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Apple Mac Studio

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I would like to highlight just how much Apple is focusing on their customers and use cases right now. It seems that they're targeting products to what their professional customers actually want. And in this case, it's a 3.7" little thing that can process 18 streams of 8k video (fully specced out). That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.

Bravo Apple. I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next.

It's insane how boldly (for Apple) they focused on ports and cables. I can't remember a previous demo video that showed so many ugly cables hanging out the back of the machine. They've finally realized it's a selling point!

My jaw hit the floor when I saw USB A ports. If only it had multiple HDMI ...

On that kind of device it doesn't cost them much and those features are more appreciated. It's not much of a war. On the laptops it becomes a bit more of a design conundrum. I'd imagine they have different leadership teams, and, Jobs + Ive are both gone. So there's that.

This is very interesting because PC workstations have been stagnating for quite long! It'd be cool to be able to bring medium-sized tasks back from clouds to personal computers.

The CPU performance is impressive but I wonder how well it'd fare against say an AMD ThreadRipper or a dual socket system with an equivalent price? It'd be also interesting to see a deep learning benchmark against Nvidia. Branding and RAM limits suggest this is geared towards video processing, but might also be useful for some other domains.

My workstation has a 3990x.

Our "world" build is slightly faster on my M1 Max.

https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257

The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage but the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up at that point. I expect the M1 Ultra to crush the 3990x on compile time.

Even if they stagnate, you can at least pull out a GPU and replace it with another (when they're available for purchase) even if you don't change RAM/CPU which you could replace when faster is better as well. You can even change storage options.

None of that swapability is available on any of the Apple systems, so when they stagnate there's nothing that can be done.

> This is very interesting because PC workstations have been stagnating for quite long!

How have they stagnated?

Depending on your use case. Assuming no video editing (since this is HN), for equivalent performance I guess they can't beat their rivals on price. Different story for power tho.

> they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there

I think they're blowing all their competitors out of the water with the price point. It's not just a 10-20% difference in price anymore.

$8k for 128GB RAM, 8 TB solid state storage and 22 trillion ops/sec isn't exactly a bargain.

I do however image that the performance per watt will be really good.

> I think they're blowing all their competitors out of the water with the price point.

Not only on price point but also performance per watt. The M1 laptops were a game changer on that front, and I expect the M1 Ultra to be the same.

And you can tell because they were marketing their products in relation to older Apple products rather than other manufacturers.

Also the impressive things for me are it’s actually really cheap, as in bargain territory, and you don’t have to piss around with HP sales drones to actually get one like the Z series.

While I could be wrong, I think the Mac Studio may be their "desktop aimed at designers and programmers" -- get the M1 Max instead of Ultra, bump the SSD up to 1TB and the RAM to 64G and it's $2600. By no means cheap, but not the wheeze-inducing iMac Pro prices or the second-mortgage Mac Pro ones.

The caveat is whether they're going to bring out an Apple Silicon-based "big iMac" that's a more direct replacement for the iMac I currently have. I'm not really optimistic about that possibility now that they've shipped the xMac, er, Mac Studio, but never say never.

I got the impression that this Mac Studio and their new 27" studio display form a replacement for the iMac and iMac Pro 27"

Overall I like the idea, because years after buying an iMac I still have a nice monitor, permanently attached to a (now) slow computer that I can't upgrade. With this approach I only need to replace the Mac itself as its age or my needs catch up with it.

I am actually at a loss at who the M1 Ultra is aimed for.

They are doing a great job. 180 turnaround from the company that wanted their products to look clean above usable.

Only downside to me is that in such relatively expensive hardware they should have doubled all storage options. Starting at 512GB for the entry spec and 1TB for the high end spec is rather low.

They still look clean though even after making them useable.

I'm really glad to see that the mea culpa they pulled when admitting the trashcan was a really bad idea wasn't just a bunch of platitudes. They've actually released good products after that. That last MacPro was interesting, but they still had custom dedicated GPUs that again had no replacements.

I suspect storage is one of their high margin profit knobs.

They do a great job of pricing it just a little bit more than their target market would prefer to pay, but they grin and bear it, especially if it is not upgradable later.

I sprung for the 2TB M1 Max...damn did I resent the premium I had to pay for 2TB, but I paid it in the end.

Not only that...

> 20-Core CPU

> 48-Core GPU

> 32-Core Neural Engine

for $3,999

is that kind of like... a bargain?

I have a 10-core CPU with a performance advantage of 23% over an M1 Max in Cinebench R23 (AMD 5800x) and a 1,280 CUDA core GPU (GTX 1060 6GB) that cost a little over $1,000 US total.

UPDATE - Sorry, I originally listed this as a 5900x by accident. I need more sleep.

If you're an Intel/Windows gamer, or a Linux/Nvidia GPU server user, no. But this is a tailored product aimed at a distinct professional class, which spends heavily on the latest hardware that boosts their productivity.

Maybe? "Core" is apple, and everyone else sells oranges, so you need good benchmarks to compare.

Jony Ive leaving was a massive improvement for Apple.

This. So much this.

Getting what we need not what Jony says we needed.

Apple still doesn’t want to allow expandable internal storage. That’s my core requirement for a pro/sumer desktop

I would also never buy such a machine. Still, in 25 years of owning my own computing resources, I have never actually expanded the internal storage of the 6-8 systems I've built.

Yeah, I was really hoping this would take M.2 sticks.

wouldn't a prosumer actually opt for a NAS with fast gigabit or better network speed?

I think over all the designers that focused on how the products looked have lost the tight grip they had over them. For years, look was more important than function. It was probably a good thing since it helped make the company become what it is today. But giving engineering a bit more control is givings us some very functional products. Very cool.

As a programmer, data scientist and macOS user, I have to say I'm just annoyed by Apple these years. They've built a preset of users who may use their products, on that list are "Creative producers", etc. I'm not saying creative works aren't important - I personally enjoy poems, movies and photography very much. But just imagine how many MacBook Pros and other products Apple sell each year - does the world need that much creative producers, so we can indulge ourselves in Tiktok and other things? This is crazy. And I also feel excluded from their potential customer.

Everyone in my data science team is using MacBook Pros right now. At least in a corperate environment, I don't know why you would even want to train models locally. We either do it in the cloud (Databricks / SageMaker) or remote into on-premise workstations for research & experiments.

how does the targeting for creatives hinder the machines usage for programming? macs are among the best computers for coding and data science. huh?

Apple aren't just selling a tool, they're selling a lifestyle. Apple customers like to feel part of that artist/architect/film producer vibe, with the expensive weird glasses and green trousers. That's the marketing pitch and has been for two decades. The current Apple product engineers grew up on that marketing diet and came to believe that that was really who they should design the product for.

I said this because the design of new MacBooks and Mac Studios are completely following the need of creative producers. I would never use a SD card reader, and really don't need that slot to appear on my laptop. The return of those utilities is an obvious bias of the design.

This “Studio” mac seems pretty ideal for programming to me.

I don’t really see how Macs generally are limited to “creative producers”. The computer doesn’t care if you’re compiling, running containers, or doing whatever it is that people do to create tiktok videos.

