Apple Mac Studio
apple.com
apple.com
Bravo Apple. I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next.
I use a Lenovo Thunderbolt dock for both my M1 16" MBP and a Lenovo laptop running Linux. It runs 2 x DisplayPort monitors, mouse, keyboard, and webcam.
Yep. There are monitors with Type-C, power delivery, usb hub, so they avoid you the need of having a dock. Usually they're priced at around monitor+fancy dock, so it doesn't even cost more for more practicality.
Otherwise, it has been great, especially with games.
> Supported Interface: DisplayPort (G-SYNC, FreeSync), HDMI (FreeSync).
[0] https://gscs-b2c.lge.com/downloadFile?fileId=Do77Cjc9rIkTamu...
Say that you're a manufacturer trying to keep an eye towards wants new vs supporting what's old, what decisions do you make to support new and retro without increasing the costs? At some point, having backseat decision makers giving input results in the car designed by Homer.
Of all of the things I've personally railed on Apple about in the past as well as others, their most recent HW offerings have been a great compromise. They've brought back some USB-A, SD card reader, HDMI, etc. They realized they've gone too far in certain areas, but some how they had a come to Jeebus meeting that reigned them back in.
> trying to keep an eye towards wants new vs supporting what's old
No one is suggesting they trade anything away. Apple has settled on USB-C. But there's plenty of extra room on the rear panel. Your argument assumes benevolence on Apple's part. For all you know the chips support dual HDMI, they removed it to save money which ends up being pure profit because they didn't reduce the product price at all. Do you think adding a second HDMI would increase the arbitrary price from $2k to $2k plus $20?
For the record, I would LOVE it if the Mac startup chime played "La Cucaracha"
Sure, but I don't think any Apple Silicon Mac has dual HDMI. While I guess it's possible that they spent the money to design dual HDMI support in their own chips and then said "but now that we've done this, we can save twenty bucks by not actually making the physical ports," but doesn't it seem likely that they also saved the money by…not putting it on the chip?
> Do you think adding a second HDMI would increase the arbitrary price from $2k to $2k plus $20?
Do you think anyone contemplating buying a computer that starts at $2K is going to suddenly stop, slap their forehead, and scream, "To connect two HDMI monitors, I'm going to have to buy a $15 USB-C to HDMI cable instead of a $6 HDMI cable! That extra $9 blows my budget! CURSE YOU, TIM COOK!"
I mean, I get what you're saying, but this just seems like a weirdly tiny hill to die on. :)
> For the record, I would LOVE it if the Mac startup chime played "La Cucaracha"
Well, who wouldn't.
However, it's not like you have to replace your monitors because of only one HDMI port. There are cables that go from TB4 to HDMI without dongles. Yes, you would need a new something instead of the something you already have.
Do you really know what the cost of adding a 2nd HDMI port to a system is? I do not. I do know it will be much more than the cost of the actual port connector itself. There's a new hole to be added to the case. There's more robotically soldered points to connect the new port to the system. Of the way the system is laid out on the board, is there enough bandwidth to supply signals to all of the ports? I have no idea the level of complexities involved in deciding what ports are available with the bandwidth of the system, but I do not for a second think that I could do it better.
Also, I'm pretty excited to replace my big tower with this thing and finally get my computers off the floor.
Because of the "sleek" design and smaller size, Apple has people convinced that the computer should be like children in the '50s--seen but not heard.
If you offer someone a computer in the shape of the mac mini or this new studio design OR they could have a typical PC style box, I'm guessing the majority of people will choose the smaller box. Even if there are no Apple logos on the smaller box. Nobody wants a 30+lb box any more. As an editor, you can take this bad boy on the road with you without incurring overweight luggage fees at the airport.
MAKE IT THICKER. IT'S A GODDAMN DOORBELL. YOU CONTROL THE THICKNESS! THERE IS LITERALLY NO REQUIREMENT IT BE THAT THIN!
<3
-- I really get so angry when these arguments are given so I feel your pain.
FWIW I do have a thickness requirement to install one on my door
Not only that but with the Ultra variant, all of the USB-C ports are thunderbolt 4 ports at 80gb/s, that's a massive amount of IO.
(note that despite the number of ports - only 4 of them can be running displays, plus the HDMI port gets its own channel)
On Max it's only 4 thunderbolt ports (and I would assume 2 displays + 1 HDMI since it's half of an Ultra) but still, that's about 2x anything else on the market.
And people who only have HDMI cables! I was using display port on my old MacBook, but I'm using HDMI on the new one as I already had an HDMI cable, but not a USB-C to DisplayPort one.
I had a M1 Mac Mini but I do occasionally want to take a Mac with me so I replaced it with the Air. I only slightly miss the extra ports on the Mini.
That was on a Dell desktop I had at a previous job. Not sure if it was just kinda crappy, or whether the inrush current on those Model Ms is just that big.
Also, the Mac Studio actually has an HDMI port.
Don‘t forget the headphone jack!
It's at the top to the left of the USB-A ports.
I mean, if you're going to break with Apple tradition and have visible ports on the front, seems like you'd want the headphone jack to be one of them.
Just to be clear yes I know USB-C thumb drives exist but they are next to useless because their whole purpose is to shuttle files between devices. Devices that likely don't have USB-C yet.
