is M1 Max i.7 or i.5?

You don't need an i7 for music production - where is this information coming from, if you don't mind, for it would be a poor choice. Investing in an Intel Mac, at this juncture, may become one of your worst purchasing decisions.

If you look at whatever the specs say for whatever recommends an i7 in today's M series market, seems terribly misguided, based on the only info you have offered:

1) If this company hasn't t yet made public an apple silicon native solution, or even just a shout out that they are working on it, they might not have a capable programmer to make the update, which would certainly halt me from moving forward with a probable dead end company trying to peddle old software. I'm sure, if you investigate, that it may that it requires an i7 at minimum.

2 ) It could be saying that it is NOT apple silicon (M series) compatible and they haven't plans to make it so, which makes the above point stronger

Apple Silicon is an apple product, not an intel product, I'm guessing it was about 1 1/2 years ago that apple announced that they will cease support of Intel CPUs in its entirety, within 2 years. That means they are moving away from the entire intel CPU platform entirely, in six months, give or take. That doesn't mean that you won't have a warranty, apple will move forward on updates and innovations of the M series, leaving the Intels on the wayside. I'm sure you will be able to get updates as far as keeping it current for a while, but they did make a public announcement that they are abandoning Intel Processors, so as the OS and other programs move forward, Intel involvement will be less and less.

Any software companies whom haven't already offered an apple silicon compatible version of their plugins, needs to jump on the Apple Silicon Native mods really soon.....like yesterday.

They all know what apple is offering now is a giant leap for mankind & womankind, on the most common platform (Mac) among professionals in the music industry, as well as other media and arts. Plus used by most of the professional establishments they use!

If I may elaborate, in actuality, though there is a new CPU within it, It isn't a comparison of a new apple CPU vs an Intel, or other CPU.

The focus is really on the fact that M series computing is a whole new means of computing. A whole new way of building what is, literally, the whole new level of computing. It is called a System On a Chip (SoC). It means that the CPU is directly connected to the RAM, which is now referred to as Unified Memory and are both directly connected to the GPU (graphics), Neural Engines, and more. It is ready for everything from your DAW to Artificial Intelligence, which is working its way into your DAW already.

We used to look at how many cores were in the CPU: an i5 2 core as example or the bigger 4 core model. But here, we have DOZENS of cores in the GPU alone. You can get a 20-core CPU, and that 20-core CPU is supported with 16 performance cores plus 4 efficiency cores along with a

64-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine and more

Every important component is integrated in this single chip and, thanks to both its method of connections and its tiny runs for connections within the chip the M1 MAX's Integrated Memory communicates at an outstanding bandwidth 400GB/sec - the Ultra doubles that.

In a typical, non-SoC motherboard, having the RAM on one side of a motherboard, the graphics card in a slot on the back of the motherboard, the CPU elsewhere on a motherboard is, as we look at it now, terribly inefficient, when compared to the internal speeds achieved when every main component resides together and is interconnected.

All those traces, those golden strips carry your DATA (gold is used because it doesn't tarnish, it isn't the greatest conductor, I believe platinum is, but gold will never ever tarnish.) from point to point around the board. Initially, in the early days of computing, it was likely traveling faster than the computer can handle, so the speed hindering design of having data traveling all around the motherboard wasn't a concern. Until now, motherboard design hasn't changed much at all for decades. The larger capsule shipped resistors, diodes .and other components became SMDs (Surface Mounted Devices), tiny black rectangles crazy glued to the motherboard and the whole board goes through a bath of solder, Called Wave aWoleerignmaking for even soldering across the board, increasing reliability. But, the design is basically the same as it was when PCs first came out

The longer the run of any signal, along any type of wire, conduit or a trace on a board, It's really just traveling electrons - that's the physics. If it's audio along a speaker cable, electricity from the power-supply or a capacitor mounted on the board or traces from your CPU, GPU or RAM, the same physics apply: the longer the run, the greater the loss of signal, the lower the integrity of the information and the slower the speed.

I have generalized somewhat, for illustrative purposes.

It's neither i5 and i7 are Intel chips; M1 is an Apple chip.

See: Introducing M1 Pro and M1 Max: the most powerful chips Apple has ever built - Apple

Can someone tell me if the new M1 Max Macbook Pro 16" is i.7 or i.5,

Neither. It's a brand new chip. To be a good, effective, thorough engineer you really need to take the time to understand the technology.

In the old days it was tape machines, consoles, lineups, 1KHz tones etc. Now it's computers.

It appears that you looked that up before they had compatible updated software, to run natively on mac's M series chips (AKA apple silicon), so it defaulted to what it would run on, at that time, the intel.

Additionally, 32G/RAM was recommended, for that was the limit of what was available outside of Mac Pro.

I suggest you run an M1 MAX with 64G/RAM if purchasing as of this writing. You may also want to look into the M1 Ultra and it's compatibility. It appears that, once developed for Apple Silicon, programs work for all versions of the M series SoC's,, but double check to be safe.

Best of luck to you!

You can currently run Protools with M1 Max chip. And also Avid should release M1 versions soon.

Intel Mac is a soon to be obsolete system.

https://avid.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Compatibility/macOS-Big-Sur-Support