That has always been their target market since forever, even developer tools on Mac OS classic were eventually outsourced to Code Warrior and PowerPlant C++ framework.

This.

I don’t care if a laptop is a tad thicker, or the aesthetics would allow the device to sit in a museum - Ive helped make them desireable objects, the iPhone provided the scale and momentum and Apple silicon in macs at last allows for focus on actual usability. This set of kit will pave the way for a revolution in how we think about computing.

Indeed, Bravo!

Revolution? What revolution? NN's for everything? Something else?

> what they have in store for [...] programmers

They just (November) released the best MacBook Pro since 2015.

Original keyboard back. Escape key back. Utility keys back. Mag-Safe back. HDMI back. SD card back. Headphone jack back. And all with a brand new M1 Pro chip.

I really wish they focused on bigger displays too. For music/video production having at least 2x27'' screen size is crucial. But two is kind of weird because you can't centre any app. And there is kind of too much...

I've never understood why 2x27" is supposedly "crucial" for music/video production. I had two large monitors for a while; eventually I went back to one slightly larger monitor because I found it was more comfortable and ergonomic to be staring at a single surface perpendicular to my eyes.

Why are they doing this? Trickle down effects for their mass market products? There is no way that the prosumer market is big enough to justify this distraction for Apple even if it used to be their core business line.

Apple's market share has always been a small slice of the overall PC market. In a way, they never did "mass market". While the prosumer market may be a small proportion of the overall market, it could be very significant, for Apple, relative to the market Apple addresses.

Plus, I think a lot of people who would not normally call themselves a "prosumer" will want, and purchase these.

I would imagine:

- it's easy for them to make

- some of their customers need them

- prevents people switching to windows for high-even pro machines, which would influence their other computer purchases

There is a big market of creatives/artists who basically own an apple product as a decent chunk of their personality, for good or bad. Ergo, they'll sell.

Are you saying this only targets prosumers because professionals will wait for the M1 (M2?) Mac Pro?

The indie professional market is more than big enough to justify this. Small films have been able to roll some pretty impressive vfx on desktop computers recently, and North American creative types tend to love Macs.

What do you mean big enough? You don't think there's any profits here?

I look at it from the other side - why aren’t Dell and Lenovo and HP and Microsoft doing this? Have they given up? Is assembling commodity parts into the same computer everybody else makes the only thing they can do?

More margin than ever now that they're just gluing ARM processors together instead of buying Xeons from Intel?

Ecosystem.

> I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next.

We're not really their target audience. Back when they had a rack server, they had something that looked good to us, but we're not really the ones that will buy a maxxed-out Studio.

It's an interesting machine. It definitely is aimed at folks that would get Pros, beforehand. With the hint dropped at the end of the Studio presentation, I suspect that they may announce some crazy Pro, in the coming months.

>We're not really their target audience.

It's really interesting, because I'd estimate there are 10x more programmers than "video professionals". I could be extremely wrong though.

> Bravo Apple. I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next.

What would you say the programmers specifically need though. A laptop instead of a workstation?

Beautiful high resolution and crisp text rendering. I want looking at a dense page of code to look as beautiful and comfortable as reading a magazine. A comfortable keyboard and trackpad are a must too. Give me as much battery life as possible--at least a day or more. Performance, memory, and storage are less of a bottleneck these days and today's higher end specs are generally good enough.

I'm annoyed at how narrow their concept of "use cases" is.

I mean, are there really so many "pros" that need 18 streams of 8k video? Seriously? That's where all the money is? How does the market support so many "creative pros"?

Meanwhile, I know that Fusion 360 is going to suck as it always does, with its crappy slow graphics and clunky UI, and my docker containers will run dog slow.

It feels like they're catching up; there was a long lull where they seemed to focus entirely on iphone, with the occasional macbook because they needed devices to make apps for iphone on.

I mean their bread and butter will still be the iphone and co, but I'm glad they seem to have moved away from min/maxing for whatever brings in the most money.

Wait, how and why did Apple suddenly become cost-effective?

When the M1 was released... a year ago...

You could buy a 900$ laptop with a better CPU than any laptop out there. 20 hours battery life (almost 3x any other laptop out there). Silent (no fans). With a great screen, a great keyboard, lightweight, well built, etc.

Basically a machine that was more than 2x cheaper of competing laptops at 2500 $ or more, yet had more than 2x of everything.

Apple’s been fairly cost competitive for a while now. That’s an old trope, lots of their new stuff is similarly priced or in some cases cheaper than their competitors.

Given the longevity and resale value, they make great machines.

They have been off-and-on. They had a few notable price cuts back in the twenty-teens that made them damned competitive. At times they've been a rip-off but most of the "LOL look how expensive Apple is" stuff achieves such large gaps by comparing them to significantly worse hardware and calling it "equivalent". Plus theirs is the only consumer phone and computer hardware with a healthy used market, so you don't take as big a hit on recoverable value as soon as you "drive it off the lot".

Apple has consistently been cost-competitive since at least the Intel era, if you compare to mid- and high-end PC hardware. Apple never has made entry-level systems. Also, comparing to home-built doesn’t really count because most IT departments won’t support custom PCs.

Apples stuff has been cost competitive since the M1 came out... Although it's partly because there isn't much else in the same performance envelope, so there isn't much to compare to.

Since M1 pretty much.

> It seems that they're targeting products to what their professional customers actually want.

A $2,000 machine to handle editing, processing and posting video ~content~ on YouTube.

Quite the condescending tone.

You could have stopped at video content. Or just content. I don't see how the platform that serves and broadcasts said content is relevant to the value or performance of the device it's made on.

"Creatives" don't want a stylus or touchscreen to do their creative stuff?

> customers actually want

Almost. The hardware looks fantastic all-around. But the hostility to running an actually-usable OS like Linux is a huge stumbling block. Their users having to rely on the herculean efforts of the Asahi project, et. al, is shameful for the world's largest company.

If they were actually listening, they would have a more affordable, configurable Mac Pro like the old refrigerator models. I don’t care about compactness for a desktop model. I also don’t like components being soldered like it was an appliance instead of a computer.

If it wasn’t for Mac OS, and the fact that the alternatives suck more; I would have been gone last generation.

I don't know, "18 streams of 8k video" doesn't seem terribly customer-oriented? Is it something anything anyone really needs or understands other than "that's very fast?" How much video can you watch at a time?

I also don't see how the size of a desktop computer matters, other than as a fashion statement.

More and more I see the M1 chips and I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming. Would love too see something like Proton but for Mac (given up hopes for native support).

I hate that I have my gaming PC and then my Mac for everything else.

I have to wonder though what their plan is for the M2. Are they laying the groundwork for when the M2 comes out all of these variants will be ready at the same time? Or a gradual upgrade but the same series (Normal, Pro, Max, and then Ultra) for each.

Having worked with Apple on games, I can tell you that as an engineer they work fine. Metal isn't bad. The problem isn't technical. The problem is how Apple approves apps and thinks about the gaming experience. For example, a game I worked on got rejected from the App AND Mac store because (in Apple's opinion) the texture download was too large. There's no analogue for this in other game ecosystems. As a developer, if your secondary ecosystem is demanding a lot of changes your primary ecosystem don't require you'll decide it isn't worth the effort.

