Originally published at: Apple Mac Studio not just a stack of Mac Minis in a trenchcoat | Boing Boing
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I have seen a stack of Mac Minis in a trenchcoat - it was being used to demonstrate cluster computing, and worked quite well actually.
No GPUs in it though.
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Having just priced out new computers, if those specs are accurate then its absolutely in the ballpark for most decent PC’s these days. Interesting model, I’m sure we’ll be seeing them around our organization soon (and I thankfully no longer have to support them… no, this is not a ding on Apple systems, more of a ding on me for getting old and lazy and not wanting to have to keep up with yet ANOTHER hardware/software environment). 
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Rob, what do you mean by “Apple announced its first new computer in years”? They have announced plenty of new machines in recent years.
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IMHO, he means their first new model, which in this case, would probably be the first model since the iMac Pro. I guess the 16" Macbook Pro could count, too, but it was just a slightly larger version of what it replaced.
I have an old 2017 iMac as my daily system… might be time to upgrade here.
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I also have a 2017 iMac 4k. It’s been a great computer for my daily. I bought it as a refurb off the Apple site, checking every day at the time for one with a TB drive and 16gb of RAM. My last system was a Mac mini - had it for 5 years. I might consider the Studio for a replacement later this year, we’ll see - I have a gadget budget I can use in the Fall from work. The iMac is still doing well with one external monitor. I’d have to get another one if I got a Studio.
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This is the best headline I’ve seen about the new Mac Studio.
I also have a 2017 iMac as a daily driver at work and home. The work iMac will eventually be replaced with a MaBook Pro and monitor. For home the Mac Studio and Studio Display are tempting, but expensive. I will probably wait for Apple to release a higher end Mac mini to replace the Intel Mac mini and see if that better fits my budget.
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I wonder how accurate it is to compare the Mac Studio’s GPU power to the Nvidia cards. They may be comparable in terms of raw operations per second, but to leverage that power on the Mac you’re presumably going to need something that’s written against Apple’s Metal framework (just as you’d need something coded to use CUDA for the Nvidia cards). Presumably someone could also write code that would access either device at a lower level, but that’s rather more work. I assume that there are probably more apps out there that can take full advantage of the power of, say, an RTX 3090 than of the power of the M1 Ultra. So it’s not that easy to make an apples-to-Apples comparison (excuse me).
Personally, I’d buy one of those suckers tomorrow if I could do Iray renders on it at full speed. But Iray is tied very closely to Nvidia’s GPUs, and since Apple and Nvidia had a little falling out, Apple hardware will never ever work in any way shape or form with Nvidia hardware ever again. You can do Iray renders in CPU, of course, but the CPU rendering code is written for Intel. That means that on an Apple Silicon Mac it’ll have to run under Rosetta 2, which eats up another giant chunk of performance.
The result is that Iray rendering on the Mac Studio might be appreciably faster than on my current Intel Mac, but it’s probably also many times slower than on any of Nvidia’s recent GPUs.
Speaking of performance killers, how will the M1 Ultra do at crypto-mining? Are we going to find that we can’t buy any Mac Studio devices because every last one has been bought and shipped to China, I mean Texas, to be installed in a Bitcoin mining farm?
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The Studio comes in two basic forms: a $1,600 model with the M1 Max chip, 32Gb of RAM and a 512Gb SSD, and the $4,000 M1 Ultra model, which comes with 64Gb of RAM and 1Tb SSD.
Shouldn’t that read 2000 for the first one?
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1.600,-
Where?
That price would make it worth flyin’ cph-jfk and back plus do a weekend of serious partying and visit friends while there 
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From that comparative specs graphic it is more likely that the second is two of the first in a trenchcoat
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Yes, I must have gotten mixed up with the display. Thanks.
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Definitely a nice-looking system, and tempting for me. But it’s also worth noting that the high specs for multi-core operations won’t apply to many applications in real-life use. Most applications are designed for single core, still.
But high-end video editors, graphics professionals, data scientists and others will no doubt know what their preferred applications can make use of…
For me, the M1 mac mini I got last year will probably last me for a while. I’m using Lightroom and Photoshop and its fine for those needs. I would definitely get at least 16gb RAM with it though.
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These guys really pulled a rabbit out of their hat. Can’t wait to see the benchmarks. I wonder how many people who previously bought Mac Pros will go for these next time. I wonder what the M-class Mac Pro will look like. I use Affinity Photo and DaVinci Resolve regularly at work and I’m quite pleased with my M1 MacBook Air.
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Agree, but I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that someone using only single-core supporting applications is not the target audience for this wee beastie.
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I think so…although you could argue the iMac Pro is basically just the iMac (not-Pro) form factor in a new color (obviously very different insides, but most new Macs differ inside).
The new form-factor prior to that was arguable the MacBook (no second name) which was discontinued without a successor.
Prior to that the MacBook Air which has changed from a high priced MacBook for people that value small size over low cost (and performance) to the entry level MacBook for people that prize low price and also get small size (and also get performance as of the M1 MBA).
Prior to that the new form factor was the Mac mini.
Prior to that the new form factor was the PowerMac Cube which was discontinued without a successor (although after a multi-year absence from the line up the Mac mini is a plausible replacement as the low cost desktop Mac that comes without display/keyboard/mouse, and the new Mac Studio can also plusabbly be thought of as the same sort of niche…or maybe more so as the Mac Cube had similar perforce to the top of the line Mac towers of the day and the Mac Studio beats the current Mac tower, but maybe not the M1/M2 replacement for the Intel MacPro).
Prior to that the eMac. That’s not counting the earlier iterations of the iMac and iBook that had many different form factors, many of them fairly to somewhat minor variants though (and some being quite significant – like the monitor on a stick iMac I once had in my office).
The Mac Studio though does have one thing none of those other Macs had though. I think it is butt ugly. I mean not all of the other Macs were a prize (I’m looking at you eMac…and orange plastic eBook), but none of them looked like a forced error. This thing looks like a render of an Apple fanboy that knows how to drive solid works or something, but not how to craft a nice looking computer. Not that that would stop me from buying one if I had a personal need for that much horsepower (or accepting one as my work computer) – but I would try to figure out how to place it where I can’t see it!
FYI, other then the 16G RAM limit the current mini is very fast. For many work loads even with 16G it is fast (I think the SSD being so fast helps it perform even with what for modern systems is a pretty limited amount of RAM)
Rosetta 2 is shockingly fast. For some things it is faster then running on a real x86 (atomic memory operations are dramatically faster on the M1). I think the real problem with relying on something that needs Rosetta2 is R2 requires some hardware assist, and at some point Apple will likely stop putting that in the CPUs and stop supporting R2. (the hardware assist being maybe just having a MMU bit to support the x86-64 style memory reordering in hardware so you get x86-style enforcement of what does and does not get covered by locks and other atomic instructions, but it may also have an 80-bit FPU as well)
I do a lot of compiles, and while clang-llvm as far as I know only uses one core most build systems will launch multipole instances at once. Apple’s linker however is single threaded (there are actual linkers more or less drop in comparable that get multicore speedups, but Apple doesn’t currently ship one, and they are a wee bit on the experimental side…).
I don’t know if I am the actual target audience though. I kind of expect it would handle my work load faster then the iMac Pro I currently have…
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Everyone’s talking about specs and computer related tangents while I’m over here thinking about BoJack’s Vincent Adultman. ^___^
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signed,
Apple user since 1982
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Who was, let’s face it, the most emotionally mature character in the show
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