USB-A is the de-facto standard for thumb drives. Are we all just supposed to throw them away overnight because Apple blessed us with computers without USB-A ports? Or, they'll sell you a dongle for $19 which can be had on Aliexpress for $0.75. Would it have killed them to throw an extra USB-A 3.x port on the nearly empty front panel? It carries nearly the same signals as USB-C minus power delivery. No, this was a purely aesthetic decision. Apple could design a brick PC with no ports besides power and people would still pleasure themselves into a coma at the thought of spending $2k on such a grotesque monstrosity.
If you are willing to buy a $0.75 anything from Alibaba and trust it with your precious data, you do you. As I've already suggested, you more than likely already have everything you need in a drawer, on your desktop, etc that will allow multiple USB-A devices to connect through a single port.
This seems like a very disingenous way of saying that Apple is one of the largest companies on the planet and sells hundreds of millions of devices a year.
Given that Apple regularly supports devices almost a decade old with firmware updates, has one of the most aggressive environmental agendas in the industry, and has invested billions of dollars in recycling programs, I would hazard a guess and say that on an adjusted basis they probably compare very favourably to competitors like Samsung and other OEMs.
>USB-A is the de-facto standard for thumb drives. Are we all just supposed to throw them away overnight because Apple blessed us with computers without USB-A ports?
You're upset about having to reach seven inches further to plug in a USB drive. If that's enough to cause you to throw all of your thumb drives away then I'd say that reflects more on you than on Apple.
>Or, they'll sell you a dongle for $19 which can be had on Aliexpress for $0.75.
There's a considerable engineering (and therefore cost) difference between a dongle that carries all the required electrical certifications, and a 75c Chinese firestarter that stands as much chance of damaging your computer as enhancing it, but that's moot anyway since nobody is forcing you to buy the Apple-made adapter in the first place.
>Would it have killed them to throw an extra USB-A 3.x port on the nearly empty front panel?
Given the form factor, quite possibly. It isn't as simple as just cutting out a slot and sticking a connector in, you need to route that connecter internally and find space on the logic board for the supporting circuitry, which has all sorts of difficult implications for the board layout.
And for what? How many thumb drives do you think the average person needs to plug in at any given moment? Why do you assume that your extremely narrow use-case is so important that it must be given the highest possible priority for Apple's engineers to meet?
The overwhelmingly vast majority of consumers, even pro consumers, will do just fine plugging their thumb drives into the back of the very small box sitting in front of them, or plugging in a USB hub to one of the USB-C ports on the front. Why add complexity and cost to solve a non-problem for a tiny subset of users who, if they're anything like you, were never going to buy an Apple product irrespective of what ports it has on the front?
They have multiple TB4 ports. I'm not sure if their USBC ports are video-compatible. If you get the ultra, then the front ones are TB4, as well.
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.
I do however image that the performance per watt will be really good.
Maybe not, but 32GB RAM + 512GB SSD for $2k is a pretty competitive price point.
https://www.newegg.com/seagate-2tb-firecuda-530/p/N82E168202...
Find me a 1TB SSD that perform as fast as Samsung 980 Pro and is much cheaper. Say under $125.
> That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.
Likely mostly running the same workloads such as web browsing.
> ... and run different software.
Maybe if Apple wrote it. Otherwise you can run the same Chrome/Firefox, Photoshop and Office on a Windows or even Linux Machine. Most software is shared between platforms nowadays with posix/windows being the lowest common denominator in terms of "cross platform".
Same goes if you prefer pages to word. Or software from Panic vs something else. The thing is if you’re most comfortable ale and productive on MacOS unless you build a hackintosh you need to buy a Mac and pay the mac tax but you get a whole integrated thing
Having a clever reason to justify how it was intentionally designed to be slower doesn't change the fact that it's slower.
Apple is great at other things and you do get other benefits when you buy an Apple computer, the performance/dollar just isn't one of them for desktop. Even for laptop, the M1 was the first time they were completive on that metric.
That's a narrative which I think has been proven to be not true for quite some time? If you look at the prices of Windows ultrabooks from brand names, they have been at the same level as Mac laptops for many, many years.
Then you have to add on motherboard ($1k), case ($200), cooling ($200), psu ($200).
Even if you cut a few corners, you are still over $8k for equivalent performance, and a substantially larger form factor. Yeah, you can upgrade, etc, but thats not really the point of the exercise.
That said, if you can think of speccing it another way, id be interested, as im looking for a decent workstation build that is x86.
Not only on price point but also performance per watt. The M1 laptops were a game changer on that front, and I expect the M1 Ultra to be the same.
Given the longevity and resale value, they make great machines.
You could buy a 900$ 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.
I wish I could get back all the time I've wasted helping relatives deal with their Photos libraries and backups just because they got the entry level machine with skimpy storage...
As for storage, yeah 240gb is probably not ideal for most people but since I bought the air mostly as a lightweight device I can carry anywhere instead of a workstation (even though it's insanely powerful for what it is) it does not really matter in my case.
(This is my first Mac so I was very worried of the pretty limited ram since I had no idea how macOS deals with memory, but if it's fine for me I'd say it's fine for most normal/casual users)
The small SSD is the bigger issue. If you use it as your main machine you will fill it up quickly and people then start doing stupid things like putting their Photos library on a USB stick or on an SD card, and that's just asking for trouble.
Keep your daily driver lean and cheap (and easy to replace).
Maybe 240GB are enough for light usage if you store photos in the cloud. I can only say that in my experience 1TB is the bare minimum if I don't want to spend half my time copying files around.
