Mac Studio - options

[James Steele]

Just watched this video online. Apparently, the M2 Ultra is a real screamer. Apple has optimized quite a bit it seems. It makes me very optimistic about what will be coming down the pike in the years to come.

[mikehalloran]

Just watched this video online. Apparently, the M2 Ultra is a real screamer. Apple has optimized quite a bit it seems. It makes me very optimistic about what will be coming down the pike in the years to come.

Optimized for Video and AV, of course. He seems surprised; apparently didn't watch the keynote. His rendering tests are useful but not very intense.

His M2 Studio Ultra has the same whistling noise that he says is a heat sink but it only appeared once—I think he was making assumptions since he didn't mention how it was fixed otherwise. There are YouTube videos of the M1 Studio "noise" and they sound the same to me. Says there's a widespread issue with the M2 Studio, then doesn't say what it is. This, perhaps? Something he read on MacRumors but never checked out himself?

Yet another person pounding on price and the huge $3K difference between the Studio Ultra and the 2023 Mac Pro. Realy? Last year, the video upgrade package only on the 2019 7.1 was $11,000. Mac Pros, now as they were then, are bought by companies for their employees. $3,000 more for an extra pair of TB4 ports, another HDMI port, another 10GBE port, internal USB 3 and SATA III ports plus 6 PCIe slots and 3 oversized fans,? That's nothing. Not a single person intent on buying the Pro cares what this guy thinks.

[Michael Canavan]

It's a pretty extreme difference in price, IMO Apple sometimes overprice things, and this is one of those times.
It's the exact same chip as in my M2 Ultra, they just IMO do not want to sell the Mac Pro as the standard, the features warrant a larger price for sure, but literally all you're getting is more in/out connectivity, PCIe at full speed, and a bigger chassis. The chip, GPU, and bus speed internally are the same.

I can't think of a single thing I would need to do specifically on a Mac that would justify the difference in price between the Studio and Mac Pro, especially considering an i9 Windows machine with equivalent specs will be faster in almost every test, except of course thermals and noise, and literally $3-4000.00 cheaper.

I feel like they don't want to deal with PCIe anymore, I think that's been obvious for a while. One way to do this is to overprice their offerings with PCIe until they can justify killing it off. Yes Pro Tools studios and other very specific niche professional outfits will get these and be relatively happy, but like I mentioned, the current top of the line i9 desktops are outperforming Apple Silicon, albeit louder and with more power consumption, but most people have rooms or closets set up to deal with that anyway.

[James Steele]

...all you're getting is more in/out connectivity, PCIe at full speed

...I feel like they don't want to deal with PCIe anymore, I think that's been obvious for a while.

That seems to be a shame, because I have to tell you as someone who bit the bullet and retired my old PCIe-based MOTU system, for all the amazing improvement with the Apple Silicon Macs... there are times I really miss "direct hardware playthrough" that was available when I was running my old interfaces on my Cheesegrater. With this new generation of TB interfaces... for whatever reason... that's not available in DP anymore and I miss it.

Makes me wish there were an option of a Mac Studio that was slightly bigger that I could get just ONE updated PCIe-424 card in there and MOTU might make an "Audiowire II" version of their current TB3 interfaces. I could be way off base... but I understand PCIe is still much faster than TB?

[hammerman]

Just checking in to say that I am loving my new Mac Studio Ultra! I have some OWC Drive Docks for bare drives: backups, archives, clones, etc. But otherwise, everything lives on the internal SSD.

The only weird problem I am having is at a certain brightness level on my new Apple Studio Display, it causes my Furman IT-1220 Balanced Power Transformer to acoustically hum. I change the brightness and it goes away. It doesn't even have to be plugged in to the Furman. I called Furman and they had no answer for me. I don't want to spend $4K on a new Furman. I just turned off Adjust Brightness Automatically.

[James Steele]

Just checking in to say that I am loving my new Mac Studio Ultra! I have some OWC Drive Docks for bare drives: backups, archives, clones, etc. But otherwise, everything lives on the internal SSD.

Thats too cool!! Apple Silicon has re-awaked my need for speed. I'm seriously thinking of in a year or two, moving my M1 Max Mac Studio to my office (I imagine it would be an OVERKILL office machine) and then upgrading the studio to an M2 Ultra refurb perhaps or maybe M3? Who knows. As they work out the kinks, I'm very excited about the possibilities for Apple Silicon Macs.