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)
On Max it's only 4 thunderbolt ports (and I would assume 2 displays + 1 HDMI since it's half of an Ultra) but still, that's about 2x anything else on the market.
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.
I had a M1 Mac Mini but I do occasionally want to take a Mac with me so I replaced it with the Air. I only slightly miss the extra ports on the Mini.
That was on a Dell desktop I had at a previous job. Not sure if it was just kinda crappy, or whether the inrush current on those Model Ms is just that big.
Also, the Mac Studio actually has an HDMI port.
MAKE IT THICKER. IT'S A GODDAMN DOORBELL. YOU CONTROL THE THICKNESS! THERE IS LITERALLY NO REQUIREMENT IT BE THAT THIN!
<3
-- I really get so angry when these arguments are given so I feel your pain.
FWIW I do have a thickness requirement to install one on my door
Also, I'm pretty excited to replace my big tower with this thing and finally get my computers off the floor.
Say that you're a manufacturer trying to keep an eye towards wants new vs supporting what's old, what decisions do you make to support new and retro without increasing the costs? At some point, having backseat decision makers giving input results in the car designed by Homer.
Of all of the things I've personally railed on Apple about in the past as well as others, their most recent HW offerings have been a great compromise. They've brought back some USB-A, SD card reader, HDMI, etc. They realized they've gone too far in certain areas, but some how they had a come to Jeebus meeting that reigned them back in.
> trying to keep an eye towards wants new vs supporting what's old
No one is suggesting they trade anything away. Apple has settled on USB-C. But there's plenty of extra room on the rear panel. Your argument assumes benevolence on Apple's part. For all you know the chips support dual HDMI, they removed it to save money which ends up being pure profit because they didn't reduce the product price at all. Do you think adding a second HDMI would increase the arbitrary price from $2k to $2k plus $20?
For the record, I would LOVE it if the Mac startup chime played "La Cucaracha"
Sure, but I don't think any Apple Silicon Mac has dual HDMI. While I guess it's possible that they spent the money to design dual HDMI support in their own chips and then said "but now that we've done this, we can save twenty bucks by not actually making the physical ports," but doesn't it seem likely that they also saved the money by…not putting it on the chip?
> Do you think adding a second HDMI would increase the arbitrary price from $2k to $2k plus $20?
Do you think anyone contemplating buying a computer that starts at $2K is going to suddenly stop, slap their forehead, and scream, "To connect two HDMI monitors, I'm going to have to buy a $15 USB-C to HDMI cable instead of a $6 HDMI cable! That extra $9 blows my budget! CURSE YOU, TIM COOK!"
I mean, I get what you're saying, but this just seems like a weirdly tiny hill to die on. :)
> For the record, I would LOVE it if the Mac startup chime played "La Cucaracha"
Well, who wouldn't.
However, it's not like you have to replace your monitors because of only one HDMI port. There are cables that go from TB4 to HDMI without dongles. Yes, you would need a new something instead of the something you already have.
Do you really know what the cost of adding a 2nd HDMI port to a system is? I do not. I do know it will be much more than the cost of the actual port connector itself. There's a new hole to be added to the case. There's more robotically soldered points to connect the new port to the system. Of the way the system is laid out on the board, is there enough bandwidth to supply signals to all of the ports? I have no idea the level of complexities involved in deciding what ports are available with the bandwidth of the system, but I do not for a second think that I could do it better.
Because of the "sleek" design and smaller size, Apple has people convinced that the computer should be like children in the '50s--seen but not heard.
If you offer someone a computer in the shape of the mac mini or this new studio design OR they could have a typical PC style box, I'm guessing the majority of people will choose the smaller box. Even if there are no Apple logos on the smaller box. Nobody wants a 30+lb box any more. As an editor, you can take this bad boy on the road with you without incurring overweight luggage fees at the airport.
They have multiple TB4 ports. I'm not sure if their USBC ports are video-compatible. If you get the ultra, then the front ones are TB4, as well.
Don‘t forget the headphone jack!
It's at the top to the left of the USB-A ports.
I mean, if you're going to break with Apple tradition and have visible ports on the front, seems like you'd want the headphone jack to be one of them.
> Supported Interface: DisplayPort (G-SYNC, FreeSync), HDMI (FreeSync).
[0] https://gscs-b2c.lge.com/downloadFile?fileId=Do77Cjc9rIkTamu...
I use a Lenovo Thunderbolt dock for both my M1 16" MBP and a Lenovo laptop running Linux. It runs 2 x DisplayPort monitors, mouse, keyboard, and webcam.
Yep. There are monitors with Type-C, power delivery, usb hub, so they avoid you the need of having a dock. Usually they're priced at around monitor+fancy dock, so it doesn't even cost more for more practicality.
Otherwise, it has been great, especially with games.