It's why the games on apple products are fundamentally different. Apple may say it's about protecting the integrity of the user experience, but the best and the brightest would rather learn directly from users themselves and not use Apple as a go-between.

Seriously. If Apple supported gaming more I'd be able to drop this PC.

Could be the sort of thing that could cause an avalanche of switchers.

You'd also pull over the entire games industry into the Apple space. Right now we code on PCs. As Apple silicon gets better, it's gonna be more and more painful to not be able to make use of that.

I don't feel the need to play cutting edge games anymore. Playing Windows games in Parallel on my M1 is pretty good. I was shocked to see how well it worked. It's unlikely to run Elden Ring well. However, the vast majority of games are fine.

The good news is that optimized iPhone, iPad, and Mac games now share most of their code and run on the same CPU and GPU cores.

There aren't many Mac games that have been ported over to both Metal and ARM, but World of Warcraft is an example.

Same, I want to run AAA games using these crazy Mac hardwares. A more interesting question will be: how hard it will be to implement such Proton for Mac? Is there any previous project?

There is a lot of support for M1. See these lists. Please note though that "playable" does not mean "on par with other platforms", ie, Windows and Xbox / Playstation.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3...

https://applesilicongames.com/

In reality though would you really want your games to be installed on the same machine as your daily driver?

Game companies and their parent companies tend to install some shady spyware on your machine in the name of "anti-cheat software" (ie, installed in the ring0/kernel space). I am kind of relieved that I have 2 separate machines.

Although if they develop virtualized environments to sandbox games from the host machine (similar to QEMU) then I suppose that might work.

Tell the game developers! They need to hear from you that the demand is there.

Same. That chunky PC serves only one purpose now and rest of the time is unused.

Mac is going back to their most successful niche - creators.

It's important to note that Apple cut off the Proton devs; not the other way around. It would indeed be pretty cool to see that sort of thing running on Apple Silicon, but the plethora of architectural changes that came along with Catalina stopped Mac support from being a viable target for Valve.

Not very surprising though; Mac native games don't really work that well either. If it relies on 32-bit libraries, it won't launch. If it uses outdated OpenGL, you can expect a plethora of errors to accompany you to an instantaneous crash. Apple has their work cut out for them, I just doubt they'll have the "courage" to bring back the features they so courageously threw away.

I agree that just M1 MacBook Pro is not great for gaming. However my M1 iPad Pro is very nice for some types of games. Lots to enjoy in Apple Arcade that takes advantage of motion detection in the tablet, developer support for VR/AR, etc. I worked on Nintendo video games about 22 years ago, but I am not much of a gamer now because my iPad and Quest just about do it for me.

> I hate that I have my gaming PC and then my Mac for everything else.

Why do you hate it? I also have this setup and I just play games, watch movies occasionally and play music on it unattended and I don't mind it's running Windows as I have no other use for it.

> More and more I see the M1 chips and I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming.

I guess Apple will never play the console game, with having their own game developer studios and buying exclusives.

But I wish they would put a M1 in an Apple TV, releasing their own controller and just do something!

- [x] RGB'd out PC with RTX 3090 for playing Minecraft and Elden ring

- [x] Decent wired network in-home

- [x] Connect via Moonlight from Mac Mini M1 to Gaming PC

- [x] Best of both worlds

It's wonderful. I only wish my Mac Mini had a 120hz display attached.

Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1 CPU's into bigger ones" were right, that's basically what they did for the top of the line new M1 CPU (fused two M1 Max'es together).

And since the presenter mentioned the Mac Pro would come on another day, I wonder if they'll just do 4x M1 Max for that.

I think the Mac Pro is almost like a phantom product at this point. Or a riff. Like they're going to say "the new Mac Pro is there is no more Mac Pro".

What can they really do, in a single machine, that is more "Pro" than the Studio? How are they going to bring developers along when most aren't developing for twenty-core machines?

I still think something else is coming. Maybe something unconventionally stackable. Something for render farms.

Whatever it is, it feels like it's going to need novel OS support.

They literally said in the keynote that the new Mac Pro is in the pipeline

> What can they really do, in a single machine, that is more "Pro" than the Studio?

I'm guessing the Mac Pro will focus more on Upgradability and adding expansion slots? That seems like a direction Apple is willing to go tbh.

The pro-ness is probably more about extensibility than speed, as you say 20 cores is already plenty for most.

And obviously they are not lying about the Mac Pro, marketing is spin, not saying the opposite of the truth.

New die with 64 M1 cores and support for 4TB of ram. Basically fill whatever market the threadripper fills.

It has been a phantom product, because Apple has needed to fill major gaps in the desktop space first.

I suspect Apple is set to debut powerful revision to the Mac Pro focused on AI/ML at WWDC.

I wrote about this 10 months back[0], and it still applies following Studio:

> It may not be obvious, but Apple has repair work to do in the pro community. Four years ago this month, Apple unusually disclosed that it was "completely rethinking the Mac Pro." [1]

> The current Mac Pro design wasn't announced until June of 2019 and didn't hit the market until December 10th of 2019. That's just six months prior to the Apple Silicon announcement.

> It seems unlikely Apple spent 2017-2019 designing a Mac Pro that they would not carry forward with Apple Silicon hardware.

> The current, Gen 3 2019 Mac Pro design has the Mac Pro Expansion Module (MPX). This is intended to be a plug-and-play system for graphics and storage upgrades. [2]

> While the Apple Silicon SoC can run with some GPU tasks, it does seem it does not make sense for the type of work that big discrete cards have generally been deployed for.

> There is already a living example of a custom Apple-designed external graphics card. Apple designed and released Afterburner, a custom "accelerator" card targeted at video editing with the gen 3 Mac Pro in 2019.

> Afterburner has attributes of the new Apple Silicon design in that it is proprietary to Apple and fanless. [3]

> It seems implausible Apple created the Afterburner product for a single release without plans to continue to upgrade and extend the product concept using Apple Silicon.

Given "Ultrafusion" it seems plausible that M2 would be able connect multiple custom SoCs that are littered with GPU cores as stackable accelerator cards.

> So, I think the question isn't if discrete Apple Silicon GPUs will be supported but how many types and in and what configurations.

This prediction not come to pass:

> I think the Mac Mini will remain its shape and size, and that alongside internal discrete GPUs for the Pro, Apple may release something akin to the Blackmagic eGPU products they collaborated on for the RX580 and Vega 56.

But at least the mid market display now exists. > While possibly not big sellers, Apple Silicon eGPUs would serve generations of new AS notebooks and minis. This creates a whole additional use case. The biggest problem I see with this being a cohesive ecosystem is the lack of a mid-market Apple display. [4]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956886

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

[2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-unveils-powerfu...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ywFqY5o1E

[4] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/wishful-thinking-wwdc-d...

The dialog around unveiling the Ultra had a “one final member of M1” vibe to it. I think that is the end for M1. The next cpu bumps will be M2s.

