Mac Studio M1 Ultra Teardown [video]
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However, it is pretty unforgivable that the cooling sucks in air from the bottom where it would pick up any dust on the table and might clog the electronics of the power supply. Especially as it is not possible to easily clean the internals of the machine. If just the aluminum housing of the machine could be easily removed, I would consider this machine a great design - but not so as it is.
I wonder whether one should carefully apply some filter gaze around the air intakes to reduce dust intake into the machine.
Also, desks and surfaces are usually cleaned.
My MB Pro started failing for thermal reasons after 5 years, fortunately, the local service partner could clean it for a tip. After that, the thermals of the machine were distinctively improved.
Dust in the ventilation is just a matter of time, a machine should not fail because the user can't clean that dust.
Also, I think you are way overstating how dusty this will get. It's not going to be any worse than anything else built in the last 20 years.
With the latest MacBook Pro it feels like they're back on the right track. Heck they dropped the magic bar.
The issue with replaceable components is that they're often at odds with performance. If MacBook had user-replaceable batteries we simply would have less battery OR a thicker and heavier and more expensive computer. Literally you cannot have all.
Memory/SSD sticks take more space and cost more than a soldered chip (and they earn Apple more money, shhh)
It's a compromise though, I get it.
How much dust do you think comes from the desk surface vs the ambient air? The air is probably where most of the dust comes from.
Also the PCB design looks cool, but they are not the only ones, if you buy a mid/premium gaming motherboard they are also beautiful.
Please dear god no. First, it already exists (shared memory with GPU). Second, implementing it in the same way as Apple basically requires an SoC.
I'm on having the cpu/gpu integrated, but more powerful, if apple can do it, then amd/intel can do it too, but I suspect amd will lose their dedicated gpu market, while intel could gain more with this kind of move, but I suspect that intel doesn't care too much about the enthusiast or end users as apple/amd (I mean that apple market are end user and not server/enterprise like intel).
Bundling CPU and GPU is not feasible in the present day for high end systems.
There are use cases where you need say HBM2 memory. Or you need 4 outputs (most motherboards have just HDMI+VGA).
It’s easy for Apple to do, because they have 0 skin in the game in gaming or AI or even GPU compute markets. I don’t think it would make sense for AMD to do it.
It would make sense for Intel, to compete in entry level gaming market, but that’s it.
IMHO it’s just not feasible if your product is a general purpose GPU, because there’s a lot more to it than just the processing unit.
That’s extremely impressive. Sure, no one has CUDA except NVidia but it looks like Apples GPU architecture really truly does work quite well at this stage.
I wouldn’t be shocked to see them catch up to the highest performance GPUs in the next 5 years or so. I mean I also would t be shocked if they didn’t, but it seems like a reasonable possibility at this point.
Which is crazy for a SOC, especially one borne from mobile phone architectures.
I also feel like M1 rackmount servers could be amazing if Linux ran on them.
The m1 ultra and max basically targeted for video editing as their target market. Same with the m1 max pro with it’s xdr screen to become a great hdr editing laptop. M1 studio similarly is targeted for the video editors that want a mac mini made for them.
If apple kept up with x86 CPUs the difference on macOS wouldn't have been as wide. When you compare a Ryzen 5000 series with the same core count, they are fairly comparable in compile times AFAIK.
Yeah I can confirm that. I have an 8 core ryzen 5800, and its performance when compiling rust code is almost identical to my 8+2 core macbook pro.
The macbook pulls ahead slightly in single core performance, but I think the ryzen takes longer before thermally throttling - which makes sense given its a desktop workstation.
I’m assuming that some of the phenomenal, market-beating growth of the Apple Silicon architecture over the past 5-10 years will continue.
Also if Apple merely creates a quad M1 Pro, as some prognosticate, that would likely match the 3090 in performance.
With only 128 GB RAM max? No.
That's pretty much the definition of Unified Memory, i.e. something the other implementations can also do.
Several companies are trying that. The Corsair One series is XBox/trashcan Mac sized and plenty powerful. HP has their Z Mini series of Mac Mini sized workstations. Intel sell their NUC and NUC Extereme kits for people who are more DIY inclined.
