Posted by shortformblog 3/29/2025
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.
If cloud companies have the opportunity they will divide the resources of that Mac into 30 vms and then meter access to the point where it would have been cheaper to go out and acquire the hardware yourself.
Unpopular opinion, but Apple should stick to its guns and maybe create a physical Mac rack server with legal and technical restrictions on maximum tenancy.
Otherwise what is the point of doing it on a mac?
That’s…how cloud computing is supposed to work? You pay them a premium to set this up. The fact that this isn’t possible is why everyone is annoyed.
These days I think do something very similar to your friend. I pack an external keyboard and mouse I like, and a chromecast (just in case) and that's it. Not packing a big screen and a battery is just a huge bonus.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-shell/id1473805438 among others will give you access to shell including python, vi, and at least curl.
Here is a talk from Netflix about cloud workspace for their artists https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-workst...
Isn't the editing software on Macs? Can't see what point is being made here.
Put another way, if Stiller's team was building this for Amazon or Netflix, would that be a Mac Mini on Richman’s desk, or an HP or Lenovo box? Why even use a Mac in this editing process at all, when other companies offer access to better GPUs anyway?
[...]
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 [could] just as easily be running on a Windows or Linux box a thousand miles away. There are way more efficient ways to do this, and Apple doesn't offer them. Instead it relies on cloud providers like MacStadium, or localized IT teams, to work around their convoluted rules around VMs.
The point of the article, and the full quote, is "These editors aren't working on Macs, per se. They're working around them".
[1] I don't know about the software they're using in particular (Avid?), but there is a chance the Macs are actually faster than what you can currently get from PCs regardless of GPU - nothing atm matches the bandwidth you can get from Apple Silicon, ProRes hardware encoders, power consumption, noise
[2] it's not even actually irrelevant as the overall experience of owning a Mac, outside of the remote desktop client, will be substantially different.
I was simply clarifying "what's the point of the article". Your quote fragment ("These editors aren't working on Macs") makes it look like the article is saying something it's obviously not (as it's clear from the very next sentence).
It’s like seeing a car ad where someone is being driven around by a chauffeur in a BMW, then arguing that “they are not actually driving it, it could be any car”.
I don't know what else to say, other than to show again this full quote: "These editors aren't working on Macs, per se. They're working around them". The point is not that they're not using Macs, he knows they are.
What you're doing is like seeing the scene[1] from the Watchmen movie where a character in prison says "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me", and then thinking "Wow, that character was totally wrong! Of course he was locked in there with them, he was in a prison!".
[1] warning: graphic violence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0-EuoBjkKI
Final Cut Server:
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.