"Optimize Storage" is a bandaid that helps make your Mac with too little storage usable. But it's not a great solution. You'll be looking at spinners a lot. It's just not a nice experience when every video you want to look at takes a few minutes to load.
It was a fantastic product launch sure but it's not really fair to say it was 2x better on all metrics at a given price.
> 20-Core CPU
> 48-Core GPU
> 32-Core Neural Engine
for $3,999
is that kind of like... a bargain?
UPDATE - Sorry, I originally listed this as a 5900x by accident. I need more sleep.
As for the footprint, it's usually not enough of a concern at the desktop to double or triple the price to go from a standard mini ATX down to a double height Mac Mini, but I'm sure there are some locations where that would be a concern.
You may have misread the number of cores on the box when you bought it!
If you go into task manager, how many logical threads are there?
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.
How have they stagnated?
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...
or the HP equivalent - they're still equipping them with Xeon's from 2 1/2 years ago. So pretty stagnant.
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.
There is Mold (https://github.com/rui314/mold) as an alternative but it doesn’t support MacOS yet and that’s a blocker for our team.
None of that swapability is available on any of the Apple systems, so when they stagnate there's nothing that can be done.
I love the idea of component machines, but at this time of my life, I would be just fine to never have build another PC. With that, these systems of plug in the cables and go to work are appealing. Having said that, it still rubs me the wrong way on how non-upgradeable these things are.
- 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
Plus, I think a lot of people who would not normally call themselves a "prosumer" will want, and purchase these.
Small is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Apple sold nearly $11 billion worth of Macs last quarter. Once you get out of the HN echo chamber and enterprise IT circles, Macs are quite popular.
In a way, they never did "mass market".
Having an Apple Store within a 20 minute drive of 80% of the American public counts as mass market [1]. Haven't been lately because pandemic but my local Apple Stores were always packed with people. And of course there's a Best Buy, Micro Center and other regional retailers that sell Macs in places with no Apple Stores.
It's not just prosumers; it's normies who just want a good computer made by a company they've heard of and trust vs. a cheap plastic 3rd tier PC from a manufacturer they're vaguely familiar with. I've been involved in user groups since the 80's; trust me, most Mac users are just regular people—not music producers and cinematographers.
An M1 Mac mini, which certainly outperforms most PCs in it's price class. The retail price starts at $699 but is available for significantly less via 3rd parties like Amazon.
If you think of the market segment as "non-plastic computers that don't suck", Apple is doing quite well. And now that Apple Silicon performance continues to outpace the industry as a whole, this will continue.
The other segment is the "I like nice things" crowd. They aren't price sensitive; they just like nice things and Macs have that in spades compared to the vast majority of PCs.
It's like when people say their iPhone is better quality than a $200 Xiaomi phone. Well, duh??? Why are you even comparing them? If you look at higher tier Xiaomi phones, or in your example, laptops from reputable companies such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, they're much closer in build quality, have a choice of tradeoffs ( you can choose if you want small, light, long battery life, type of screen, ports, performance, etc. and not have Apple choose), and were still quite a bit cheaper than equivalent specs Macbooks. That's no longer quite as valid for laptops due to the M1s l, but is still valid for phones.
Getting what we need not what Jony says we needed.
Products and needs evolve and change. Saying bad things about the man is nasty especially considering his gentle nature. Especially that we really actually don’t know who is exactly responsible for what in that world.
What would you say the programmers specifically need though. A laptop instead of a workstation?
I am trying to imagine what a page of code laid out by a professional designer would look like and I can hear a million programmers screaming bloody murder in my head about the thoughtful use of whitespace, proportional-width fonts (even though they are ones chosen to clearly differentiate between confusing characters like 1/I and 0/O), and the occasional change in font size for... what is the source code equivalent of a subhead, anyway? Comments?
There are beautiful programmer fonts nowadays that look amazing on Apple's high resolution screens.
There are several GUIs for Vim/Neovim that take advantage of the GPU and the text rendering abilities of modern computers in general and Macs in particular [1].
And once you get used to seeing your code this way, it's hard to go back.
You'll probably love this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06030
Nicolas Rougier has also implemented a few of those ideas in a series of packages for Emacs called "NANO Emacs"; the actual implementation goes beyond what's discussed in the paper and is worth checking out.
I love the exploratory screenshot of a function reformatted with the comments floating on the left of a hairline instead of next to the source, with the function name nice and big and bold right next to the version control info.
BTW, Nicolas has a lot of interesting packages exploring use of graphical design elements in Emacs apart from the Nano Emacs stuff; for example, there's https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode. I love how he chooses to represent dates and dates with times attached, and to distinguish active vs. inactive dates with shading rather than "[" and "<". That actually makes it easier to spot a common org-mode mistake without having to call up the agenda.
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!
I also don't see how the size of a desktop computer matters, other than as a fashion statement.
A $2,000 machine to handle editing, processing and posting video ~content~ on YouTube.
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.
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.
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.
It's really interesting, because I'd estimate there are 10x more programmers than "video professionals". I could be extremely wrong though.
Creatives, on the other hand, probably have a 50% or more Apple platform user base, and also like fixed workstations.
I used to run a dev shop for a photographic equipment manufacturer, and the Apple platform (even relying on the users having beefy workstations), was quite important.
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.
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.
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.
Apple added back expandable internal storage for the Mac Pro and I hoped they would relent here too
I always thought it was a fair trade-off. Pro users who care more about stability/support can pay the Apple Tax, and enthusiasts on a budget can DIY it and get a better machine for less. It feels like greed to cut off that path.