The GP did not say that.
It’s also interesting Apple is cooling both sides of the chip. Is that just for efficiency so the computer is quieter? Intel/AMD chips that put off way more power aren’t cooled from both sides right?
https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/17/apple-execs-on-developing-...
The heat sink in the iMac Pro was where things really started to shift. It keeps the Xeons in those machines reasonably cool while being whisper quiet at idle/low load and reasonably quiet at load. They really kicked it up a notch with the Mac Pro, which remains nearly inaudible at all times, and now that’s carried forward into the Mac Studio.
Really nice work. I’d love to see this kind of innovation in more standardized PCs — the NH-D15 and front fans in my custom built tower do a good job on thermals but their acoustics leave something to be desired, despite Noctua coolers and fans being some of the quietest on the market.
Is there any chance at all that six months from now Dell or HP will wow us with something that is faster, quieter, and as aesthetically interesting as the Studio? Or will they crank out another version of a black sheet metal case that is loud and hot and inexpensive? There have to be people in those companies that want to do something interesting, right? Or do they assume that anybody with money and taste are already out of the Windows market?
Maybe it is all the fault of Windows. There's a pretty good story about the problems of Windows elsewhere on HN right now. The comments there are so damning it makes me think nobody believes in the platform anymore. You know how there's no M in FAANG? Is Microsoft stuck with people not good enough to work elsewhere? There might be no point in building interesting hardware that is ultimately going to run Windows.
My old Intel MBP would sound like a jet engine just by opening Chrome.
This one… I hammer it all day with multiple servers running, JS projects, tons of tabs, Docker containers, many misc. software utilities… not a single noise.
I’ve only heard the fans once while using Handbrake.
I don't see a real difference though. Mine doesn't overheat but the fan kicks in often anyway.
Plugging in an external screen enables the discrete GPU so your energy usage and temperature will go up.
I am planning to get a Mac Studio as the replacement for that iMac, but I would be happier, if easy cleaning of the fans would be possible.
It’s basically never an i9, because once it hits 70°C it starts throttling quite rapidly and then stays stuck between 1.0 and 1.4 GHz clock speed for at least 5 minutes, and what good is an i9 running at 1 GHz?
Their laptop cooling has been absolute dogshit for the past (at least) 10 years.
It’s more of an inadequate cooling combined with Intel releasing CPUs that run just hotter and hotter.
I can’t wait to upgrade to a 16” MBP with an M1 Max (or next gen if they release it by then). There are still some essential tools in my workflow that don’t work all that great on ARM.
Interestingly, sharing an external screen using google meet and running something like npm install will easily throttle the CPU even if the CPU usage never shows anything above 15% of use.
I thought that was interesting, so I looked for it on the video: https://youtu.be/IY0gRMpT4AY?t=878 If there's a difference in blade pitch, it's not visible from that angle. What is pretty clear is that the split isn't exactly halfway down, maybe 55/45 instead of 50/50.
Their marketing photos aren't any clearer: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FNa32k2XoAMCDiW?format=jpg&name=...
You would probably need to cut an impeller up to see a difference, or xray it.
I would also be interested if someone swaps out the blowers and see what difference the Apple impeller makes. I would be surprised if it's more than 5%. But injection molding makes fancy geometries very cheap, and if you're making the molds anyway you might as well pick up the easy design win. Amortized over however many millions they're going to make, the NRE costs are going to be pennies per unit.
i was going to make the same statement.
is chiplet design the future? lets put together two powerful chip to make one super powerful chip. i guess its one way to beat the Moore's Law
Hasn't AMD been doing it for the past half a decade?
Working near the limits of manufacturability will result in occasional defects. If you only have to have a few eight-core 10x8mm chiplets and a more reliable 12nm process node interconnect die come out defect-free, that's much easier than trying to get all of that on a single giant die with 64 cores and the IO on the same die.
To exaggerate, if each chiplet has a 50% chance of failing, on average you have to make 16 chiplets to get one good multi-package chip. But you'd need (2^8 * 8) = 2048 to get one contiguous super-die. with no defects.
