While we cannot test the claimed performance of Apple’s two new chips, unveiled as part of its MacBook launch, without having them in front of us, the M1 Pro and Max variants now have dedicated ProRes codec accelerators baked into their designs. Geared at video professionals, these bespoke silicon elements should significantly reduce the processing time needed for Apple’s lossy video compression codec. Now, ProRes is an intermediate codec, meaning that it is designed to be used to manage video captured by cameras inside the production process, before it is eventually encoded using a more device-friendly codec such as H.264 or H.265. But silicon features tend to trickle down the stack. Apple now has a design that it can bring…