Just to be clear yes I know USB-C thumb drives exist but they are next to useless because their whole purpose is to shuttle files between devices. Devices that likely don't have USB-C yet.
USB-A is the de-facto standard for thumb drives. Are we all just supposed to throw them away overnight because Apple blessed us with computers without USB-A ports? Or, they'll sell you a dongle for $19 which can be had on Aliexpress for $0.75. Would it have killed them to throw an extra USB-A 3.x port on the nearly empty front panel? It carries nearly the same signals as USB-C minus power delivery. No, this was a purely aesthetic decision. Apple could design a brick PC with no ports besides power and people would still pleasure themselves into a coma at the thought of spending $2k on such a grotesque monstrosity.
This seems like a very disingenous way of saying that Apple is one of the largest companies on the planet and sells hundreds of millions of devices a year.
Given that Apple regularly supports devices almost a decade old with firmware updates, has one of the most aggressive environmental agendas in the industry, and has invested billions of dollars in recycling programs, I would hazard a guess and say that on an adjusted basis they probably compare very favourably to competitors like Samsung and other OEMs.
>USB-A is the de-facto standard for thumb drives. Are we all just supposed to throw them away overnight because Apple blessed us with computers without USB-A ports?
You're upset about having to reach seven inches further to plug in a USB drive. If that's enough to cause you to throw all of your thumb drives away then I'd say that reflects more on you than on Apple.
>Or, they'll sell you a dongle for $19 which can be had on Aliexpress for $0.75.
There's a considerable engineering (and therefore cost) difference between a dongle that carries all the required electrical certifications, and a 75c Chinese firestarter that stands as much chance of damaging your computer as enhancing it, but that's moot anyway since nobody is forcing you to buy the Apple-made adapter in the first place.
>Would it have killed them to throw an extra USB-A 3.x port on the nearly empty front panel?
Given the form factor, quite possibly. It isn't as simple as just cutting out a slot and sticking a connector in, you need to route that connecter internally and find space on the logic board for the supporting circuitry, which has all sorts of difficult implications for the board layout.
And for what? How many thumb drives do you think the average person needs to plug in at any given moment? Why do you assume that your extremely narrow use-case is so important that it must be given the highest possible priority for Apple's engineers to meet?
The overwhelmingly vast majority of consumers, even pro consumers, will do just fine plugging their thumb drives into the back of the very small box sitting in front of them, or plugging in a USB hub to one of the USB-C ports on the front. Why add complexity and cost to solve a non-problem for a tiny subset of users who, if they're anything like you, were never going to buy an Apple product irrespective of what ports it has on the front?
If you are willing to buy a $0.75 anything from Alibaba and trust it with your precious data, you do you. As I've already suggested, you more than likely already have everything you need in a drawer, on your desktop, etc that will allow multiple USB-A devices to connect through a single port.
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.
Our "world" build is slightly faster on my M1 Max.
https://twitter.com/kiratpandya/status/1457438725680480257
The 3990x runs a bit faster on the initial compile stage but the linking is single threaded and the M1 Max catches up at that point. I expect the M1 Ultra to crush the 3990x on compile time.
There is Mold (https://github.com/rui314/mold) as an alternative but it doesn’t support MacOS yet and that’s a blocker for our team.
None of that swapability is available on any of the Apple systems, so when they stagnate there's nothing that can be done.
I love the idea of component machines, but at this time of my life, I would be just fine to never have build another PC. With that, these systems of plug in the cables and go to work are appealing. Having said that, it still rubs me the wrong way on how non-upgradeable these things are.
How have they stagnated?
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...
or the HP equivalent - they're still equipping them with Xeon's from 2 1/2 years ago. So pretty stagnant.
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.
I do however image that the performance per watt will be really good.
> That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.
Having a clever reason to justify how it was intentionally designed to be slower doesn't change the fact that it's slower.
Apple is great at other things and you do get other benefits when you buy an Apple computer, the performance/dollar just isn't one of them for desktop. Even for laptop, the M1 was the first time they were completive on that metric.
That's a narrative which I think has been proven to be not true for quite some time? If you look at the prices of Windows ultrabooks from brand names, they have been at the same level as Mac laptops for many, many years.
Likely mostly running the same workloads such as web browsing.
> ... and run different software.
Maybe if Apple wrote it. Otherwise you can run the same Chrome/Firefox, Photoshop and Office on a Windows or even Linux Machine. Most software is shared between platforms nowadays with posix/windows being the lowest common denominator in terms of "cross platform".
Same goes if you prefer pages to word. Or software from Panic vs something else. The thing is if you’re most comfortable ale and productive on MacOS unless you build a hackintosh you need to buy a Mac and pay the mac tax but you get a whole integrated thing
Maybe not, but 32GB RAM + 512GB SSD for $2k is a pretty competitive price point.
https://www.newegg.com/seagate-2tb-firecuda-530/p/N82E168202...