It was also way more important in the day of spinning disks - so many machines from that era got a new lease on life by having the HDD replaced with an SSD. Imagine if HDDs had somehow been soldered in...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
But for the price to use it, ok not rarely since I game a lot... but considering I also have consoles. I would say I use my Mac more.
I just wonder if this is ever going to be a realistic alternative or am I just always going to have 2 personal computers.
Additionally all the creators, musicians, artists, etc that are making assets for and working with the game industry are having to use PCs to interface with the game.
Increasingly rare to find an artist that only works in photoshop and isn't working in the engine, directly putting their work into the game.
Accordingly even the art side is using PCs.
So even if it "only" reaches 3060 levels of performance in games, I think many people would be okay with that. Reality will likely place it somewhere between a 3060 and the 3090.
A lot more probably find a best-bang-for-the-buck midrange card and hang on to it for ~3 years, before upgrading to another midrange card.
Running a farm of these things? Maybe perf per watt makes sense to save some money. Mobile device running on battery? I totally get it.
But surely, the difference in cost for one person running it in their house, or a few hundred people in an office... like who cares? The cost savings won't even be noticeable on the power bill.
It's definitely a great machine, but if you're a gamer - stay away.
I know there is Crossover, Wine technically works on Mac from what I can tell also. So not sure if there is a technical reason Proton couldn't work on Mac other than just not building it.
Apple does talk a lot about gaming now on the iPhone and iPad, I would love to see them talk about it more on Mac (especially with how powerful these are) and maybe work with Proton like Steam is for the Steam Deck.
Meanwhile, newer versions of macOS (and the M1 that runs the ARM builds in particular) don't use Vulkan at all, opting for Metal instead.
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.
You mean if gaming supported Apple more, right? The industry's reliance on DirectX and the frameworks that build on it are largely what keep gaming so PC-centric.
If we saw AAA studios embrace macOS-compatible (or better yet Open Source) graphics architecture, the need to have separate gaming PCs (and the insanely expensive GPUs associated therewith) would evaporate.
It's a chicken and egg problem, although Apple Arcade is a good approach to try and bridge that gap.
But go on, blame directx for being the one API actually moving things forwards. Not Apple's shitty behavior.
I can't find 'em for under $2000.
> Apple deprecated OpenGL in iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 Mojave in favor of Metal, but it is still available as of macOS 11 Big Sur (including Apple silicon devices). The latest version supported for OpenGL is 4.1 from 2011.
OSX accounts for 2.62% of Steam users.
Implementing another graphics backend is prohibitively expensive for small studios whereas you could implement either OpenGL or Vulkan and get the other 97.38%. And that's without factoring in the required investment in single-use hardware, people, and skills.
DirectX is another safe choice but I try to stay away from anything proprietary or Microsoft-related.
Honestly the real issue is you probably wouldn't get many users or make a whole ton of money, really. Unless you target iOS or iPads, but that can add some significant constraints to the game. (But sometimes it's OK; Divinity Original Sin 2 basically works fine on an M1 Mac or an M1 iPad, as long as you have a Xbox controller to go with it.)
I think as programmers we desperately want to believe it's just a matter of programming and that we're in the critical path here, but it really isn't. Most of that stuff is a solved for a lot of cases. And if it was technological constraints, honestly, there's like a whole host of actual technological concerns, all of them really boring and crappy and not "cool" like rendering (like how do you CI and QA the damn thing, what kind of impacts might it have on your build system, do all the 3rd party things you have work here, etc.) Rendering is just "cool" to talk about but it's not actually as important as those; by the same token you never see giant threads on here about like OS-specific sound APIs or whatever...
There just aren't many Mac gamers and the hardware is kind of expensive to buy and test on for most purposes in that case.
I can tell you from long experience-- more than 20 years ago I produced a Mac games with Apple's financing and as recently as five years ago I produced a game that sold over $100m on an Apple device-- Apple has been extremely consistent in their attitude. They are much less supportive of gaming then Microsoft or Sony. Part of it is that they see games as a lesser use of their devices over other use cases. Another part is that they consistently promote the kind of experiences they wish their customers wanted over the experiences their customers choose.
Of course consumer level macs have never had GPUs that could run AAA games. I don't know what an M1 MacBook Air's perf is. If it's able to run AAA games and a reasonable framerate then maybe a market would build? But if you're limiting gamers to M1 Pro/M1 Max/M1 Ultra users only then it's probably a pretty small market?
Apple makes a huge part of its revenue from mobile gaming, while ferociously antagonizing the game makers and the main players of the industry (still remember their beef with Nvidia for instance) which makes it a bad bet to embrance Apple platform outside of the most dominant ones.
But the economics make total sense. It's like 15/euro a month. A RTX 3080 would cost me like 1200 euro to buy at the moment, without the rest of the PC to go with it. And I'd need to run windows, which I've not done since '98.
Outsourcing hardware it seems, does work for gaming, if you've got the 'net for it, :}
Had the benefit to purchase my self a beasty computer right before Cyberpunk launched.
I don't know how many times I just stopped what I was doing and just look at something shiny/bright.
Last time I felt this way must have been back with HL2
I find it rather pretty, either way...
Not being allowed to play a game you legally bought on geforcenow is something I really don't understand.
Really?
Have you missed the insane markups on anything 'gaming' related for many years?