Also I wonder about fabrication nodes. The iPhone SE is going to take a lot of dies and keep that fan very busy. M1 is on something else, but it isn’t going to free the A15 fab for other customers.

I expect M2 is on a different process.

An entry level M2 has been showing up in software developers logs.

4 big cores, 4 little cores (like the M1, but based on newer gen iPhone cores) and 10 GPU cores instead of 8. Said to be based on TSMC 4nm.

> and keep that fan very busy

The wonders of auto-correct, I guess. It took me a moment to correct that to “and keep that faB very busy”.

”faN” made me wonder why you thought that phone ran hot and had a fan.

If they do create another chip for the Mac Pro, I wonder what they'll call it.

We have the M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra so far.

When handing over to the M1 Ultra part of the keynote he literally said something along the lines of "we're adding this last M1 chip to our lineup". So maybe an upcoming Mac Pro will have the next generation of Apple Silicon (M2).

I am curious to see how that device will look like. Surprisingly, with the last Mac Pro the modularity of the device and the ability to user-upgrade GPU, RAM or storage was actually a huge selling point that Apple emphasized. I can't imagine how this would work with Apple Silicon.

M1 Epic (late 2022)

M1 Ludicrous (early 2023)

M1 Insane (late 2023)

Probably they'll make enough changes to release M2 by that time.

I’m surprised they’ve introduced four M1 variants already, and while that makes a fifth variant seem more likely… I still think they’ll want to find another way to differentiate the new Mac Pro. What seems more likely to me: the M2 MBA is released either in tandem with a M2 Ultra MP, or a few months ahead of it, and the other higher spec models will lag 6-12 months behind from then on. Especially given the significant delays on M1 Max, it makes sense to me they’ll want to roll out the next gen in a lower volume/higher margin while they ramp up production.

Reminds me of this from Minions: https://youtu.be/Xs4LF8QnELM

At least it’s less confusing than the fucked up Intel and AMD product numbers.

This is just about CPU but I really wish they go back to simpler naming for macOS.

Cat namings were good and memorable but now I don't even remember what I'm using nor which version is newer. Even the spellings are hard for foreigners.

There's a New Nintendo 23DSLite iXL[1] joke in here somewhere.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4MHRcPLr38

Maybe it won't be M at all? I still reckon they might do discrete GPUs for the pro model, which could make it quite different to the other M chips.

M1 Plus Ultra.

Just go full anime.

Holding out for the M1 Ultra Magnum Turbo

M1 Hammersword Despacito.

Mega, Supra, Domina, Prima, Stellar, Noto, Nova, Jumbo.

Pro, Max, Ultra, Mega?

M1 Double Plus Good

M1 Ultra Max

M1 Ultra Pro, baby

This is actually really cheap. Maxed out at £7999 is less than half the price of an HP Z with similar numbers configured in which it probably can’t even get near the mac.

And it doesn’t need $1000 wheels.

My workstation build with Epyc is ~$5,000 and has more cores (24 core), more memory (256 GB), faster GPU (3090), a 2TB pcie 4 SSD and I suspect will perform better on standard benchmarks. Definitely not as compact as the Studio though but lot more extendable.

> I suspect will perform better on standard benchmarks.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. These M1 chips have some crazy benchmark performance.

What they don't have, is a standard x86 ISA, which means that a lot of applications run emulated (and still tend to beat many Intel specs, anyway). I keep reading people complaining that "It's faster, but not that much faster. What's the big deal?", when they are talking about an i86 application, running on Rosetta2.

$8100 for a 20-core, 128GB, 8TB, 2x10ge, 2xTB3 BTO config of a HP Z6 G4. You get more expandability but fewer and slower TB ports, random graphics, and a much slower CPU, also a different operating system. Z workstations won't be competitive for people who can choose macOS until they refresh them with a newer Xeon. On the other hand, Mac won't be competitive for people who require ECC or Windows or Linux.

https://zworkstations.com/configurations/2944242/

Stick two bigger GPUs in it to drive multiple 4k screens.

But yes no ECC. Linux arm64 works on my M1 Pro in UTM using native virtualisation. And it’s fast as anything.

$5,799 for:

* 20 core cpu

* 64 core gpu

* 32 core neural engine

* 128GB of ram

* 1TB SSD

fully maxed out, 8TB SSD

Yeah stuff SSD array in TB4 hole for less money.

This is such a random thing to complain about but I hate these Mac product pages with the animations as you scroll. I guess they are designed for mobile but I navigate them on a desktop using a mouse wheel and they always look super clunky.

It's like going to the library but someone has hired dancing cheerleaders to grab the book you're trying to read and wave it around so that you're more excited about reading it.

I'm going to use this example in my next usability review meeting. It's perfect.

Apple does them FAR better than anyone else. I can’t remember if they did it first, or just popularized it, but it works well for what it is.

That said, while it looks cool, after the first time you’ve used it it’s just a pain to navigate. I kind of wish it was a separate “intro” page or something.

(They’re annoying on mobile too, but work better than desktop)

Yeah, I don't get it. They are such a UX nightmare. My company was trying to implement something like that in our latest redesign of our site and I put my foot down about it. We are in the financial B2B space and I had to explain to the marketing team that people come to our site for information... not to be shown cute animation. Also (I haven't tested Apples take on it), they are often ADA nightmares.

Their pages respect prefers-reduced-motion [1] though. You have the choice to see a static page if you prefer.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

the first time they did it i was like wow apple is so good at this stuff this is really cool. It's gotten very old and annoying.

They used to be quick and smooth on the desktop, too. But it looks like Apple has been taken over by designers in the name only.

If you're using Chrome, change the page zoom from 100% to 33% or 50%. It feels so much more normal (to me)

It's terrible on mobile too.

Mouse wheels mostly just don't have a good input resolution. It's one of the main reasons I stopped using a mouse and switched to an apple trackpad full time. I can't stand static pages that scroll in chunks either.

it sucks w/ trackpad too tho! it's just totally breaks any physicality to scrolling

it's insane to me that they keep using this

Hey look, it's finally the "Missing Mac" as longed for here: https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2020/06/12/the-missing-ma... and here: https://www.cultofmac.com/1899/the-missing-macintosh/

Fans have been asking for such a thing for so many years.

100% what I was thinking. Sounds silly, but it's going to massively simplify my setup and change the whole way I work.

Interesting tweet from Hector Martin, who is leading the Linux port:

>Chances are our kernel will Just work on M1 Ultra with just device tree changes, might not even need any m1n1 changes.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1501271229763706882

Good. None of these releases matter to me if all those machines can run is Mac OS. I'm not a Linux freak, but I like machines that last a long time. Long term support is the weak spot of any proprietary design. Given the incredible hardware capabilities of these new boxes, the 5 or 6 years official expected official lifecycle is waaay too short.

Latest MacOS is supported by Mac Pro from 9 years ago, that's pretty good. Macbook Pro from 7 years ago. These M1 machines are the new baseline, I wouldn't be surprised if they're supported a decade from now, it's not like MacOS is going to need 10x the CPU/RAM to run in 2032 knock on wood

https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/ (have to scroll all the way down for supported devices)

I don’t buy Apple products for philosophical reasons, but the Mac Mini, and now Mac Studio, are everything I wish Intel NUCs were. I have an Intel Skull Canyon system from 2016 as my gaming PC and it fits in my wife’s purse. Since then, the gaming NUC variants have gotten larger and larger so that they’re nearly mini-ATX form factor again.

