But Apple Silicon’s fixed RAM and lack of eGPU support mean Premiere will always be a second-class citizen to Final Cut Pro on raw performance. You use Premiere on a Mac because your job demands Adobe—not because it’s the best tool for the machine.
If you live in the "All Mac World," you know the old pain: Premiere Pro used to turn your Intel Mac into a space heater with a spinning beach ball of death. That era is dead.
Historically, Premiere on Mac was buggier than on PC. That has flipped. Recently (2024-2025), the Windows version has seen more crashes, while the Mac version is oddly stable. However, a specific Mac bug remains: Exporting to H.264 with hardware encoding sometimes produces glitched frames on M3/M4 chips. You have to switch to Software Encoding—which is slow.
Unlike Windows PCs that choke when you run out of VRAM, Macs use Unified Memory. A Mac with 64GB of RAM lets Premiere share that pool between CPU and GPU. For heavy After Effects dynamic links or Lumetri color grading layers, this means fewer crashes than on PC (dare we say it).
But Apple Silicon’s fixed RAM and lack of eGPU support mean Premiere will always be a second-class citizen to Final Cut Pro on raw performance. You use Premiere on a Mac because your job demands Adobe—not because it’s the best tool for the machine.
If you live in the "All Mac World," you know the old pain: Premiere Pro used to turn your Intel Mac into a space heater with a spinning beach ball of death. That era is dead.
Historically, Premiere on Mac was buggier than on PC. That has flipped. Recently (2024-2025), the Windows version has seen more crashes, while the Mac version is oddly stable. However, a specific Mac bug remains: Exporting to H.264 with hardware encoding sometimes produces glitched frames on M3/M4 chips. You have to switch to Software Encoding—which is slow.
Unlike Windows PCs that choke when you run out of VRAM, Macs use Unified Memory. A Mac with 64GB of RAM lets Premiere share that pool between CPU and GPU. For heavy After Effects dynamic links or Lumetri color grading layers, this means fewer crashes than on PC (dare we say it).