Learn · why Macs
Why Macs beat small cloud containers for Remotion (in our bakeoff).
Chromium-bound Remotion on a 0.5 vCPU / 4 GiB shape spent most of its life waiting on CPU. The same compositions on M2 Max and M1 Air finished dramatically sooner. Cloud still wins when you need elastic burst without owning silicon.
| Composition | Frames | M2 Max | M1 Silver1 | M1 Silver2 | CF live |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LightMotion (5 s) | 150 | 3.47 s | 8.78 s | 8.66 s | 54.12 s |
| MediumMotion (10 s) | 300 | 5.98 s | 9.14 s | 8.54 s | - |
| HeavyMotion (15 s) | 450 | 32.62 s | 42.93 s | 40.87 s | - |
Source: 2026-07-22 Remotion fleet + CF Containers bakeoff. Canonical report: Remotion vs cloud and M1 vs M2 Max.
| Job | Output | M2 Max | M1 Silver1 | M1 Silver2 | CF live |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LongKinetic3m | 3:00 (5400 f) | 111.5 s | 133.7 s | 145.6 s | 2175.3 s |
| LongKinetic20m | 20:00 (36000 f) | 679.5 s | - | - | 14502 s PROJECTED |
LongKinetic20m CF column is PROJECTED (×20/3 from measured 3-minute CF live). Method: benchmark methodology.
- Mac win: wall-clock for Remotion Chromium.
- Cloud win: ops elasticity, no device management.
- Lambda: parallelism story - not measured here yet.
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