You should get into the small form factor (SFF) Mini ITX gaming scene.

Brands like Velkase, Custom MOD (in Ukraine, cannot currently conduct business), Phanteks, DAN Case, NZXT H1 V2, and many others are really interesting options.

I've built systems that use either SFX PSUs or Flex ATX PSUs (the latter are usually modified with Noctua fans to quiet them down, so using a case that requires an SFX power supply is more noob-friendly and will have more generous power limits)

The Optimum Tech channel on YouTube is a great as a general small form factor resource. Here's a case roundup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo8T81nuLFM

Gamers Nexus sometimes covers small form factor, but Optimum Tech has a lot more focus on SFF in particular.

> I don’t buy Apple products for philosophical reasons

philosophical? they are the most responsible company ever https://www.apple.com/environment/

they push performance limit while maintaining very low power consumption

What's philosophical into buying Intel or Microsoft Windows that constantly spy on you and forces bloat on your face year after year?

Apple reinvest into its OS and HW, i don't understand your logic

> philosophical? they are the most responsible company ever https://www.apple.com/environment/

LOL. If Apple actually cared about the environment they would make their products repairable and not fight people who repairs them.

It doesn't matter what you say if people are force to trash the entire computer because of one part failure. Most computers will not be recycled and a lot of them end up in toxic fires and stripped for metals.

Linking to a marketing page of one of the absolute worst offenders and claiming that they are the most responsible company ever is delusional.

Apple pushes promotions of their services into my face all the time. Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple Whatever. I hate it. At least with Windows I can disable it once and forget about it.

The amount of compute paired with the shared memory and fast bandwidth would make this an awesome fit for machine learning. But for PyTorch, the framework everybody is using now at least in computer vision, there seems to be no support at all for the GPU or the neural cores (which the presentation went on and on about).

I guess I’d better not hold my breath about support there, given Apples historical stance on support third party APIs/frameworks?

Whether PyTorch supports it... I'm not sure, but Tensorflow is still an immensely popular framework, and it is supported:

https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/11/accelerating-tensorflow-...

https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/

Apple said that Max's CPU is up to 2.5x faster and the Ultra's CPU is up to 3.8x faster than whatever intel CPU is in the iMac Pro, so you're getting about 52% more CPU performance with Ultra's doubling in CPU cores vs the Max, so definitely feeling some linear scaling limitations with the interconnect.

There has to be overhead to not have to deal with the multi-cpu architecture in software.

It's impressive

Maybe, but performance doesn't usually increase linearly with cpu count anyway. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

I am genuinely crestfallen that there was no update to Mac Mini. That thing has the right balance for most computer science folks who want a Mac. Not everyone needs/runs a silicon Godzilla on their desk after all.

As of the current lineup, Mini is still stuck with 16 GB RAM and a disappointing number of ports.

> Not everyone needs/runs a silicon Godzilla

Right, which is why the Mini exists.

> Mini is still stuck with 16 GB RAM and a disappointing number of ports.

Because people who need more are expected to buy the Studio.

There's only a gap of roughly $500 between a maxed out mini and the entry studio, so perhaps the studio is the answer to what you're looking for?

Apple M1 | 8‑core CPU, 8‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine, 16GB RAM, 10Gbit LAN = 899$

Apple Studio | 20-Core CPU, 48-Core GPU, 32-Core Neural Engine! 64GB RAM! 10Gbit LAN = 3999$

I think the M1 is a nice product for 95% of people including iOS Devs.

Silent, „cheap“, cost effective, nice build server. If you need more power … well get the small studio or buy another one.

Renting from hetzner is also cheap. 49€ with really unlimited bandwith. 20 TB traffic in a month? No problem, nobody cares.

https://www.hetzner.com/de/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-apple

WWDC is a few months away. There might be a refresh of the Mini there? If we don't see a refresh of the mini this year, I can't see them not upgrading it for M2 next year.

I initially thought the Mac Studio was the "pro" version of the Mac Mini. But no -- they're still selling the i5/i7 mini. This makes me wonder whether they're going to update it at all. Maybe they'll just quietly drop it at some point down the road?

What update were they going to do? Make an M1 Max model? That would cut into sales for the base Studio.

I'd buy one in a second if only it would support running vmware fusion - I still have to have one foot in Windows world, and not being able to spin-up and old windows vm is a deal breaker for me. (M1 chips won't support it).

Sure hope my latest macbookpro with intel chip lasts a while, I fear it may be one of the last ones they make.

For what its worth there is a tech preview: https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2021/09/fusion-for-m1-pu...

For now do not attempt to run Win11 on it though. It kinda sorta works a little after doing tons of workarounds including some really crazy ones (network through a kernel debugger stuff or something; manually installing x64 store packages if you want the store, etc...), the graphics is crap, rdesktoping is not very good. Seems fine for Linux VMs though (then use them with ssh).

If you want Win11 use Parallels, it works very very very well.

You can even run Fusion tech preview and Parallels at the same time :)

I'm assuming you can't run the Intel version of Windows or am I wrong and it is emulating an Intel processor?

Have you tried Parallels?

It works incredibly well on the M1 macs.

https://www.parallels.com/

Yes, but AFAIK, M1's will not support emulation of x86 based regardless of software vendor - and unfortunately, I still have to run some old VM's several times a week - include a very old Windows XP environment, and I don't think anyone's in any rush to support that anytime soon.

Who knows, maybe get a Mac studio for my Mac work, and keep my MacBook Pro for when I need to run non-arm VM's

Also UTM if you are a cheap ass like me.

https://github.com/utmapp/UTM

I use native virtualisation to run Debian arm64 and emulation to run Debian x86-64

They may be referring to the Non-Arm Windows. Let me tell you Parallels running Windows ARM is the snappiest Windows experience I have had in years....only problem is that its Windows 11 :/

Really wish there was someway to easily run Windows 7 or 8 on this thing. It would be bliss. Now that Windows XP Source has been leaked, maybe we can come together as a community, try to harden the OS and make it forward compatible with ARM. Bring back the Windows that people actually somewhat liked! If only that wasn't a monumental task :/

ARM versions of Parallels can only run ARM VMs. They can't run x86 VMs.

Parallels' marketing site does not make this very clear.

I expect Microsoft's answer to that will be to run an instance of Windows in Azure.

Why would you overload this machine for that need, though? Just have a laptop sitting on a shelf for when you need to spin up those old VMs, do what you need to do, and put it back on the shelf.

Its just the inconvenience of having to lug around multiple machines, and backup multiple machines - its nice when everything you need fits under your arm, but you are right - I could offload my old VM's, and may need to do that at some point.

The 2TB option is an extra $400. That's $200/TB. The 4TB option is $250/TB. The 8TB option is $275/TB.