Find me a 1TB SSD that perform as fast as Samsung 980 Pro and is much cheaper. Say under $125.
Then you have to add on motherboard ($1k), case ($200), cooling ($200), psu ($200).
Even if you cut a few corners, you are still over $8k for equivalent performance, and a substantially larger form factor. Yeah, you can upgrade, etc, but thats not really the point of the exercise.
That said, if you can think of speccing it another way, id be interested, as im looking for a decent workstation build that is x86.
Not only on price point but also performance per watt. The M1 laptops were a game changer on that front, and I expect the M1 Ultra to be the same.
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.
Overall I like the idea, because years after buying an iMac I still have a nice monitor, permanently attached to a (now) slow computer that I can't upgrade. With this approach I only need to replace the Mac itself as its age or my needs catch up with it.
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'm really glad to see that the mea culpa they pulled when admitting the trashcan was a really bad idea wasn't just a bunch of platitudes. They've actually released good products after that. That last MacPro was interesting, but they still had custom dedicated GPUs that again had no replacements.
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.
> 20-Core CPU
> 48-Core GPU
> 32-Core Neural Engine
for $3,999
is that kind of like... a bargain?
UPDATE - Sorry, I originally listed this as a 5900x by accident. I need more sleep.
As for the footprint, it's usually not enough of a concern at the desktop to double or triple the price to go from a standard mini ATX down to a double height Mac Mini, but I'm sure there are some locations where that would be a concern.
You may have misread the number of cores on the box when you bought it!
If you go into task manager, how many logical threads are there?
Getting what we need not what Jony says we needed.
Products and needs evolve and change. Saying bad things about the man is nasty especially considering his gentle nature. Especially that we really actually don’t know who is exactly responsible for what in that world.
I always thought it was a fair trade-off. Pro users who care more about stability/support can pay the Apple Tax, and enthusiasts on a budget can DIY it and get a better machine for less. It feels like greed to cut off that path.
It was also way more important in the day of spinning disks - so many machines from that era got a new lease on life by having the HDD replaced with an SSD. Imagine if HDDs had somehow been soldered in...
Apple added back expandable internal storage for the Mac Pro and I hoped they would relent here too
I don’t really see how Macs generally are limited to “creative producers”. The computer doesn’t care if you’re compiling, running containers, or doing whatever it is that people do to create tiktok videos.
I don’t care if a laptop is a tad thicker, or the aesthetics would allow the device to sit in a museum - Ive helped make them desireable objects, the iPhone provided the scale and momentum and Apple silicon in macs at last allows for focus on actual usability. This set of kit will pave the way for a revolution in how we think about computing.
Indeed, Bravo!
They just (November) released the best MacBook Pro since 2015.
Original keyboard back. Escape key back. Utility keys back. Mag-Safe back. HDMI back. SD card back. Headphone jack back. And all with a brand new M1 Pro chip.
Plus, I think a lot of people who would not normally call themselves a "prosumer" will want, and purchase these.
Small is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Apple sold nearly $11 billion worth of Macs last quarter. Once you get out of the HN echo chamber and enterprise IT circles, Macs are quite popular.
In a way, they never did "mass market".
Having an Apple Store within a 20 minute drive of 80% of the American public counts as mass market [1]. Haven't been lately because pandemic but my local Apple Stores were always packed with people. And of course there's a Best Buy, Micro Center and other regional retailers that sell Macs in places with no Apple Stores.
It's not just prosumers; it's normies who just want a good computer made by a company they've heard of and trust vs. a cheap plastic 3rd tier PC from a manufacturer they're vaguely familiar with. I've been involved in user groups since the 80's; trust me, most Mac users are just regular people—not music producers and cinematographers.
An M1 Mac mini, which certainly outperforms most PCs in it's price class. The retail price starts at $699 but is available for significantly less via 3rd parties like Amazon.
If you think of the market segment as "non-plastic computers that don't suck", Apple is doing quite well. And now that Apple Silicon performance continues to outpace the industry as a whole, this will continue.
The other segment is the "I like nice things" crowd. They aren't price sensitive; they just like nice things and Macs have that in spades compared to the vast majority of PCs.
It's like when people say their iPhone is better quality than a $200 Xiaomi phone. Well, duh??? Why are you even comparing them? If you look at higher tier Xiaomi phones, or in your example, laptops from reputable companies such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, they're much closer in build quality, have a choice of tradeoffs ( you can choose if you want small, light, long battery life, type of screen, ports, performance, etc. and not have Apple choose), and were still quite a bit cheaper than equivalent specs Macbooks. That's no longer quite as valid for laptops due to the M1s l, but is still valid for phones.
