My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

Musicians can feel latencies as low as 1ms.

Apple is designing pro gear for its target audience.

Do you have a source for that? I saw a study a short while ago showing the “just noticeable difference” for audio latency was best case around 26ms.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3678299.3678331

I highly doubt anyone notices 1ms latency. I might believe rare people can notice 10ms.

I definitely notice the difference between 10 ms and 26 ms. 26 ms already feel sluggish when playing drums, guitars or keyboard instruments. But there is no way anyone can feel a difference of 1 ms.

The study wasn’t conducted with musicians making music.

Anecdotically, 7ms vs 3ms latency is felt as weirdly heavy action when playing midi keyboard. It's not felt as latency, but it's felt. And I bet the difference could be reliably established in double-blind testing (3 samples, find an outlier).

1ms seems less believable, but I wouldn't be surprised, if some people could notice that too.

It depends on the frequency. At higher frequencies, the ear is capable of higher time precision. It's why a snare pops and a bass drum blooms.

Again I have to point to this Microsoft Research Video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

That’s audio latency, not musicians doing music. In my experience if you have two musicians that are supposed to be playing unison, 5-6 ms is enough to feel “off”

Fun fact, 1ms is the approximately the amount of time it takes for sound to travel 1 foot. Do musicians move all their speakers to be within one foot of their ears? Do people in a band notice a difference if they're not standing within 1 foot of their partners? No, they don't.

Fantastic video. QED.