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Comment by a_carbon_rod | Hacker News Reader

I made a similar transition as you earlier this year from a i7 8700k/GTX 1080 Ti Windows desktop to a Mac Studio and much like you I'm very happy with that decision for a lot of the reasons you already described.

One of the more interesting aspects of the switch I hadn't considered though is that it actually (positively) impacted my power bill - I'm paying about $5-$10 less per month since the switch.

The difference in form factor is welcome as well - some days I find myself astonished at how much power fits in such a (relatively) small box on my desk.

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Still the performance vs price seems pretty bad. From what I see their 10 core 500GB SSD + 32GB RAM costs as much as a 7950X (16 cores) + RX 7900XT + 64GB RAM + 1TB SSD which should have better performance and you can actually play AAA games (at very high performance and quality, also 4k).

I like Apple stuff (I have an iPhone, MBP) but their high-end stuff is really overpriced for what it offers.

Well, let's try to compare like for like...

7950x = $599 7900XT = $800 64GB of RAM = $150

Thats' $1550 right there, before motherboard, storage, case, cooling, powersupply, etc. By the time you add all that (plus labor, either in dollars or in time) I bet you're in the $3500 range with those specs.

You have to consider the total package... the Studio is 7" x 7" x 4"... that's smaller than a microATX board, never mind some giant dual slot graphics card (Which also draws 300w btw, over 3x what the entire Studio draws).

Lack of noise, heat, and power efficiency has real value. Some of us are at a point where we want stuff that just works, not to fiddle with components and BIOs settings. Plus, frankly, nobody on the PC side has anything even close to Applecare.

I think you went way overboard with the costs - a good AM5 MOBO is around $200, case $150, AIO cooling or good fan $100 and a good PSU would be $200. That's a total of $650. Add to that assembly and sanity checking for let's say $100 (many times it comes free for these upper end setups) and we get $750.

That's a total, with your estimates for the CPU and GPU prices, of $2300 which is around $1000 lower than the Studio while having more power. I agree the power efficiency is worse but also note that the Mac simply doesn't have access to the same compute power. Also the CPU and GPU are redlined by default and going down to almost 50% TDP only causes a 5% drop in performance so it is not that bad.

Of course there are advantages that you mentioned (form factor, better support) but, at least for me, that is not worth a $1k+ premium. Also using MacOS for me at least is a pain compared to Linux.

You're comparing against the ultra. I'm using (and talking) about the base model Max, which is $1999 all in. (The Ultra is 20 core, btw. It's essentially two Maxes fused together.)

I will agree that the Ultra ($3999) is probably not a great value for most people, since outside of synthetic benchmarks, it's usually more like 10-20% faster, not 100%, as outside of editing 8k video or AI, there really isn't much that scales well to that many threads.

Another thing I'll mention, and that I think really is a big part of the special sauce, is the insane memory bandwidth.

A 7950x has a maximum memory bandwidth of 83.7GB/sec. An M1 Max has 409GB/sec.

It's really hard to outrun RAM that's essentially soldered directly to the CPU.

I’m generally a pretty big fan of self-built systems in general and Intel in particular (what can I say, every couple years they pulled a rabbit out of their hat during my childhood, it was really magical).

But that memory bandwidth is some envy inducing stuff.

The ram is regular package on package stuff, it's not the reason for the high bandwidth.

The bandwidth is due to apple giving more area and pins to more channels.

The Mac Studio was a bit of a sleeper. For AI inferencing at 128gb it is higher performance than any affordable consumer solution with that much memory available, it's quiet, it's small, it's power efficient, it supports 5 displays. It costs a lot less than an equivalent MBP.

It's the desktop a lot of us having been waiting for... no built in screen, no forced purchase of hundreds of dollars in "magic (i.e. garbage) keyboard/mouse), and ports out the wazoo... even the base model I have has 4x Thunderbolt 4, 4x USB 3 (two Type C on the front, 2 Type A on the back), 10Gb eth, even a headphone jack and SD slot.

Interesting comment about the Apple keyboard. I have bought Apple Magic keyboards for all my Windows machines. Need a correct driver to make the fn key work and remap the delete key, but otherwise I have not yet found a better TKL keyboard.

Hotswap mechanical or nothing for me. I hate low travel keys (and flat keycaps).

I actually just bought this last week for the work machine..

https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-k8-pro-qmk-via-wi...

Not as good as the board on my personal PC, but that is a highly tweaked out, kit built, full metal gasket mount board that I have mumble hundreds of dollars in to...

People are different. I grew up with clunky and noisy IBM keyboards. Really love the low key travel.

Model Ms are terrible. A nice modern mechanical with light linear switches is neither.

I used to like apple keyboards but I got RSI using them. I was probably holding it wrong but switching to mechanical keyboards fixed it for me.

I buy mechanical keyboards for all my macs and skip the flat feel of the chiclet keyboards. It is too bad that such an experience can’t be very portable.

I have a similar 8700k system (I’ve got a weaker GPU, though). I already kind of feel like anything that gets even close to stressing it would be much happier running off on some cluster or server somewhere.

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