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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.
Bravo Apple. I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next.
It's insane how boldly (for Apple) they focused on ports and cables. I can't remember a previous demo video that showed so many ugly cables hanging out the back of the machine. They've finally realized it's a selling point!
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 limits suggest this is geared towards video processing, but might also be useful for some other domains.
> they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there
I think they're blowing all their competitors out of the water with the price point. It's not just a 10-20% difference in price anymore.
Also the impressive things for me are it’s actually really cheap, as in bargain territory, and you don’t have to piss around with HP sales drones to actually get one like the Z series.
While I could be wrong, I think the Mac Studio may be their "desktop aimed at designers and programmers" -- get the M1 Max instead of Ultra, bump the SSD up to 1TB and the RAM to 64G and it's $2600. By no means cheap, but not the wheeze-inducing iMac Pro prices or the second-mortgage Mac Pro ones.
The caveat is whether they're going to bring out an Apple Silicon-based "big iMac" that's a more direct replacement for the iMac I currently have. I'm not really optimistic about that possibility now that they've shipped the xMac, er, Mac Studio, but never say never.
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.
Not only that...
> 20-Core CPU
> 48-Core GPU
> 32-Core Neural Engine
for $3,999
is that kind of like... a bargain?
Jony Ive leaving was a massive improvement for Apple.
Apple still doesn’t want to allow expandable internal storage. That’s my core requirement for a pro/sumer desktop
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 upgrade but the same series (Normal, Pro, Max, and then Ultra) for each.
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.
This is actually really cheap. Maxed out at £7999 is less than half the price of an HP Z with similar numbers configured in which it probably can’t even get near the mac.
And it doesn’t need $1000 wheels.
This is such a random thing to complain about but I hate these Mac product pages with the animations as you scroll. I guess they are designed for mobile but I navigate them on a desktop using a mouse wheel and they always look super clunky.
Hey look, it's finally the "Missing Mac" as longed for here: https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2020/06/12/the-missing-ma...
and here: https://www.cultofmac.com/1899/the-missing-macintosh/
Fans have been asking for such a thing for so many years.
Interesting tweet from Hector Martin, who is leading the Linux port:
>Chances are our kernel will Just work on M1 Ultra with just device tree changes, might not even need any m1n1 changes.
I don’t buy Apple products for philosophical reasons, but the Mac Mini, and now Mac Studio, are everything I wish Intel NUCs were. I have an Intel Skull Canyon system from 2016 as my gaming PC and it fits in my wife’s purse. Since then, the gaming NUC variants have gotten larger and larger so that they’re nearly mini-ATX form factor again.
The amount of compute paired with the shared memory and fast bandwidth would make this an awesome fit for machine learning. But for PyTorch, the framework everybody is using now at least in computer vision, there seems to be no support at all for the GPU or the neural cores (which the presentation went on and on about).
I guess I’d better not hold my breath about support there, given Apples historical stance on support third party APIs/frameworks?
Apple said that Max's CPU is up to 2.5x faster and the Ultra's CPU is up to 3.8x faster than whatever intel CPU is in the iMac Pro, so you're getting about 52% more CPU performance with Ultra's doubling in CPU cores vs the Max, so definitely feeling some linear scaling limitations with the interconnect.
I am genuinely crestfallen that there was no update to Mac Mini. That thing has the right balance for most computer science folks who want a Mac. Not everyone needs/runs a silicon Godzilla on their desk after all.
As of the current lineup, Mini is still stuck with 16 GB RAM and a disappointing number of ports.
I'd buy one in a second if only it would support running vmware fusion - I still have to have one foot in Windows world, and not being able to spin-up and old windows vm is a deal breaker for me. (M1 chips won't support it).
Sure hope my latest macbookpro with intel chip lasts a while, I fear it may be one of the last ones they make.
The 2TB option is an extra $400. That's $200/TB.
The 4TB option is $250/TB.
The 8TB option is $275/TB.
That looks like planned obsolescence to me. A customer with 1TB will likely want to upgrade sooner than a customer with 8TB, so this pricing strategy discourages people from buying the more future-proof options. Other SSDs on the market tend to be cheaper per TB as you go up in size, but Apple's seem to be completely backwards (and obscenely overpriced, of course).
Or am I being too cynical here, and this is just that famous "luxury tax"?
I'm really happy they're not going with a iMac pro form factor for these. Having a separate display and computer is great for avoiding e-waste. There are a ton of iMacs out there that have obsolete hardware but a screen that still works great.
If anyone thinks Apple is not very serious about AR/VR consumer products, their renewed focus on creative professionals, intense workloads, and GPU performance seems to suggest otherwise.
Whatever the marketing out of Microsoft Surface, it's the Mac that has always enabled creative workflows. I'm genuinely more excited about the Mac than any other product, which I haven't felt or said for many years.
Nice work, Apple silicon and hardware teams!
Apple finally releases a powerful affordable desktop computer. Now I am worried it's the start of WW3 or otherwise the end of the world. Going outside now to look for flying pigs
The design of it looks a bit off to me.
Like a cheap mac-ish intel nuc designed by huawei with their matebooks.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17396818/huawei-matebook-...
Great they avoided $1000 stand memes by offering a more reasonable $400 stand.
To be more serious looks like a pretty good product that fits well into offices. I stopped working in IT in 2018 but back then SFF was all the rage and a powerful workstation with a smaller form factor will probably be attractive to a lot of customers.
