Enfocus Community

Hello,
with the release of the Mac Studio with the M1 processor, I would like to have a feedback if people are running Switch on M1?

Currently I am running my Switch on an old Macpro and I have to renew my machine. So Mac Intel, M1 or Windows for performance?

Did Enfocus do a good job of optimizing the M1s or is it disappointing?

I too was curious about this, but the owner of our company bought this machine yesterday for our Switch / PitStop implementations. We've run our implementation on 2 machines so far: a 2015 Mac Mini, and a 2017 iMac. Both with mid range specs.

I'll be back in a month to update on how things are going.

Hello,
I can't wait to hear your feedback even if my configuration is older (with more processors)… so the comparison is not obvious…

I have Switch on a Mac Mini M1, runs without any problem. And it is very quick, even for being just a Mac Mini.

It is not a production server, for me it is just developing Switch stuff and testing.

OK,
Thanks for the feedback Jan.
I use Switch and Pitstop (and one of your modules) in production… and I would like to know if I can consider shooting with a Mac Studio Max instead of my old MacPro Xeon or the virtualized servers under Windows that I want use my IT.

I have a few customers who run Switch on Mac Minis, some of them are a bit old today.
It depends on what kind of jobs you have and quantity. "Normal" pdf's runs with no problems on a Mac Mini.

If you have a lot of jobs with much image data then you might need something heavier but you will come a long way with a Mac Mini M1

I'm back after 2 months of running our flows on a standard Mac Studio with no bobs and no whistles. Because we see so many large files (not uncommon for a pdf to be 1GB in size) I decided to get a cheap external ssd with good read write speeds to host the backend of switch so we didn't have tons of read writes onto the actual drives the Studio uses. No need to ruin those on accident when the chipset makes those such a pain to get to.

I can say that this was truly a major upgrade. We normally submit job folders that have all these actions: files sorted, preflighted, color management, soft-proofs creation, Production file created, impose File created.

On our old hardware this could take roughly 3-10 minutes depending on file size (pulling from and to a local file server).

we're now looking at 1-5 minutes depending on the complexity / size of the files. The biggest slog is converting everything to get proper color page counts for the office staff, but that is no longer a huge time suck.

On our last hardware, if I needed to use the station while files were in the flows, the machine was unusable.

I'm currently using the Studio as a daily workstation, and I haven't had a disruption the entire time we've used it as the host for our Switch implantation.

8/10

-2 because security permissions in Monterey were a pain to get set properly where it was not asking me every 5 minutes for access to a folder or to use a service it needed access to.

Hello and thank you for this feedback,
we only use the switch station for switch only… but i see you are able to work on the station at the same time…so good news.

The problem of Monterey permissions should only be punctual because once authorized, it does not ask for it anymore (normally).