- it's easy for them to make
- some of their customers need them
- prevents people switching to windows for high-even pro machines, which would influence their other computer purchases
We're not really their target audience. Back when they had a rack server, they had something that looked good to us, but we're not really the ones that will buy a maxxed-out Studio.
It's an interesting machine. It definitely is aimed at folks that would get Pros, beforehand. With the hint dropped at the end of the Studio presentation, I suspect that they may announce some crazy Pro, in the coming months.
It's really interesting, because I'd estimate there are 10x more programmers than "video professionals". I could be extremely wrong though.
Creatives, on the other hand, probably have a 50% or more Apple platform user base, and also like fixed workstations.
I used to run a dev shop for a photographic equipment manufacturer, and the Apple platform (even relying on the users having beefy workstations), was quite important.
What would you say the programmers specifically need though. A laptop instead of a workstation?
I am trying to imagine what a page of code laid out by a professional designer would look like and I can hear a million programmers screaming bloody murder in my head about the thoughtful use of whitespace, proportional-width fonts (even though they are ones chosen to clearly differentiate between confusing characters like 1/I and 0/O), and the occasional change in font size for... what is the source code equivalent of a subhead, anyway? Comments?
There are beautiful programmer fonts nowadays that look amazing on Apple's high resolution screens.
There are several GUIs for Vim/Neovim that take advantage of the GPU and the text rendering abilities of modern computers in general and Macs in particular [1].
And once you get used to seeing your code this way, it's hard to go back.
You'll probably love this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06030
Nicolas Rougier has also implemented a few of those ideas in a series of packages for Emacs called "NANO Emacs"; the actual implementation goes beyond what's discussed in the paper and is worth checking out.
I love the exploratory screenshot of a function reformatted with the comments floating on the left of a hairline instead of next to the source, with the function name nice and big and bold right next to the version control info.
BTW, Nicolas has a lot of interesting packages exploring use of graphical design elements in Emacs apart from the Nano Emacs stuff; for example, there's https://github.com/rougier/svg-tag-mode. I love how he chooses to represent dates and dates with times attached, and to distinguish active vs. inactive dates with shading rather than "[" and "<". That actually makes it easier to spot a common org-mode mistake without having to call up the agenda.
I mean, are there really so many "pros" that need 18 streams of 8k video? Seriously? That's where all the money is? How does the market support so many "creative pros"?
Meanwhile, I know that Fusion 360 is going to suck as it always does, with its crappy slow graphics and clunky UI, and my docker containers will run dog slow.
I mean their bread and butter will still be the iphone and co, but I'm glad they seem to have moved away from min/maxing for whatever brings in the most money.
You could buy a 900$ laptop with a better CPU than any laptop out there. 20 hours battery life (almost 3x any other laptop out there). Silent (no fans). With a great screen, a great keyboard, lightweight, well built, etc.
Basically a machine that was more than 2x cheaper of competing laptops at 2500 $ or more, yet had more than 2x of everything.
I wish I could get back all the time I've wasted helping relatives deal with their Photos libraries and backups just because they got the entry level machine with skimpy storage...
As for storage, yeah 240gb is probably not ideal for most people but since I bought the air mostly as a lightweight device I can carry anywhere instead of a workstation (even though it's insanely powerful for what it is) it does not really matter in my case.
(This is my first Mac so I was very worried of the pretty limited ram since I had no idea how macOS deals with memory, but if it's fine for me I'd say it's fine for most normal/casual users)
The small SSD is the bigger issue. If you use it as your main machine you will fill it up quickly and people then start doing stupid things like putting their Photos library on a USB stick or on an SD card, and that's just asking for trouble.
Keep your daily driver lean and cheap (and easy to replace).
Maybe 240GB are enough for light usage if you store photos in the cloud. I can only say that in my experience 1TB is the bare minimum if I don't want to spend half my time copying files around.
"Optimize Storage" is a bandaid that helps make your Mac with too little storage usable. But it's not a great solution. You'll be looking at spinners a lot. It's just not a nice experience when every video you want to look at takes a few minutes to load.
It was a fantastic product launch sure but it's not really fair to say it was 2x better on all metrics at a given price.
Given the longevity and resale value, they make great machines.
A $2,000 machine to handle editing, processing and posting video ~content~ on YouTube.
You could have stopped at video content. Or just content. I don't see how the platform that serves and broadcasts said content is relevant to the value or performance of the device it's made on.
Almost. The hardware looks fantastic all-around. But the hostility to running an actually-usable OS like Linux is a huge stumbling block. Their users having to rely on the herculean efforts of the Asahi project, et. al, is shameful for the world's largest company.
If it wasn’t for Mac OS, and the fact that the alternatives suck more; I would have been gone last generation.
I also don't see how the size of a desktop computer matters, other than as a fashion statement.
Bravo Apple. I'd love to see what they have in store for designers and programmers next.