The M1 Ultra is likely using CoWoS from TSMC.
Perfect. Recently went to a 40" ultrawide display to share between work laptop (during work hours) and personal desktop (after hours) to simplify my desk, and felt the Mini was probably just a little too limiting/low-end.
Finally, the replacement to my 2015 iMac 5k.
Mac Pro scale up?
How is this going to scale up to a Mac Pro, especially related to RAM?
The Ultra caps at 128 GB of RAM (which isn't much for video editing, especially given that the GPU uses the system RAM). Today's Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB (and has dedicated video RAM above this).
If the Mac Pro is say, 4 Ultra's stacked together - that means the new Mac Pro will be capped at 512GB of RAM.
Would Apple stack 12 Ultra's together to get to 1.5TB of RAM? Seems unlikely.
Without having a teardown available, and more importantly, without having actually manually manipulated it, I am ready to say the Studio is poor design. I could be completely wrong, but it appears from the images of the back that the design is simply this: a Mac Mini on the bottom with storage, I/O & PSU, below a processor layer with a massive heatsink, which is likely the only thing taking up any space behind the top grill. The problem with the design is that the M1 Ultra version weighs 8lbs., and most that weight is going to be in the bottom, making Studio unwieldy, and I expect placement of this little bottom-heavy box that weighs nearly as much as a gallon of water is going to be the source of a number of wrist injuries, and I think it is safe to say also, there will naturally be some blunt force injuries to a number of hands and fingers, some with ugly lacerations. Most of this could have been avoided with some new cutting edge technology colloquially known as putting a doggone handle on the top that was solidly loaded into the more massive layer on the bottom. I think the design ethic here is similar to strapping a 350 to a gocart. Putting a handle on something that weighs 8lbs. is so ordinary and necessary and obvious, and because Studio lacks it, I honestly do not care what's inside it. Even if manipulation is only going to occur once or a small handful of times, physically it is going to function like junk, and that just bugs me too much. I have too much junk as it is. I'd take 2 budget M1 Minis and an Intel Mini over a maxed out Studio every time. I'm absolutely serious, a handle would have changed everything.
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).
Can't wait to see a teardown of the cooling solution. Not sure how the air flows between the bottom and the heat sink as there's a board between them.
I don’t even care about the specs.
Just love the fact they fit it all in that tiny case, flush under a Studio display monitor.
There’s something 90s about it, SGI maybe?
The Mac Studio's HDMI doesn't support 120Hz out (so likely HDMI 2.0?) and it also doesn't come with a keyboard and mouse.
Biggest missing thing for me is no internal M.2 SSD slots where you can swap storage. Getting external closures is annoying, really wish it came with 2 or 4 m.2 slots that you could put on the top or bottom. Cables break, wiggle around, get moved around during data transfer and cause it to get corrupted or fail and more.
It looks like the son of the Mac Cube.
I generally like Apple designs, but I think the Studio is ugly and uninspired. It reminds me of a cheesy HiFi component. If they couldn't come up with a better original design, they should have abandoned pretty design and put a handle on the top to make it easier to move around. Also, I think it is ridiculously expensive, should have maxed out closer to $4K, not $10K. Also, since it is thick enough, they could have jammed in a little wide-screen right on the front as a backup or aux monitor. For $10K, I'd like a little wide-screen display on the front.
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 question arises as with the mac mini: Why can't the additional (leftover) ports be used for even more displays ? In this case, there are two more ports on the front (either USB-C or TB4) that can handle a display - why is that not possible ?
Is there any point to building a PC anymore?
Is it just me or have apple clearly not tested this page on Android Firefox?
Boy is that an ugly box… the proportions seem all wrong to me - looks like they just stacked a bunch on Mac Mini’s (which has pretty nice proportions)
Apple claims M1 Ultra is faster than 28 Core Intel Xeon W chip, which they ship in Mac Pro. If that's true, then Mac Studio is an excellent value.
Mac Pro with 28 Core, 96GB RAM, 1TB SSD = $14,199
Mac Studio with M1 Ultra (48GPU Cores), 128GB RAM, 1TB SSD = $4,800
Also it looks like they compared their CPU performance with the latest intel generation in their demo.
> "16-core PC desktop CPU performance data from testing Core i9-12900K with DDR5 memory" https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/#footnote
It's kinda scary how monster of a company Apple has become lately. Their product line-up in compute is now unmatched.
The "overview" is just a graphic with links to an event page and video content. That isn't an overview. An overview is a blurb of text summarizes the subject matter.
I am really, really sick of these gated "watch the video" information vehicles. I read much faster than video plays: stick to text if you want my attention for things like this.
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 price/performance/power market for quite some amount of time.
Normally I'd make some snarky remark about Apple Tax, but in this case they look to have the PC hardware equivalent very well and truly beat on cost. For now.
As a dev, I think this is neat - but unfortunately, to this very day, the most important workloads usually are single-threaded, even the ones that are multi-threaded, rarely scale to more than 8 cores.
This usually means that the advanced M1 variants don't really offer an advantage over the base offering, although, more RAM is always nice.
The chassis seems to be around the right size for a DIY project of combining it with an iMac G4 swivel display [1].
With a modern display it would make for a really nice 3rd party accessory.
It's a little funny looking, proportionally speaking, but I am so happy to see some ports on the front. It can be incredibly awkward to try and find ports on the back of a machine. At first glance it seems a little expensive, but the value based on performance is actually fantastic. Well done, apple.