That looks like planned obsolescence to me. A customer with 1TB will likely want to upgrade sooner than a customer with 8TB, so this pricing strategy discourages people from buying the more future-proof options. Other SSDs on the market tend to be cheaper per TB as you go up in size, but Apple's seem to be completely backwards (and obscenely overpriced, of course).

Or am I being too cynical here, and this is just that famous "luxury tax"?

"Options" are a popular marketing scheme to have your customers with deep pockets subsidize a lower starting price at the bottom end while keeping the same overall margin. Doesn't matter if you're Works the same way whether you're buying a Mac, buying SaaS software, or buying a car.

Apple does use very good quality SSDs, so I would expect them to be premium priced regardless.

I've never heard of an accusation of planned obsolescence based on price before.

> A customer with 1TB will likely want to upgrade sooner

Though I have no data to back it up, I think this is your mistaken assumption. I think it's much more likely that people upgrade because of CPU/RAM than disk space.

Depends on what you compare it to.

A basic 8TB SSD is about $500, but it's also more than 10x slower than what's in the Mac. A fast 8TB SSD from Sabrent, which is still slower than what's in the Mac, is about $1800.

Of course not everyone needs a blazing fast SSD for all their stuff. But that's why it has USB ports in the back.

Those are desktops, and Thunderbolt/USB 4 allows for fast SSDs. You can have the OS installed on an external drive too.

It's much less of an issue there than on laptops.

A lot of professionals use external drives for their work, and Apple has the right of charging beyond market value per TB of storage because the space is integrated, so you'll find that most people will purchase on-the-curve storage and rely on high-performance commodity drives for day-to-day artifacts and asset work.

That seems pretty typical for Apple. Upgrading from 512gb to 1tb on a MacBook Air is $200.

I would argue that the professionals they're targeting are storing terabytes of assets on network-attached storage, not on the local machine.

I'm really happy they're not going with a iMac pro form factor for these. Having a separate display and computer is great for avoiding e-waste. There are a ton of iMacs out there that have obsolete hardware but a screen that still works great.

I died inside when they got rid of target display mode for iMacs.

If anyone thinks Apple is not very serious about AR/VR consumer products, their renewed focus on creative professionals, intense workloads, and GPU performance seems to suggest otherwise.

Whatever the marketing out of Microsoft Surface, it's the Mac that has always enabled creative workflows. I'm genuinely more excited about the Mac than any other product, which I haven't felt or said for many years.

Nice work, Apple silicon and hardware teams!

> Whatever the marketing out of Microsoft Surface, it's the Mac that has always enabled creative workflows. I'm genuinely more excited about the Mac than any other product, which I haven't felt or said for many years.

A professional will work with whatever tools he needs, Mac or otherwise. It's pretty narrow-minded to think that it's the domain of one OS.

Apple finally releases a powerful affordable desktop computer. Now I am worried it's the start of WW3 or otherwise the end of the world. Going outside now to look for flying pigs

What? $2000 for the Studio plus $1600 for their 5K display means Apple's new entry level workstation now costs $3600. That's a LOT more expensive than the old iMac 27 i7 at about $2400.

To sum up, Apple just hiked their entry level workstation's price by $1200. AND they convinced you they performed magic.

No, I think that flying pig you saw was proof that Jobs' reality distortion field is still alive and well.

Except you don't have to buy their display, that's part of why the Studio is so nice. You can buy any generic display you want that doesn't cost 1600 bucks. For what you get, the 2k Studio is an absolute steal in terms of compute per watt, I/O, form factor, and longevity (Macs last ages). Plus, having 64 gigs of VRAM is absolutely amazing at that price point.

The old iMac Pro used to cost an absurd amount - like $5k IIRC. That is the old entry level "pro" Mac.

Which is quite a bit more than the studio + display.

A vanilla iMac (or blueberry :D ) is a consumer device.

The Mac mini is more equivalent to the iMac. This is a step beyond, a bit more like the iMac Pro, which was always more expensive.

I find the M1 Max configurations reasonable(almost equivalent to their Intel Mac Mini) and the M1 Ultra configurations obscene.

The design of it looks a bit off to me. Like a cheap mac-ish intel nuc designed by huawei with their matebooks.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17396818/huawei-matebook-...

It looks like they made a taller computer then cut it off 2/3 of the way down. Something about the proportions read as simply wrong.

But if it works, well its better than Jony Ive‘s „design is everything, function is last“ approach.

- Like the Mac Pro (2013) which was thermal limited even with the launch configuration and could not be refreshed because more power would mean less power through throttling

- Magic Mouse 2 which well u could not use while charging

- Macbook Pro Touchbar which is there because there was nothing else to „inovate“

- MacBook Pro Keyboard which is so thin and lookin good that the owner has to replace it every 6 month

I just don't get why they wouldn't turn those usb-c ports the other way so they line up nicely with the sd slot....

like this? https://twitter.com/thijsvlierop/status/1501295909275111425?...

Agreed

Great they avoided $1000 stand memes by offering a more reasonable $400 stand.

To be more serious looks like a pretty good product that fits well into offices. I stopped working in IT in 2018 but back then SFF was all the rage and a powerful workstation with a smaller form factor will probably be attractive to a lot of customers.

I want a vesa mount one which should be cheaper. Hrumph.

The M1 Ultra is likely using CoWoS from TSMC.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/tsmc/cowos

Perfect. Recently went to a 40" ultrawide display to share between work laptop (during work hours) and personal desktop (after hours) to simplify my desk, and felt the Mini was probably just a little too limiting/low-end.

Finally, the replacement to my 2015 iMac 5k.

What's the name of the monitor?

Mac Pro scale up?

How is this going to scale up to a Mac Pro, especially related to RAM?

The Ultra caps at 128 GB of RAM (which isn't much for video editing, especially given that the GPU uses the system RAM). Today's Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB (and has dedicated video RAM above this).

If the Mac Pro is say, 4 Ultra's stacked together - that means the new Mac Pro will be capped at 512GB of RAM.

Would Apple stack 12 Ultra's together to get to 1.5TB of RAM? Seems unlikely.

Hector Martin who’s developing Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon recently tweeted about this. The M1 Pro, M1 Max and the at the time unannounced “Double M1 Max” have a completely different series identifier (T600x) to the forth coming Mac Pro chip (T6500) so no it won’t just be a doubling/quadrupling of an existing design. https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1498317101245034502?s=21

Production houses working on massive projects will get the Pro. Anyone else will get the Studio and use proxy clips.

Without having a teardown available, and more importantly, without having actually manually manipulated it, I am ready to say the Studio is poor design. I could be completely wrong, but it appears from the images of the back that the design is simply this: a Mac Mini on the bottom with storage, I/O & PSU, below a processor layer with a massive heatsink, which is likely the only thing taking up any space behind the top grill. The problem with the design is that the M1 Ultra version weighs 8lbs., and most that weight is going to be in the bottom, making Studio unwieldy, and I expect placement of this little bottom-heavy box that weighs nearly as much as a gallon of water is going to be the source of a number of wrist injuries, and I think it is safe to say also, there will naturally be some blunt force injuries to a number of hands and fingers, some with ugly lacerations. Most of this could have been avoided with some new cutting edge technology colloquially known as putting a doggone handle on the top that was solidly loaded into the more massive layer on the bottom. I think the design ethic here is similar to strapping a 350 to a gocart. Putting a handle on something that weighs 8lbs. is so ordinary and necessary and obvious, and because Studio lacks it, I honestly do not care what's inside it. Even if manipulation is only going to occur once or a small handful of times, physically it is going to function like junk, and that just bugs me too much. I have too much junk as it is. I'd take 2 budget M1 Minis and an Intel Mini over a maxed out Studio every time. I'm absolutely serious, a handle would have changed everything.

