't immediately respond and Adobe offered the following statement: "We’re excited to bring Creative Cloud apps to both Apple silicon and Windows ARM-based devices soon. We’ll have news related to Lightroom and Photoshop on ARM soon."

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For Cioni, the M1 could also offer a boost for multitasking. Having Resolve, Final Cut, Frame.io, Adobe and Nuke open at the same time is certainly the way I work and [with the M1, Apple claims it could] dramatically improve that experience." For more, read the full article from The Hollywood Reporter.