Here's the Pro, with 8 or 10 CPU cores and 14 or 16 GPU cores, depending on die yield issues where they might have to shut off a couple cores:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/mac/standard/A...
Here's the Max, with 10 CPU cores and either 24 or 32 GPU cores for the same reason:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/mac/standard/A...
And here's the Ultra:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/mac/standard/A...
It's literally two M1 Max bolted together with more RAM around the periphery.
If you make an M1 Max wafer there are a lot of ways to spin out 8/24-core Maxes, 10/32-core Maxes, and adjacent 10/32 core Maxes into an Ultra. Nothing in the patent seems to indicate they have to decide which ones to use before testing the wafer...
But also, it's hard to think of products that are nice on the outside but ugly on the inside. I suspect it's because some people care and some don't, and both inside and outside reflect that.
HP and Microsoft have both made some pretty looking laptops recently, but they are a complete and utter mess on the inside.
I wish their software and UI teams were this unrushed (or time-efficient).
I switched back to macOS after having been away for 13 years and I felt right at home. System Apps and Settings generally are and worked the same. Sure the UI might have have changed a bit but mostly by repositioning things or adding a feature. Almost everything I learned about the UI 15 years ago still applies. The disk encryption and firewall settings were still in the same place, same goes for the touchpad and everything else.
It was the total opposite to the Windows 11 VM I set up after. The settings app had a major redesign again and instead of relying on my memory I had to use the search function after failing to find some settings.
They seem to design their products for Cupertino weather , specifically the weather inside their spaceship lab and fake model homes. Or is just good ol’ “planned attrition”..
I find all these comments here very strange indeed.
The Mac Studio is a desktop. Like any other desktop from any other manufacturer it is intended for use indoors in a typical home or office environment.
If you require a device that works outside of "normal" parameters then there are specialist industrial PC manufacturers who will build you something that will deal with humidity, dust, vibration and temperature extremes.
99.999999999999999999% of people on this planet do not require the extra mechanical designs (and associated expense) of an industrial PC.
Hence Apple and every other commodity PC manufacturer on this planet designs for the typical home or office.
Edit to add:
Look at the Mac Studio specs:
- Operating temperature: 10° to 35° C (50° to 95° F)
- Storage temperature: –40° to 47° C (–40° to 116° F)
- Relative humidity: 5% to 90% non-condensing
- Operating altitude: tested up to 5,000 metres (16,400 feet)
Its 10° C inside your house / office ?!?
This introduces a functional ground to the chassis, and so perhaps (amongst other things) addresses some of the static/dust build-up concerns that others here have commented on ?
Yes, I am aware of that.
I was, however, referring specifically to this form factor, i.e. "mini" style[1]
Maybe I’m misremembering.
But it wouldn’t surprise me if this was a version of that.
On the older aluminium MacBook Pro, it used to blend into the chassis.
The same is true for PCB design: as long as the board is correct, reasonable, stable and have good performance, it's a good board.
Based on the video, in order to clean up the dirty fans in this machine (something you'll start to do eventually), you'll have to:
1. Un-glue the button rubble stand ring to access the body screws,
2. Remove the exposed power supply (Risk getting shocked or worse),
3. Detach almost everything (screws, tapes and cables) you can see, so you can un-mount the main board to access the fans.
Then, after done cleaning, you have to do everything again but in reverse.
My opinion is, Apple can make their circuits look like a Steve Jobs thonk pose, but if an user has to go through all that many trouble and risks to preform such simple and (rare but) routine task, this design is bad.
I'm a big fan of the power/efficiency of the M1 (and all variants), but it's completely ridiculous that the teardown is so involved to get at the fans/heatsink for cleaning.
You're assuming an Apple user is meant to service their own product. That's not the case as far as Apple is concerned. You have an issue, you drop by the Apple store (or send your device in) and they repair it for you.
