Agreed. For those who have been quietly sitting with a base Mac Studio, or a reasonably capable Mac Mini. The possibilities changed on some fronts, but GPT's extremely low price on their API remains a good option.
IMO, Apple's habit of cheaping out on ram is maddening. Although perhaps this is a sign for me to pick up a m2 pro mini with extra ram.
The Base mac studio with 32 gigs of ram can be a good value from a ram perspective.
Let’s see if the Mac studio is discontinued or updated.
I do hope that it's updated. I could see them reserving the top end chip for the Mac Pro, though. Or maybe make it a dual socket?
In any case, I much prefer the ability to run an Apple computer with a proper cooling setup. I know that cooling pads for laptops exist, but ultimately it's a bit of a janky solution compared to actually adequately cooling the system properly.
The Mac studio is surprisingly quiet and well cooled. I haven’t had to install a fan control utility as of yet.
I thought I’d be trying one of these out and sell it if my setup didn’t work, but it’s the first desktop I’m starting to consider especially if I want to leave a workload running on it instead of a decade of carrying a lot of horsepower around with me.
Instant on for 3 monitors, no need for docking station or USB hubs, everything is plugged in and works, I can run a virtual cam obs setup easily.
The studio is a great upgrade on Mac mini, which might cannibalize the Mac pro sales and why it might not get toasted or refreshed. I’ll F the max studio was a way to put a dent in hackkntoshes, it makes sense.
The M2 mini looks super decent but quickly goes up in price when ram and ssd is setup to match a studio.
For my purposes the ultra wasn’t that much faster than the M1 max on because the software has to be optimized to benefit from it. Maybe some of this ML stuff will be shortly.
I understand azure has its own chatgpt api.
Apple's optimization here is nice for the people who own their hardware, but it's totally silly to read through the comments promising the end of CUDA.
I think there might be a different use case for me but to compare with your economics - I picked up a base mac studio (m1 max with 32 gb) for about $1370 USD with 8 months warranty remaining. It’s letting me test my daily setup to see if everything can run on Apple silicon yet without intervention.. if not, I’ll be able to get rid of it at little to no loss, and decide if I want to carry that much computing power in a laptop or not, or head on to other options.
My interest currently is computational power, per watt. Not much comes close to Apple Silicon.
The cost of a loaded pc can quickly outstrip other options with electricity costs included so it needs to be useful in any case.
The integrated speed of the Apple silicon, ram, and ssd is a little astonishing. More than I expected to admit. I don’t know if there’s anything like it on PC. If Apple silicon supported eGPUs it would interest me.
Comparable PCs have described are generally power inefficient. Still, the system you’re laying out is interesting, especially the ram, mind sharing a bill of materials?
I guess my PoV is with a GPU + inexpensive RAM, I can do some things more quickly, and other things are at least possible. But granted, hardware nuts and bolts is a hobby for me too, I've always enjoyed researching and building systems, there is a huge community of people and companies, and I much prefer KDE to MacOS, Android to IOS.
If Apple released a reasonably priced system with lots of RAM, or that could take a GPU, I'd not have as much to stand on, but they don't seem inclined to do that.
Here's BoM, $2170:
$700 for 192GB https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Categories/Products/Memory/VEN...
About $200 for a LGA1700 board with four slots (currently Asus and Gigabyte support 4 X 48GB memory modules on consumer hardware)
$200+ for a CPU
$120 for an 850 watt PSU
$700 for a used 16GB quadro, or a new 12GB A2000
$150 for 2TB NVME storage
$50 for some kinda case (I use an XTIA open frame, it is the opposite of a Macbook)
These are "best prices," You'd have to pay around 10% more if you're not into finding deals.
If it’s 400-800w 24 hours a day, op costs quickly pile up.
It looks really reasonable for everything here. I am interested more in eGPUs for interchangeability but have enough on my plate.