Apple could come with its magic to take the field, but it’s been a while we saw them succeed in a market where a serious competitor is already expanding (voice assistants or the apple TV comes to mind). I’d love to be proven wrong, but won’t be holding my breath)
Make games for Linux, and let Apple figure out a compatability layer to make it work on their products. That's the way it should be.
And the most performant MacOS APIs for graphics rendering aren't on Linux AFAIK. Besides, game developers generally eschew compatibility layers because they harm performance.
It sounds like a good idea if it leads to higher profits. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all charge game developers similar fees.
Desktop Macs with GPUs even remotely capable of gaming are not that plentiful.
There aren't many Mac games that have been ported over to both Metal and ARM, but World of Warcraft is an example.
Blizzard games are or were probably the outlier. They supported Macs even back in the PowerPC days. As a kid with a PowerBook G4 Blizzard games were the only good games I was able to play (Warcraft 3, WoW, Diablo). I have no idea if this is still the case for their newer games though.
Diablo 2 Remastered doesn't run on a Mac :-(
All the iOS games do both today.
Blackthorne ran on 68040 as well. I think WarCraft came out first though...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1er-NivvuIheDmIKBVRu3...
You’re right, though, that M1 has pretty decent parity with Intel Macs for games now.
Valheim - not in database
ARK: Survival Evolved - "game won't launch"
Conan: Exiles - not in database
Grounded - not in database
Civ V and Civ VI - each shows one record and seems it ran for that person (30-60 fps - for comparison, both run 144 fps on my $1000 Lenovo laptop.)
It Takes Two - not in database
That's all anecdotal, i.e. the games this one person likes to play are not supported, or don't play very well, and some of them are 5+ years old.
Overall the point being, it's hard to shell out all that money for a device that won't play your games. (If this sort of gaming is part of your computer use case). So to that original comment's point "I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming."
- [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.
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!
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.
Yes. The vast majority of people that I'm aware of don't buy multiple desktops. If I spend $1000+ for a gaming machine, I don't want to spend hundreds more to have multiple machines to jump between and to manage connections to and to take up space in my office.
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.
the last 32bit only Mac system shipped a decade prior to Catalina. 32bit was dropped a decade after support for the last 32bit only Macs. Apple Silicon in both iOS and Mac is 64bit only, on iOS it has been for years.
Despite that, macOS supports everything required for proton - the mechanisms that allow wine to run 32bit x86 apps on both intel and under rosetta exist pretty much purely for the purpose of things like wine (and so proton).
So I'm not sure where you get "apple cut off the proton devs" from that work
It was quite odd because the original herald of Steam Play had macOS front and center, even with exclusive cosmetics if you launched the game on macOS.
I do remember a large kerfuffle over the very poor state of OpenGL on macOS, which if I remember correctly was stuck on 3.2 for a long while, before being completely deprecated.
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.
It took me years to understand that, you can picture a performance red line, and instead of approaching it from above (that is, optimising a lagguy game) we should approach it from below. I havent work for a single game developer which use that approach and yet Im now convinced its the right one. Approaching the line from above almost always gives you a bloated heavy erring-on-the-wrong-side software.
Of course mobile games are "bigger" than PC games. It's because today 18yos use mobile phones to "type" their homework. It's because they have never actually used or owned a computer/mac keyboard. It's because +80% of visitors of all web pages come from mobile.
It's because everyone has a mobile phone, and relatively fewer people use or own a classic computer. It says nothing about the scale of mobile gaming. It says everything about the scale of mobile.
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.
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.
We have the M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra so far.
Just go full anime.
At least it’s less confusing than the fucked up Intel and AMD product numbers.
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 Ludicrous (early 2023)
M1 Insane (late 2023)
Probably they'll make enough changes to release M2 by that time.
Will Epic add that naming to its case?
On scaling down, they simply designed and laid out M1 Max such that half the GPU cores, memory controllers, and media encoders were divisible from the rest of the chip, with the interface between the two a clean, straight cut line. To make M1 Pro masks, they likely just took the M1 Max mask artwork, cropped it, and did minor cleanup on the cropped edge to terminate all the dangling connections.
To make M1 Ultra, they just "glue" two M1 Max die together with advanced packaging and interconnect technology. Every M1 Max ships with an unused die-to-die interconnect block along one edge of the chip.
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.
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.
What's left? Render farms, scaleable computing.
I guess I think there will be some sort of new machine in that segment. But I figure it's not going to be what people expect from a single, unitary Mac Pro desktop.
Because once you're up at that level of performance requirement, you start to want modular and scaleable things.
What is the pitch for the part of the market that is used to using commodity hardware in scaleable configurations?
[0] Edit: I obviously forgot the cheese grater
Looking at the Mac Studio... what would an M1-based, drop-in Mac Pro replacement offer on top? That sounds like a tail-end product.
It's not like 2022 Apple is the kind of business that announces deep partnerships with graphics card makers.
It feels more to me like we're going to see either something that is half-rack-half-Mac, or something with major developments in neural engine hardware, or something.
A new segment -- something that is going to need significant new OS work.
Not at all.
What I said if you read the rest of my comments is that I find it difficult to believe there is a specifically single-desktop-machine use case for that kind of power over and above the Mac Studio.
The reason I mention this is that high end (TV and cinema) CGI just is not the domain of single machines anymore; it's the domain of render farms. The people who do that kind of work for TV and cinema now expect to run farms of commodity hardware that can be swapped out and replaced. And that technology is available to everyone in a way that can be constructed more pragmatically.
