Poll: *** The official Mac Studio thread (it has Apple Silicon, lots of ports and everything!) ***

Are you going to buy an Apple Studio?

  • Total voters
    83

Feek

Feek

Feek

Commissario
Joined
16 Oct 2002
Posts
342,926
Location
In the radio shack
It's official and it's available to order now. The new Mac Studio.

Note that you can pick multiple options in the poll. I expect most people to pick the "I really want one but I don't need one" along with "No". In fact, even if you pick one of the "yes" options, if you're truthful you'll probably choose the "I really want one but I don't need one" as well :D

Mac Studio is an entirely new Mac desktop. It packs outrageous performance, extensive connectivity and new capabilities into an unbelievably compact form, putting everything you need within easy reach and transforming any space into a studio. And it all starts with your choice of the ferociously fast M1 Max or the all-new M1 Ultra — the most powerful chip ever in a personal computer.

McaOzbf.png

Built from two M1 Max chips, M1 Ultra lets you power through workflows on an unprecedented scale. So you can run complex particle simulations or work with massive 3D environments that were previously impossible to render. And with twice the media engine resources, M1 Ultra can support up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video playback — something no other personal computer can do.
 
Feek said:
I'm waiting for the reviews but I'm almost certainly going to have the base Max model, upped to 32 GPU cores, 64Gb RAM and a 2Tb drive.
Click to expand...

I want to get one with this spec
  • Apple M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
  • 64GB unified memory
  • 1TB SSD storage
For home, I will just put all data externally anyway. 1TB is enough for apps. £2799.
 
I know those charts should be taken with a healthy dose of salt, but Apple crushing it their silicon :eek:. Bring on some LTT demos of 18 4K streams.
 
Base Mac Studio for me. It’s a vast overkill for my needs but the Mac Mini just doesn’t cut it. On the flip side, it’ll last me many, many years
 
Raymond Lin said:
I want to get one with this spec
  • Apple M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
  • 64GB unified memory
  • 1TB SSD storage
For home, I will just put all data externally anyway. 1TB is enough for apps. £2799.
Click to expand...

Also the spec I ordered. I'm hoping the cooling isn't scaled down for the M1 Max models so we'd get basically silent operations even under big loads.

Apple's storage prices are extortionate (obviously they are very fast, but I don't need more than 1TB of very fast storage). 1TB is good enough for OS/apps and then we can expand externally with NVMe SSDs and Thunderbolt/USB-C enclosures, it's much more cost effective.

Feek said:
I know you'll say "he would say that" but I don't think it is. Compare it to the equivalent iMac Pro or the Mac Pro (both of which it utterly outperforms) and it's significantly cheaper.
Click to expand...

Also comparing it to equivalent Intel/AMD setups with appropriate GPUs and the Mac Studio isn't exactly cheap, but also not insanely priced.

M1 Ultra with 64GB of ram is £4000.

Threadripper 3970X is £2100. RTX 3090 is £1900. That's £4000 already without motherboard, ram, PSU, SSD, case, etc...
 
Last edited:
Feek said:
@Raymond Lin Basically the same spec that I'll [probably] go for except I'm upping the SSD.

Have you ordered yet? ;)
Click to expand...

Not yet, I don't really NEED one at the moment, my computer can still handle my camera files fine for now, but exporting batch files do that hours for a full wedding. So much so I go watch a movie. A new Mac will cut that down to about 5mins i expect. I will probably do it in a few months when the wedding season kicks in so it saves me time.

I need to look into monitor though.
 
Ordered the base model - 85% of my needs are met by the M1 Mac Mini, I just needed to up to 16GB really, but I didn't. This will meet my requirements for a long time coming. Got the display too, I was going to get a 24" iMac but the fact that I'm WFH permanently now, the Studio Display especially with the webcam/centre stage etc makes so much more sense.
 
I assume I am not the only one who thinks this is one of the most aggressively priced Apple products to come out in years?

Even the Ultra SKU holds up incredibly well against PC equivalents.

I don’t need one and I’m not buying one but I am very much in the ‘I want one camp’.

Edit: I’m sure they are making up for that on the monitor though.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
I assume I am not the only one who thinks this is one of the most aggressively priced Apple products to come out in years?

Even the Ultra SKU holds up incredibly well against PC equivalents.

I don’t need one and I’m not buying one but I am very much in the ‘I want one camp’.
Click to expand...

Bang for Buck it is great, it's small and it will be quiet (not sure underload). The only downside is no way to upgrade so it's more an appliance.

Especially these days PC parts are hard to get, i think for work, if you can justify it, it's pretty good. Albeit I can't deny to get something i want it will cost me like 50% more than last time I bought a Mac.
 
What is there to upgrade though?

Ram and storage? RAM requirements is the sort of thing you can predict from the outset and given the storage is encrypted, you probably aren’t using it for anything mission critical as you can’t recover it in the event of a failure.

I get that in the past you could upgrade the ram but for most people that did it, it was a day 1 thing because as apple charged £lol and it was simple to do.
 
Feek said:
Built from two M1 Max chips, M1 Ultra lets you power through workflows on an unprecedented scale. So you can run complex particle simulations or work with massive 3D environments that were previously impossible to render.
Click to expand...
How does this work from a CPU architecture point of view? I maybe a bit out of the loop but it used to be the case that any "serious" animation software was based on working under an x86 environment. How does apples fancy CPU erm.... identify (for want of a better word :D ) ?
 
Rimsy said:
How does this work from a CPU architecture point of view? I maybe a bit out of the loop but it used to be the case that any "serious" animation software was based on working under an x86 environment. How does apples fancy CPU erm.... identify (for want of a better word :D ) ?
Click to expand...

It would have to be translated through Rosetta in real time, which is quite impressive if how they handled Adobe software before the native version came out.
 
robfosters said:
I don’t really understand performance when it comes to Apple. In raw computing power, how does it compare to my 3900X with 3080! Or is it apples to oranges!
Click to expand...

That's impossible to bench because not many games runs on Apple Silicon, but those that do, nVidia still are quite far ahead.

The difference however, it's that the nVidia card draws so much more power, SO SO much so in that regards it's not comparable.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom