Originally published at: Apple Studio reviews are in | Boing Boing
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I don’t think I can ever go back to a desktop (even for video editing, which I do a lot of) but the Studio looks nice. Apple monitors continue to be very spendy, but I’m clinging to my 30” Cinema Display from 2012 with my cold dead hands. I’m up to four(!) dongles now to keep it running, but it’s still the best monitor Apple ever made, IMHO.
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I am lucky enough to have a “work device” refresh coming up, and I’m lucky enough to control approvals for that budget, so I will be getting a studio that way.
I need to see a bit more on the review side (especially the graphics capabilities), but I would probably consider a MAX version as a replacement to my current (personal) 2017 iMac, since I’d rather have a discrete display for this very situation where my imac’s innards grow long in the tooth.
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I’m impressed with the new Mac studio, but disappointed with Apple’s new monitor. I’d much rather have an OLED or mini LED display at 4k, than a IPS screen at 5K. Don’t care about speakers or webcam either. Guess I’ll wait to see what comes out later this year.
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I’m not sure I see the niche for it beyond apple aesthetic fans with unlimited budgets.
The existing M1 options have more than enough oomph to push the limits of thunderbolt bandwidth when video editing. An ultra studio might have workstation amounts of cores and memory bandwidth, but it’s handicapped by consumer-level storage and IO.
Cute, though. If aesthetic is your priority, apple’s got your back.
I’m thinking I’m going to buy it for my wife to replace her (2 or 3 generations back) Mac Mini that she uses for all her teaching tasks. It’s a bit overkill, but her old one’s getting a little long in the tooth, and the kids are likely to want a video-editing machine in the near future.
This. Just got rid of an elderly iMac 27" (2012?) and I hate having to recycle that much e-waste. It was too old for Apple to offer a trade-in or to be really useful. I bought a Mac Mini and I’m using a monitor that my wife was getting rid of - not great and at some point I’d like to replace with something suitable for vid editing. But no more iMacs for me.
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Huh? Should run fine on Linux or at places where you don’t need security updates. My mother still runs my old 2007 Mac Pro.
Though I admit that I’m kinda glad that I found a patche allowing me to run Monterey on my first generation iMac 27" 5k.
For a very technical deep dive on why the mac M1s are so fast, here is an excellent read. It’s a few months old, so doesn’t explicitly cover the new Apple Studio. The chipset and architecture is so revolutionary that this will give Apple a huge advantage over Intel and AMD for a long time.
It’s an article with many technical words, at least. The author’s conclusions remind me more of how homeopaths talk about their little bottles of water.
The M1 isn’t magical. It’s a well designed chip that trades versatility, upgradability, and external IO for high efficiency(almost exactly like the A-series chips that power iOS devices). If your computer usage fits within the boundaries and constraints Apple set when designing the specific chip you purchased, great! If not… grab your wallet, it’s time to buy a whole new computer.
That isn’t to say you shouldn’t buy an M1; The efficiency makes the M1 macbook a freakin’ awesome device, and the mini is… well, it’s cheap(ish) and good enough. I would skip the MAX and Ultra, though. The IO and storage bottlenecks mean the extra cores and memory bandwidth are only going to be useful for highly specific tasks that don’t really care about IO or storage.
For what it’s worth, both Intel and AMD have made general-purpose SoC’s very much like the M1 for almost a decade now; Aside from a few outliers like the Microsoft Surface, they aren’t designed for or marketed to the consumer PC market, so they’re not really in competition with apple there. AMD launched their Opteron ARM server SoC’s back in 2014 or so, and Intel has been churning out efficiency-focused chips based on their own Atom SoC platform for even longer. Not to mention mobile SoC’s made by Qualcomm, Samsung, or even Apple’s own A-series chips. The only thing revolutionary here is that apple killed production of x64 hardware as soon as they finished macOS for ARM.
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No height adjustment? Only 60Hz? No HDR? IPS vs OLED or Mini-LED? Only USB-C? No local dimming? Backlight bleed? Can’t detach from the stand if you decide later you want to wall mount it? Meh…
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Man. I’m still on that old 2013 mac laptop cuz it has the headphone and mic jacks and a DVD player. I keep thinking one of these days I’ll have to upgrade. I’ve maxed this thing out with memory and a new battery and a huge solid state hard drive, but like, I cant run the newest OS. Maybe a good thing cuz I have software that won’t work on the newest OS. But there’s also software that won’t work on this old one
It’s funny that between 2000 and 2013 there was always an excuse to upgrade. I needed more storage or a faster processor. But somewhere Around 2013 technology almost maxed out. Like I’ve never had a problem where photoshop or any other software I regularly use for work or play ran too slow. I guess if I wanna start editing 4K video or something I’ll have no choice. But I don’t. So really the only thing now that will force me is if software I need for work literally stops functioning. As far as storage I just keep buying whatever new external drives come out. Right now I have one 4TB drive and another I keep as a backup that I update regularly. Even there, 4 Tb is enough to hold every file I’ve created over the last 25 years with room to spare. It’s a weird point where technology seems to be at a “more than we’ll ever really need” point.
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Thank you for bringing me back down to earth. I don’t want one anymore.
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Yeah, that’s pretty much the killer app for these late model machines. The mac mini m1 is perfectly useable for 4k hobbyist work, but if you do this stuff for a living, something more powerful is required.
The m1 mini is good for gaming at 1080p medium/high. If you want something faster, the m1 studio looks exciting, though really, there are cheaper PCs that can handle that sort of thing.
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