Scientific workloads, similarly: most of that market is not going to spend a bucketload on a single Mac when they can spread their risk with cluster computing.
App testing: again, an application for clustering, and low cost hardware spreads risk.
So my point, again: given the existence of the iMac Pro line, and the M1 Ultra Mac Studio (with its evident astonishing GPU performance), given that I imagine most Mac Pro users never put an expansion card in their machines (which is the grand theme of Apple -- people don't upgrade or expand, usually), and given that cluster hardware is commonly in use and well-supported, is the niche for single mega-expensive desktops really big enough?
I don't think it is -- you think it is. But I think you can disagree with me without imagining me stupid, as I disagree with you without doing the same.
The visual arts this thing is going to enable us going to be amazing, and we haven’t even seen the Pro yet. One former client has been texting me all day about ideas from 10 years ago that weren’t feasible but now are with this lil thing. I keep telling him to wait for the Pro then we can take some REALLY neat ideas off the shelf.
Aside from the fact that you're making my point for me -- you think the Mac Studio could do the job you imagine a Mac Pro doing -- there is this:
You tell your former customers to wait for an unreleased, as yet unscheduled update to a product to which historically Apple has displayed considerable, time-insensitive indifference, rather than order maybe multiples of the product that has been announced, or try to make it work somehow with kit that exists?
I'll note down your prediction about $8000. That, I guess, would be interesting. But if it's that cheap it's going to be after the chip shortage is over, surely.
The latest generation is from 2019?
They've been saying "something really great is coming", all that. That Mac Pro was not that.
Does Apple still care about the market that wants to plug in internal GPU cards? Does that make much sense even in the context of hardware the speed of the Mac Studio?
I wonder.
But by extension I certainly don't remember it being "super well received", or I'd probably have remembered it at all.
Either way: look at it. It's a tower PC. Do you think the current Apple trajectory has any meaningful room for that? What are people going to really be putting in it except disks?
I didn't see a single negative review of the tower at all, so I'm really not sure where that comes from. And they said during the keynote today a new one is coming.
It's an amazing machine. It's an incredibly expensive machine, but still amazing.
> Do you think the current Apple trajectory has any meaningful room for that?
Are you upset that you think Apple is going to stop making something that you forgot they made, except there is absolutely 0 evidence that they will stop making it? We know for a fact that they are going to release a new Apple Silicon based Mac Pro. We knew Mac Pro would be the last thing they move over to Apple Silicon. Apple even gave a timeline when they first launched M1, and so far it seems to be on track.
Apple has been extremely pragmatic lately, backtracking on objectively bad decisions around everything from keyboards and ports to form factors.
I didn't phrase it that way, but thanks, I guess. Whatever.
> Are you upset that you think Apple is going to stop making something that you forgot they made, except there is absolutely 0 evidence that they will stop making it?
I didn't say they'd stop making it, quite.
So much as that I think the product designation is a phantom, in a way. And the more alternatives they add to the Mac Pro, the less the market needs it.
How many people who bought the forgettable machine put an expansion card in it, do you think? How many of those people thus simply do not need anything more than the Studio?
And also: how many third party manufacturers are going to rush out of the gate to port their drivers to some complex new multiprocessing M1 machine?
I agree they have been pragmatic. But I think they've also sliced and diced this segment to the point where it doesn't make the sense it did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIQINCWMd6I
This is Apple's core creative audience.
Tons of people in pro industries bought it and love it. Pre-COVID it was sold out for almost a year. Every professional music producer I know bought one, and I’m sure they’ll get the M1 Mac Pro.
Funny story. Max Martin partnered with Creative to make a new audio rack to enable the audio for the first Back Street Boys album. That got miniaturized to audio cards for gaming which further shrunk down to a DAC and that lead to the iPod which lead to the iPhone which lead to Apple Silicon which brought us here today. Music producers are huge fucking tech nerds and literally move technology forward. Apple frequently works with producers when developing their highest end products that eventually trickle down to consumer grade.
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.
Seems interesting!
Drive bays, yeah. Maybe some approach towards coprocessor boards.
But none of this new direction shrieks out "install your own graphics card" anymore.
A friend told me last night that he thinks there's really a lot of generic resistance to the idea of using thunderbolt in this way, and that is what makes the Mac Pro necessary.
Reading more replies I think it's also clear that people still question Apple's GPU claims, and maybe there is more of a market for whatever-PCI-bus GPU cards.
Moreover I think if you look at the Mac Studio, it is difficult to imagine Apple thinking that a straightforward M1/M2 cheese grater is a remotely satisfactory product design.
But I've been told enough times that I am wrong, (albeit by people who were blown away by a keynote -- am I just old?) that I'm cheerfully willing to admit that I probably will be.
And I bet the Studio is a way to release what they've done so far to serve a subset of the Pro market that has simpler expansion needs. The Pro likely requires a ton more work.
They showed it being used for pro audio, but that's a niche that still uses expansion cards a lot. Keeping the current mac pro form factor enables a lot of niche use cases.
One question is whether the M1 chips have enough connectivity to efficiently handle as many expansion cards as the current pro. Even the Max version of the CPU is limited to 4 thunderbolt ports.
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...
I am really not sure about this bit, as you can probably deduce from what I've said elsewhere.
The rest is interesting but I think it's entirely possible they designed a tail-end tower PC to sell for three years.
---
You don't understand what Afterburner is, and as a result have read far too much significance into it, and haven't noticed that they've already moved on even before the new Mac Pro is out.