Determining good-ness or bad-ness of a design has to take into account the intended usage and design goals. Whether a customer should be able to repair their device easily/at all, is a whole separate topic. Apple doesn't think so and their design decisions have clearly reflected that over the decades. As far as that goes, whether the end user has to dig through 20 layers of hardware before cleaning a fan is irrelevant. What's relevant is whether Apple employees who'll be fixing/cleaning these devices will be wasting too much time for the most frequent support requests. That's what Apple should be (and most certainly is) optimizing for.
Also note that the majority of the end users will not have the time nor the interest to repair their own devices, especially when in most cases, their repair is covered under warranty. A lot of people with the technical skills far more than needed to to the self repair fall into this category as well. I've been modding and hacking expensive hardware for decades mostly for fun, but also for practical reasons, in order to add to/modify behavior of the hardware. Even I have little interest to repair my Apple products I have paid premium dollars on. I increasingly value where I spend my time and I let Apple do my laundry for me.
I must also mention (given the high degree of Apple/Google/Facebook/... bashing on HN) that Apple is among the better, if not the best, manufacturers in terms of warranty service and support (at least where I live). I have requested warranty services for dozens of products and not once have had to "prove" my case, or so much as try to convince Apple of an issue. Compared to every other worse interaction with other brands, I will continue to pay top dollars for Apple products even at the cost of whatever the hot Apple knocking topic of the day is. Having said that, there are of course tools that I need full access and repairability as a given and I never go with Apple in those cases.
EDIT: OK, let me help you arrive at the destination: your machine gets dusty and slow, just as if its electronics was failing. You take it to Apple and they fix it under warranty or ask for some $$ if it's out of warranty (given that they have to spend time doing it, time that you would be spending yourself, whether it's easy or hard to open up the machine). Calling it cleaning or repairing is splitting hairs. If it's degrading performance, it's a problem, if it's not, it's cosmetics.
BTW, all this fuss with cleaning fans — no one I know opens up their stuff and clean the fans until the device malfunctions. You are in the small small minority and no company, including Apple optimized for your habits.
The nastiest opponent to cleaning that Apple sells is the iMac lineup after the Late 2012 iMac. The iMacs before had their display glass attached to the frame with magnets, with 2012 Apple switched to adhesive... which makes servicing these really painful because it is easy to break that glass and pretty difficult to separate the front glass from the panel.
If you have cats, dogs or other beings that shed fur though around you, I'd recommend once every six months.
I don’t understand the insistence that we must regularly clean our computers, it seems daft. Maybe vacuum your house/office once in a while. The computer breathes the same air as you.
> Determining good-ness or bad-ness of a design has to take into account the intended usage and design goals. Whether a customer should be able to repair their device easily/at all, is a whole separate topic
I was just talking about the product design itself, did not touch the self-repairability issue at all.
There are certain expectations a device should be providing, been Apple does not grant them the exception. No, Apple is not a special company that produce magic rainbow out of their computer/phones, it's a company that produce digital product and service, just like those in Shenzhen, Apple is not special. They're expensive, they're a monopoly, and they hire some good people, but they're not special, keep this in mind.
I would complained the same thing if Dell or Lenovo designed their wind system like that. Fun fact, I kind like how Dell designed their OptiPlex MFF system, at least I don't have risk my life trying to clean them. But of course that computer, not a Mac.
But with all that said, I'm not here to stop you. If you want one (because it look beautiful I guess???), then treat yourself. I'm just here to complain what I saw as a consumer.
Why would you say this, after I explained in length the warranty advantages? Did you not read that part or do you disagree with it?
This design optimizes for the rest of the (365 * 3) - 1 days that the machine takes less space on your desk and is whisper quiet.
Heatsinks and thermal pastes, no-one really cared since they should be fine for years until the machine is replaced anyway.
Not that I’d bother to service it as I’d rather apple handled it these days so I can go and play inside the old dangerous stuff instead.
(HP 141T on the bench at the moment)
Maybe do something about the dirty air instead? Also, unless in a dusty industrial environment, by the time a computer fan and chassis is filthy, it's already legacy equipment. If a computer is used for work, to generate income, replacing it every 2 years is the cost of doing business and a write-off. But I suppose if a typical Mac user, one would have to go through the trouble of blowing out the dust every 4 years.
