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Apple Mac Studio

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Re: Apple Mac Studio

#501

Post by Grustaf »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #23
cube2222 wrote: post #2

Looks like all the people saying "just start fusing those M1 CPU's into bigger ones" were right, that's basically what they did for the top of the line new M1 CPU (fused two M1 Max'es together). 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.

I think the Mac Pro is almost like a phantom product at this point. Or a riff. Like they're going to say "the new Mac Pro is there is no more Mac Pro". 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. Som…

The pro-ness is probably more about extensibility than speed, as you say 20 cores is already plenty for most.

And obviously they are not lying about the Mac Pro, marketing is spin, not saying the opposite of the truth.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#502

Post by npunt »

ask_b123 wrote: post #474
npunt wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

What does high-touch market mean?

Entitled, difficult, immature, higher return & damage rate, undervalues 'just works', etc.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#503

Post by quadcore »

madrox wrote: post #491
nerdjon wrote: 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…

Having worked with Apple on games, I can tell you that as an engineer they work fine. Metal isn't bad. The problem isn't technical. The problem is how Apple approves apps and thinks about the gaming experience. For example, a game I worked on got rejected from the App AND Mac store because (in Apple's opinion) the texture download was too large. There's no analogue for this in other game ecosystems. As a developer, i…

Thing is, as a former engine and graphics programmer, I have to say I agree with them, we got gaming software wrong. It took me years to actually see it but we do it wrong. A game like all software should be incredibly light and fast. A game that examplaries that is World of Warcraft which is incredibly light for a game of its stature.

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.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#504

Post by orangecat »

ajconway wrote: post #174
ShakataGaNai wrote: post #16

As a comparsion a quick build on PCPartPicker: Xeon E5 22 core, Radeon RX 6900 XT, case, power supply, 64 gb of ram, motherboard, 1TB SSD and CPU cooler. Comes in at just shy of $5,000 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 pr…

Don't forget that any of the M1-family chips are absolutely crushing the competition in single-core performance.

Eh, not so much today. M1, Alder Lake, and Zen 3 are all pretty close in single core performance. Of course M1 easily wins in power efficiency.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#505

Post by grecy »

rsync wrote: post #481

I see that the official Apple specs mention "support for 5 displays" and the tech specs state: "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 questi…

I have to assume at some point you simply hit the limit of how many pixels it can push out. Remember, you're talking about running FOUR displays at a resolution that was unheard of on the desktop two years ago AND another display at 4k simply as a "bonus".

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#506

Post by indemnity »

neor wrote: post #445
areoform wrote: post #22

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.…

They are doing a great job. 180 turnaround from the company that wanted their products to look clean above usable. 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 suspect storage is one of their high margin profit knobs.

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.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#507

Post by OmahaBoy69 »

brailsafe wrote: post #258
ilamont wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What would you use multiple HDMI ports for? Do you exclusively use HDMI only screens/tv?

Using my two monitors. They support HDMI and VGA. Pretty standard stuff.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#508

Post by TameAntelope »

eertami wrote: post #483
xwowsersx wrote: post #106

Could/would this machine makes sense as a development machine? I use a Macbook Pro (M1) and it's always docked...I basically don't need it to be transportable. I could also use more power (I'm regularly running a bunch of docker containers + PyCharm + DataGrip + Android Studio).

I don't think any M1 chip makes sense at all if you need to work with a lot of docker containers. Orders of magnitude faster to do that on a Linux machine.

Not my experience at all, docker works just fine on this M1 Mac Mini, and I use docker heavily.

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#509

Post by efficax »

dexterdog wrote: post #476
bee_rider wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely shouldn't buy a $4000 computer if your only workload is web browsing.

If people listened to that advice Apple's stock price would be cut in half. 99% of Mac users can get along fine with the base m1 models.

pretty sure apple lives and dies by their iPhone sales. Sure, they sell a ton of computers, but it's nothing compared to their phone revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if there were activist investors who think they should drop the personal computer/laptop product lineup entirely

Re: Apple Mac Studio

#510

Post by httpsterio »

nicoburns wrote: post #461
paulmd wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USB-C (or Thunderbolt) can also carry a DisplayPort link natively, and you don't even need a dongle for that. Workstations don't really care about HDMI, that's for TVs. 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…

> Workstations don't really care about HDMI, that's for TVs. 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.

And what about my PS/2 keyboard and mouse?
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