Afterburner isn't a "graphics card". It's just a FPGA on a PCIe x16 expansion card. Although in principle you could download an arbitrary bitstream to the FPGA and use it for a really wide variety of purposes, in practice Apple uses it for exactly one function: accelerating ProRes. That's Apple's proprietary low-loss video codec designed for use in video editing software, most notably their own Final Cut package.
They needed Afterburner in the Intel Mac Pro because they didn't want to burn CPU cores on a software ProRes codec, and none of the silicon available in the Intel/AMD/Nvidia ecosystem offers a hardware ProRes codec.
They don't need Afterburner in Apple Silicon Macs because they simply integrated a ProRes codec into M1 Pro/Max/Ultra. I wouldn't be surprised if they were able to share a lot of source code between the two implementations. The M1 version is lots faster than the Afterburner version, which isn't surprising when you know about the penalties FPGAs pay for being reprogrammable in the field.
I suspect the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra project came first, and the Afterburner port was a quick side project. To me, it's not implausible that it's a dead end, instead that's just about all it can be.
And obviously they are not lying about the Mac Pro, marketing is spin, not saying the opposite of the truth.
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.
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.
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 it doesn’t need $1000 wheels.
* 20 core cpu
* 64 core gpu
* 32 core neural engine
* 128GB of ram
* 1TB SSD
fully maxed out, 8TB SSD
Obviously depends on people's workload. For myself and to future proof, I can see a benefit for 2TB locally.
The rest I can offload to network storage.
But yes no ECC. Linux arm64 works on my M1 Pro in UTM using native virtualisation. And it’s fast as anything.
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.
Wouldn't surprise me, if Apple is thinking about doing something like this, maybe with a new API/SDK, focused on this. They would probably sell it as an ML machine.
Tell me about it.
We used to have a couple of their XServe rack servers, as well as that fat RAID rack.
Iirc, we had to get $pecial disks for that damn thing.
They refuse to build what a sizable number of people want, yet we're stuck with Apple because the alternatives are even worse. That's what pg got wrong with one of his predictions. He didn't realize that no one can do better than Apple's worst effort
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)
it's insane to me that they keep using this
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
Fans have been asking for such a thing for so many years.
>Chances are our kernel will Just work on M1 Ultra with just device tree changes, might not even need any m1n1 changes.
https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/ (have to scroll all the way down for supported devices)
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.
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
But i didn't know you you prefer when microsoft force install Candy Crush Saga, Tiktok, Adobe in your start menu, you can remove them? no you can't, and even if you manage to, they'll come back at the next update ;)
To each their own after all, different standard of quality and respect i guess
I feel like Windows users have become hostages without realising it, trapped in an endless cycle of abuse designed to mentally beat them into submission until they just stop noticing the horror of what Windows has become. Even the UI is an insane hodge-podge of bizarre interaction paradigms and half-finished flows that make it seem like everyone on the design team suffers from split personality disorder.
If it's what you have to use because you need Windows-only tools or you have games that won't run under Proton or WINE or whatever then I get it, but I will never understand people who consciously choose to use such a hateful, abusive OS.
And for what it's worth, I can't think of a time that macOS has ever mentioned Apple Music or Apple Arcade or any other Apple service other than iCloud to me, and even then it's only been when I've run out of cloud storage space and needed to upgrade anyway.
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.
I guess I’d better not hold my breath about support there, given Apples historical stance on support third party APIs/frameworks?
https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/11/accelerating-tensorflow-...
It's impressive
Since they're 2 distinct chips, will a single chip be able to handle 128GB? Not sure how the interconnect works.
I was just curious if these kinds of optimizations are possible in the M1 Ultra.
The way Apple presented it sounded more like the chips talked at a lower layer, much like if it was all built as one physical chip, than when you have two normal chips with an interconnect fabric.
Someone will figure it out with benchmarks or something.
When you work with multiple cores they'll likely share the same L2 or at least L3 cache. Multiple CPUs often you pay the cost of copying that L3 cache over or need an L4 or worst case you go back to system RAM.
Each level that you go out further can drastically reduce performance, so you need to try and stay on nearby cores where possible.
Most devs don't account for that since dual CPU machines are in the vast minority
As of the current lineup, Mini is still stuck with 16 GB RAM and a disappointing number of ports.
entry studio: $2000
That's a pretty big gap. Basically it means you have to shell out $2000+ if you want to do video editing on any M1 mac. Buying a brand new computer to do video editing that has only 16GB RAM in 2022 is unjustifiable.
$2k+ is too much for most people especially young "creatives" that are making entertainment (videos). Lots of people here make hundreds of thousands a year but none of those people make that money doing video editing or working in entertainment.
16GB is plenty, and in fact the conversation when the M1 Macs were introduced was whether having 16GB vs. 8GB of RAM made a difference. (Mostly, it doesn't.)
https://www.4kshooters.net/2021/01/27/8gb-or-16gb-ram-for-vi...
MacOS on ARM handles memory differently, try it you might like it.
They can only print so many M1max chips at a time, they want to sell them in a high margin machine. Give em a year and the M1max will trickle down to the mini.
Wow, you sure have given me a lot to think about.
I already use the 16 GB 13". And while your comment is correct for most consumer applications regarding memory compression, it may not work that well in numerical computing on Python or C++ e.g. where a lot of RNGs are used or 2D/3D arrays are juggled. Just clarifying. Your statement is mostly true - but not always. Having a higher RAM machine could help definitely.
