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Apple Mac Studio

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Re: Apple Mac Studio

#411

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M1 mini with 16GB RAM (most possible RAM): $1100 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 hundred…

Maybe it's too much to expect a $1K computer to do heavy video work? Even then, I've been using an M1 macbook air myself for computational work, and haven't run into any memory issues and am surprised by how much power it provides for the price, and without a fan. The only issue I've had with the M1s is the display support, i.e. the mini only supports two displays and the macbooks only support a single external displ…

Thats sounding more like being an Apple apologist. And there are certainly other uses of graphics without using PS or InDesign involved e.g Meshlab 3D renders, computer graphics & raytracing where more RAM definitely counts. Upselling the Studio definitely hits the academic bracket (mine) hard, when it was perfectly possible to just introduce M1 variants, with its advantage of ports & more RAM. That sort of upgrade would have cost ~$1500 theoretically given Apple component listing, which is still 25% cheaper than baseline Mac Studio.

(For students looking to upgrade, $400 is a month's rent saved)

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#412

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

They did better with the limited space they have — they included a bunch of multi-functional USB-C ports that can be used with dongles for additional HDMI ports!

"With the limited space they have"? They chose how much space they had to work with...

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#413
post #151

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

Apple's market share has always been a small slice of the overall PC market. In a way, they never did "mass market". While the prosumer market may be a small proportion of the overall market, it could be very significant, for Apple, relative to the market Apple addresses. Plus, I think a lot of people who would not normally call themselves a "prosumer" will want, and purchase these.

Apple's market share has always been a small slice of the overall PC market.

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.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/retail/storelist/

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#414
post #352
post #136

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This is very interesting because PC workstations have been stagnating for quite long! It'd be cool to be able to bring medium-sized tasks back from clouds to personal computers. The CPU performance is impressive but I wonder how well it'd fare against say an AMD ThreadRipper or a dual socket system with an equivalent price? It'd be also interesting to see a deep learning benchmark against Nvidia. Branding and RAM lim…

My workstation has a 3990x. Our "world" build is slightly faster on my M1 Max. https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257 The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage but the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up at that point. I expect the M1 Ultra to crush the 3990x on compile time.

Time for your linker vendor to parallelize their algorithm.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#415
post #317

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Seriously. If Apple supported gaming more I'd be able to drop this PC. Could be the sort of thing that could cause an avalanche of switchers. You'd also pull over the entire games industry into the Apple space. Right now we code on PCs. As Apple silicon gets better, it's gonna be more and more painful to not be able to make use of that.

Not sure about game developers, but gamers are a low-margin, high-touch, low-satisfaction-score, garish-aesthetic, speeds-and-feeds market. Pretty much antithetical to Apple's core focus and I think they rightly avoid them. Despite personally wanting more games on Mac :)

> low-margin

Really?

Have you missed the insane markups on anything 'gaming' related for many years?

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#416
post #305

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How's your internet connection? I'm playing on a RTX3080 thanks to geforce now, but I admit it's only possible due to my living in a big city with a very low ping connection to nvidias data centres. 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…

What I don't like about this model is that you are not allowed to run whatever you want, you can't even run all your library from Steam or Epic but select games only.

There are other services that allow you to run base windows from which you can run whatever you want.

https://shadow.tech/

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#417
post #15

More and more I see the M1 chips and I wish Mac worked seriously well for gaming. Would love too see something like Proton but for Mac (given up hopes for native support). I hate that I have my gaming PC and then my Mac for everything else. I have to wonder though what their plan is for the M2. Are they laying the groundwork for when the M2 comes out all of these variants will be ready at the same time? Or a gradual…

- [x] RGB'd out PC with RTX 3090 for playing Minecraft and Elden ring - [x] Decent wired network in-home - [x] Connect via Moonlight from Mac Mini M1 to Gaming PC - [x] Best of both worlds It's wonderful. I only wish my Mac Mini had a 120hz display attached.

Minecraft runs great on M1 Macs, btw.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#418
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. If Apple supported gaming more I'd be able to drop this PC. Could be the sort of thing that could cause an avalanche of switchers. You'd also pull over the entire games industry into the Apple space. Right now we code on PCs. As Apple silicon gets better, it's gonna be more and more painful to not be able to make use of that.

Not sure about game developers, but gamers are a low-margin, high-touch, low-satisfaction-score, garish-aesthetic, speeds-and-feeds market. Pretty much antithetical to Apple's core focus and I think they rightly avoid them. Despite personally wanting more games on Mac :)

Also I feel like everyone is missing their AR/VR push right around the corner. VR headsets with these chips will be dramatically more powerful than other devices on the market. Combine that power with Apple product marketing, and devs will be there regardless of how much the Metal APIs suck.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#419
post #409

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

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

They're never going to try to make it easy to avoid their ecosystem and that's not shameful for their company. If it's shameful for anyone, it's the US regulators who have allowed the largest companies in the world to continue vertically integrating.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#420
post #87

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> If Apple supported gaming more 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.

Right, it's the studio's fault, not because Metal is a dogshit API with dogshit performance. And instead of paying 900$ for a RTX 3090, you could pay 4000 for something with the equivalent power of a 3060Ti that you can't upgrade without buying an entire new SoC. But go on, blame directx for being the one API actually moving things forwards. Not Apple's shitty behavior.

You got a source on $900 3090s?

I can't find 'em for under $2000.

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