Also I'm curious if the entry level Mac studio will make a difference when compiling your app, I have a rust side project were it takes a while to do a clean compilation and 12-15 secs when doing incremental compilation (it really sucks when you need to wait "that much" to try some things out, mostly when working in the UI and tweaking some things). If this new Mac could take that to 5< secs It would be a huge upgrade, if not then the Mac mini is worth the bucks.
You’ll notice that you can do a full build in background while still using the machine though.
Plain M1 is quite capable on its own.
Here’s hoping the M2 architecture has HDMI 2.1 support and the gpu can do triple monitors from the beginning.
Don't game on macOS though, so use the leftover cash to buy a decent gaming PC (or get in line for a Steam Deck)
Oh come on. That’s actually the classic apple move to have a low end entry product and a higher margin upsell product which is where all the sales happen. It’s why their phones start with low levels of storage (pretty much have to buy the next step up at minimum) and conversely why there is a pointless higher end storage option for the apple tv (grabs a little extra cash from those who can afford it).
I am surprised the high end mini hasn’t been switched to M1 max. That’s the machine I want — the studio is too large and too much for my needs but the M1 mini doesn’t do it for me (I just use a laptop instead).
I guess it will be the entry level M2 device sometime this year.
To move to 32GB of memory means you need an M1 Pro, Max, or Ultra...so you're either going for a Mac Studio for $1999+, or a 14" MBP w/ RAM upgrade for a minimum of $2399. You get a better CPU and GPU with the studio than the MBP for less money.
Assuming you get minimal benefits from the better CPU, is it worth it spend the extra $1200+ to go from 16GB to 32GB of RAM? Probably depends how long you plan on keeping the machine I guess.
Gaming: I have no idea...gaming is the only reason I boot up my Windows PC. The M1 GPU seems solid but the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra do have measurably better GPUs. They all do great in certain synthetic benchmarks, but real-world performance is another question entirely. The vast majority of games will not be written for M1 natively, so you'll be running them via the Rosetta 2 x86 translation layer, which also will impact game performance.
If it’s anything like iPhone manufacturing videos they’ve shared before, most of the device is assembled by robots.
In my experience, which has never been at the scale or complexity of iPhone manufacturing volumes, anything with screws is a big no-no. You must minimize the number of screws and having things which snap fit is greatly preferred over a screwed connection. Even when robots are doing some of the assembly.
If you have any videos of robots installing lots of tiny screws in mass manufacturing, I'd be genuinely interested to see that. I'm interested in volume manufacturing techniques.
Here is one from 2016 - it's using an iPhone as an example, but to be fair I don't know if this is actually used in the production line: https://youtu.be/BOY3oZ8SkZU?t=23
Everything is a tradeoff, it was just surprising to me that each of those external ports is their own little PCB with flex cables to the motherboard and one or more screws each. Most other PC manufacturers would likely make a case that enables putting all of those ports directly soldered to the motherboard, with a slightly worse exterior design appearance.
Seriously considering to buy the mac studio and take it in my backpack lol.
Of course he wants to draw attention, and that's fine. People understand he's acting, besides doing a professional work.
the version they tore down is $4k and even the maxed out version is $8k, don't know where you got $16k figure from
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-studio/20-core-cpu-48...
he stripped one machine, the OP comment implies a $16k machine
I used to work at a fabless semiconductor company, Aeluros (bought by Broadcom) in 2002-2007, and one of our analog designers, Arnold Feldman, Ph.D., who designed anti-static circuitry for a large graphics card mfr, religiously wore anti-static straps when he was in the lab.
In fact, all the designers (they were all Ph.D.s from either Stanford or Cal) wore straps in the lab.
I asked him once why he wore a strap because until that company I had been haphazard in my use of a strap when I worked on the guts of PCs. He said that even though I might not have caused a failure, the chip might be degraded.
I now wear a strap every time I work with bare circuit boards.
1 million views on YouTube is closer to $3-$4k in Ad Revenue (If you are lucky)
Not $40k
And you can repair it with standard parts quickly.
And you can run open software on it...