If you have pro needs, step up to the pro machine. $2k is paltry in this inflationary environment. Will pay for itself in productivity forthwith.
The only sense in which this claim is true is that macOS on Arm uses a 16KiB page size, while macOS on Intel uses a 4KiB page size. This is actually less space efficient (more wasted RAM due to partially filled pages), although it has performance benefits (N CPU TLB entries cover 4x as much RAM).
If you needed 32GB RAM to avoid swapping on Intel hardware, you still do. There isn't anything which profoundly reduces memory use. Arm Mac hardware does tend to perform lots better while swapping than Intel, which fools some into thinking it is using less memory, but it isn't.
(The reasons for the better performance: one, Apple put in a hardware accelerator block for the memory compression feature which allows macOS to sometimes avoid swapping to disk, so light swapping which only invokes the compression-based pager is faster. And two, the SSD controllers integrated into Apple Silicon are sometimes much faster than the SSDs in the Intel Macs they replaced.)
(For students looking to upgrade, $400 is a month's rent saved)
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-new-Mac-mini-with-Apple-M...
I also make no apologies for saying nice things about the current lineup, it's a clear improvement over 2016-2020 which I think was a step back in several ways.
Right, which is why the Mini exists.
> Mini is still stuck with 16 GB RAM and a disappointing number of ports.
Because people who need more are expected to buy the Studio.
Apple Studio | 20-Core CPU, 48-Core GPU, 32-Core Neural Engine! 64GB RAM! 10Gbit LAN = 3999$
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
Sure hope my latest macbookpro with intel chip lasts a while, I fear it may be one of the last ones they make.
It works incredibly well on the M1 macs.
I use native virtualisation to run Debian arm64 and emulation to run Debian x86-64
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 :/
Parallels' marketing site does not make this very clear.
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
So you'd need a VM running windows/arm64, and then windows would have to use its rosetta equivalent to run the x86 binaries
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 :)
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"?
It's much less of an issue there than on laptops.
> 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.
Apple does use very good quality SSDs, so I would expect them to be premium priced regardless.
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.
That excuse really went away with TB3 and newer iterations of DP, tho, and it's pretty disappointing that they didn't bring it back at that point.
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!
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.
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.
Which is quite a bit more than the studio + display.
A vanilla iMac (or blueberry :D ) is a consumer device.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17396818/huawei-matebook-...
- 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
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.
Finally, the replacement to my 2015 iMac 5k.
Dell's has one for a year or more. LG just released theirs as well. I think those are the only 3.
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.
The M1 is an interesting CPU, but OSX is less popular than Linux for software development. Apple working to support Linux on the M1 would increase sales, though realistically with the other high margin product sales they do not really _need_ extra sales.
And that sounds like your specific test suite. For me, tests run a little quicker on my m1 than on my boss’s Linux equivalent.
Do you have any better, more objective tests that I could replicate?
Looks very interesting. I'm curious of benchmarks and if there's throttling.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_IPC
It was quickly obsolete as CPUs got fast and too hot for that box.
Isn't "Support for one display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz" as stated on their specs page[1] pretty clear? It's an HDMI 2.0 port and I think mentioning the supported resolution and refresh rate is more helpful to customers than the HDMI spec version.
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)
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.
"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 ?
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.
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.
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.
And that's just the parts. Don't forget the M1 Ultra will use less electrical power too.
This usually means that the advanced M1 variants don't really offer an advantage over the base offering, although, more RAM is always nice.
Even Xcode now has a much more parallelized build system.
The CPU that could do that would be innovative.
With a modern display it would make for a really nice 3rd party accessory.
The thermals would have been insane to deal with
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
Guess I'll watch to mkhb video to see what the product is
I'm not exactly sure what they could've done to keep the Mac Mini footprint, but this ain't it.
It's not just as simple as adding more holes
All I'm saying is the current design doesn't look good to me, and some more work could've been done to not just make it look like a weird, tall Mac Mini.
That's not what you said. Here's what you actually said, which is ridiculously hyberbolic, hence this discussion.
> I think from a design perspective, this is the most disappointing Apple release so far.
What, exactly, is your issue with someone posting their opinion?
If you scroll to the bottom of this page, there is an image carousel with an example.
I can understand it if it's just for fun, but otherwise it seems like a really strange idea.
Amazon has dedicated Mac hardware in AWS as well and the pricing is also crazy expensive.
For large app devs though, the cost is worth it to build their apps in the cloud without bogging down their local machines constantly. If you have rebuild targets for a half dozen OS versions, it can add up!
Datacenters are the solution and the Mac Mini just so happened to be the form factor that was available and could be made to work with less hassle than accommodating laptops.
Whatever it is, I've become much less trusting of Apple hardware that is that old.
[EDIT] Could be some thermal paste going bad, too, I guess.
Stunningly compact. Extensive connectivity. Outrageous performance.
I mean, you've gotta either go
Stunning size. Extensive connectivity. Outrageous performance.
or
Stunningly compact Extensively connected. Outrageously performant.
Anyway. Not sure anyone apart from me will care.
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.
As for the "additional displays that match" comment, I did say above that it looks like the Studio Display could be the form factor for a new 27" iMac.
It's got an A15 chip in it already, as well as multiple ports on the back so they probably could get something less powerful than an M1 Ultra in it soon.
Just look at the pricing on the combo.
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.
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)?