Could/would this machine makes sense as a development machine? I use a Macbook Pro (M1) and it's always docked...I basically don't need it to be transportable. I could also use more power (I'm regularly running a bunch of docker containers + PyCharm + DataGrip + Android Studio).

I don't think any M1 chip makes sense at all if you need to work with a lot of docker containers. Orders of magnitude faster to do that on a Linux machine.

I’ll pretty likely swap this in for my almost always docked intel 16”, and keep that around for the rare times I go mobile.

Does it even make sense to get the M1 Ultra? The M1 Max seems to be enough.

Can't wait to see a teardown of the cooling solution. Not sure how the air flows between the bottom and the heat sink as there's a board between them.

It looked like it had space in the back and then the blowers were in the front to force the air over. Then it went out the top.

Looks very interesting. I'm curious of benchmarks and if there's throttling.

I don’t even care about the specs.

Just love the fact they fit it all in that tiny case, flush under a Studio display monitor.

There’s something 90s about it, SGI maybe?

Sun SPARCstation IPC: a lovely form factor and a great client machine. The matching monitor could sit on top. The whining fans were not so great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_IPC

It was quickly obsolete as CPUs got fast and too hot for that box.

The Mac Studio's HDMI doesn't support 120Hz out (so likely HDMI 2.0?) and it also doesn't come with a keyboard and mouse.

The complete lack of what HDMI port it uses is indeed pretty bizarre, but why would it come with a keyboard and mouse? The people who buy this already have those, or know which ones they need far better than Apple does, and will buy the exactly models they want on their own.

Side note: HDMI Forum pulled a USB and fucked their standard so forum members didn't have to upgrade their hardware. In the same way that USB 3.0 became "USB 3.1 Type-1" you can take HDMI 2.0 and essentially market it as HDMI 2.1 directly - it doesn't have to support 120 hz / 48gbps mode, it doesn't have to support VRR, etc. If it passes the HDMI 2.1 compliance testing, HDMI 2.0 hardware can be marketed as HDMI 2.1 without change.

So it could be HDMI 2.1 compliant, and still not support 48gbps mode.

(Which isn't quite the same thing as not supporting "120 hz" - it could probably do 120 hz over displayport/thunderbolt, or at a lower resolution, or with chroma subsampling - just not 4K120 4:4:4 because it doesn't have enough bandwidth)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo9Y7AMPn00

Seems like it shares the same shortcomings as the M1 Pro/Max family then.

The Thunderbolt ports support 120Hz though. I've been using the company MBP 14" with a 144Hz display without a hitch.

Biggest missing thing for me is no internal M.2 SSD slots where you can swap storage. Getting external closures is annoying, really wish it came with 2 or 4 m.2 slots that you could put on the top or bottom. Cables break, wiggle around, get moved around during data transfer and cause it to get corrupted or fail and more.

Try: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-ministack-stx https://satechi.net/products/stand-hub-for-mac-mini-with-ssd...

Guess this is what "modular" means. Now if there was just a cableless solution, we'd be living the Jonathan modular concept from the 80s.

It looks like the son of the Mac Cube.

I generally like Apple designs, but I think the Studio is ugly and uninspired. It reminds me of a cheesy HiFi component. If they couldn't come up with a better original design, they should have abandoned pretty design and put a handle on the top to make it easier to move around. Also, I think it is ridiculously expensive, should have maxed out closer to $4K, not $10K. Also, since it is thick enough, they could have jammed in a little wide-screen right on the front as a backup or aux monitor. For $10K, I'd like a little wide-screen display on the front.

I see that the official Apple specs mention "support for 5 displays" and the tech specs state:

"Support for up to four Pro Display XDRs (6K resolution at 60Hz and over a billion colors) over USB-C and one 4K display (4K resolution at 60Hz and over a billion colors) over HDMI"

... so I am very pleasantly surprised there ... >4k resolution on the four Thunderbolt ports and then a bonus 4k port via HDMI.

The same question arises as with the mac mini: Why can't the additional (leftover) ports be used for even more displays ? In this case, there are two more ports on the front (either USB-C or TB4) that can handle a display - why is that not possible ?

I have to assume at some point you simply hit the limit of how many pixels it can push out. Remember, you're talking about running FOUR displays at a resolution that was unheard of on the desktop two years ago AND another display at 4k simply as a "bonus".

Is there any point to building a PC anymore?

At the moment the PC market is upside down, too. If you're building a professional workstation, you'll find with current prices that a business XPS desktop is cheaper by a significant margin over building your own workstation with the highest end parts available today.

Games.

Is it just me or have apple clearly not tested this page on Android Firefox?

You're not alone.

Boy is that an ugly box… the proportions seem all wrong to me - looks like they just stacked a bunch on Mac Mini’s (which has pretty nice proportions)

Apple claims M1 Ultra is faster than 28 Core Intel Xeon W chip, which they ship in Mac Pro. If that's true, then Mac Studio is an excellent value.

Mac Pro with 28 Core, 96GB RAM, 1TB SSD = $14,199

Mac Studio with M1 Ultra (48GPU Cores), 128GB RAM, 1TB SSD = $4,800

Also it looks like they compared their CPU performance with the latest intel generation in their demo.

> "16-core PC desktop CPU performance data from testing Core i9-12900K with DDR5 memory" https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/#footnote

It's kinda scary how monster of a company Apple has become lately. Their product line-up in compute is now unmatched.

The "overview" is just a graphic with links to an event page and video content. That isn't an overview. An overview is a blurb of text summarizes the subject matter.

I am really, really sick of these gated "watch the video" information vehicles. I read much faster than video plays: stick to text if you want my attention for things like this.

As a comparsion a quick build on PCPartPicker: Xeon E5 22 core, Radeon RX 6900 XT, case, power supply, 64 gb of ram, motherboard, 1TB SSD and CPU cooler. Comes in at just shy of $5,000

That CPU isn't as powerful as the one the M1 Ultra beat in their specs, but should be about the same GPU as they compared and beat. If the benchmarks are to be believed.... the $4,000 Mac Studio will be an absolute powerhouse in the price/performance/power market for quite some amount of time.

Normally I'd make some snarky remark about Apple Tax, but in this case they look to have the PC hardware equivalent very well and truly beat on cost. For now.

> As a comparsion a quick build on PCPartPicker: Xeon E5 22 core, Radeon RX 6900 XT, case, power supply, 64 gb of ram, motherboard, 1TB SSD and CPU cooler. Comes in at just shy of $5,000

And that's just the parts. Don't forget the M1 Ultra will use less electrical power too.

If anything this just reminds me how frustrating their product line was pre-M1 for so many years. I'm still dealing with the legacy of having to work with people with 16GB as the ceiling and projects that simply do not fit in them.

Don't forget that any of the M1-family chips are absolutely crushing the competition in single-core performance.

As a dev, I think this is neat - but unfortunately, to this very day, the most important workloads usually are single-threaded, even the ones that are multi-threaded, rarely scale to more than 8 cores.

This usually means that the advanced M1 variants don't really offer an advantage over the base offering, although, more RAM is always nice.

No CPU, x86 or ARM, has broken through the 2K GeekBench benchmark.

The CPU that could do that would be innovative.

It's long past the time to change this.

Even Xcode now has a much more parallelized build system.

The chassis seems to be around the right size for a DIY project of combining it with an iMac G4 swivel display [1].

With a modern display it would make for a really nice 3rd party accessory.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30576310

It's a little funny looking, proportionally speaking, but I am so happy to see some ports on the front. It can be incredibly awkward to try and find ports on the back of a machine. At first glance it seems a little expensive, but the value based on performance is actually fantastic. Well done, apple.

I'm kind of disappointed, Apple make such a big thing of being green but keep making machines that aren't upgradeable in these tiny form factors. I was really hoping for a more affordable Mac Pro with easily accessible memory/ram and some expansion slots.

It’s interesting that they are demoing a 3d app on the screen. Does this mean that finally 3D on a Mac is not underpowered. The hold point always used to be the graphics card, but will apples new chip be equal to the task?

Still no ECC. For some reason that bothers me on this class of machine.

I was kind of disappointed as I expected this to be the keyboard thing that was leaked to the news a bit ago; seemed to fit just right with their arguments of portability, connectivity, modularity.

I just couldn't see it. Specially for the studio.

The thermals would have been insane to deal with

yea they kinda glossed over "modularity", I didn't see any modules...

Can we please please please stop hijacking the scroll wheel

I imagine the mac pro is going to have a Super Sayan M1

Darn. I was really hoping for a new Macbook Air :/

Third/fourth/fifth time's the charm I guess? I really hope apple gets the "Mac Pro" form factor right this time.

> I really hope apple gets the "Mac Pro" form factor right this time.

Tbh, they did mention at the end that their Apple Silicon Mac Pro is coming later down the line, which I'm guessing will focus more on upgradability and modularity

Easily the most obnoxious scroll/parallax presentation I've seen thus far 2022.

Guess I'll watch to mkhb video to see what the product is

Given the size I wonder if it’d make a practical laptop replacement for work? Just toss in your bag when you go home!

Apple CPU these days are so impressive. I am getting out of Apple ecosystem, but cannot ignore those.

That heatsink is too small for my taste. Should have gone full cube, still thr coolest Mac ever.

This gives me distinct G4 Mac Pro tower aesthetic vibes but with a modern twist. Love it :)

Missed opportunity to add FaceID especially since the A13 is there.

I think from a design perspective, this is the most disappointing Apple release so far. It's just way too tall, imo. There's a lot of empty space on the front which just seems odd.

I'm not exactly sure what they could've done to keep the Mac Mini footprint, but this ain't it.

From the presentation, the entire top half is the thermal system so can't really put I/O there.

Agreed, they should have gone for cube proportions. I'm sure someone will come out with a NAS that has the right height to bring it back into harmony.

I'm convinced the design is a tradeoff to make this work in the datacenter. With the exact same footprint, racks of Mac Mini servers can be converted to fit these with very little effort.

Sweet just in time for my april performance review and hardware upgrade :)

Here's hoping they bring back a usb-a port on their laptops too.

I feel like they missed an opportunity to call this the Mac M1 Maxi.

It's ugly. And I love it. No more obsession over form.

yes! i have been so worried about my macbook 2014 dying because I don't want the new macbooks. this looks awesome.

It would be nice if it was rack mountable.

We miss M1 Pro Mac Mini?

Good to see the kind of computer we can all afford in ten years or so.

This is not really geared towards 'all'. You can see that on the presentation and who they had talking.

Can I build my large xcode project in less than 20 minutes with this?

So an M1 max is not... max anymore (>_<)

Technically "Ultra" means "Beyond", so putting it above "Max" means it's "beyond the maximum" :P

Well yes and no. M1 Ultra is obviously faster, but that actually is two M1 Maxes glued together. (Of course it's much more complicated than that) In that sense it's not a completely new processor so it's not exactly breaking the "Max" promise... or am I playing devil's advocate here?

Why is the M1 Max not... the maximum spec?

It is the maximum for a single chip. Ultra is two chips in a single package. I think the name subtly emphasizes the distinction.

It is the most they can get on one die, but they can glue multiple dies together and get more.

the casting lol

can’t wait for M1 Ultra Pro Max Utimate

The design looks like it was designed to be a fan, but they accidentally added a computer chip

Cool

So it has USB-C... yet can't be powered via USB-C?

The maximum power draw of the Mac Studio according to Apple spec sheet is 370W. The maximum power draw over USB-C seems to be 100W.

The clauses on those sentences don't scan.

Stunningly compact. Extensive connectivity. Outrageous performance.

I mean, you've gotta either go

Stunning size. Extensive connectivity. Outrageous performance.

Stunningly compact Extensively connected. Outrageously performant.

Anyway. Not sure anyone apart from me will care.

Eh, reads fine to me. Helps break up the list so that people don't just skim over it, I'd guess.

Nice machine, but for all the lip service to sustainability and environmental friendliness, the insistence of soldering everything in makes for a disposable device. In particular, once the SSD goes, it’s just a very expensive brick.

Where does this fit in the lineup of Macs?

The 27" iMac is gone and the Mac Studio looks like it's taking the place of that or could even be the new Pro.

I don't want that thing on my desktop, I want a big all-in-one.

At least the Studio Display looks like it could be used to stuff some kind of M chip in down the road for a "pro" all-in-one option.

Using the 27" iMac with lots of stuff plugged in is a bit annoying. I occasionally have cables coming loose when I adjust the display. And it's impossible to get additional displays that match the iMacs look.

The Mac Studio + Display is a replacement for the discontinued iMac Pro, not the 27" iMac.

Just look at the pricing on the combo.

The whole GPU thing is really funny. The M1 Ultra is supposedly more powerful now than an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000, but I'm guessing really truly only for professional work.

If you tried to play games on it or develop games for it, you're gonna find that it's less powerful than the standard AMD integrated GPU on a 5k iMac from 2015 until you come across software or build software using Metal directly.

Both Wine and Parallels usage today provide poor graphics performance.

Don't a lot of people want a computer in the 1000-2000$ range? The average person who wants to do video editing on an M1 mac just wants >=32GB of RAM. The only way to get that is to shell out $2000+.

M1 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD for $1100

M1 Max Mac Studio with 32GB RM and 512GB SSD for $2000

Yeah because nobody ever buys a computer that costs between $1000 and $2000... ?

A 512GB SSD in a $2k computer? People who deal with HD video are going to want at least 1TB right? So it basically starts at $2200?

Is Apple going to release anything anytime soon for the young/not-rich kids who want to do real video editing (need >=32GB RAM)?

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