$8k for 128GB RAM, 8 TB solid state storage and 22 trillion ops/sec isn't exactly a bargain.

I do however image that the performance per watt will be really good.

Try and price out a PC with those specs, it will come in around $6k minimum, but much more power intensive and very very loud

High performance PC can't be too laud unless you designed as loud, but can be too big.

If you packed those specs in to something twice the size of the mac studio it would sound like a loaded up server rack on your desk. Yes you can get absolutely massive coolers which are quiet but nothing nearly as portable as this.

Do you have a reference on how quiet these are? I mean it’s fantastic if true but half the reason my MBP gathers dust is the noise under load compared to my (almost) silent 5950x under load. But yes it’s a big box that I have no intention of moving.

Yes, the tradeoff won't chosen.

What’s wrong with loud computers? You can have it die quick on you or you can have it loud. I prefer to keep machines in better shapes for longer.

For one thing, they're no good in a recording studio.

Don’t feed the “but I can build a pc for less” crowd. They can’t see the apples to oranges comparison they’re making: a Mac is not a PC. They have different use-cases and run different software.

This thread started with a comparison to PCs... I mean I assume, since no competitor is putting out Macs...

> That's kinda crazy, and they're doing it at a price point that's competitive compared to all of the companies out there.

The end users doesn't care about the reasons, the internal debates at apple that lead to them making a computer that's slower and more expensive, or what marketing spin they put on it .

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.

> 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.

> They have different use-cases ...

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".

You definitely shouldn't buy a $4000 computer if your only workload is web browsing.

If people listened to that advice Apple's stock price would be cut in half. 99% of Mac users can get along fine with the base m1 models.

I'v seen (more than once) Apple Store employees push people away from higher-end devices, or from buying devices altogether (happened with me) when they didn't think the bigger sticker price would serve the customer well, so at least apple is happy to give that same advice to their own customers.

I have seen this too. A woman wanted to buy an iMac Pro and after the sales guy heard her use case he kept saying the regular iMac was more than enough. She ended up getting that instead.

That may be because they don't carry most upgraded models and they want to push stock on hand.

pretty sure apple lives and dies by their iPhone sales. Sure, they sell a ton of computers, but it's nothing compared to their phone revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if there were activist investors who think they should drop the personal computer/laptop product lineup entirely

This would likely also affect their iPhone sales, so pretty bad plan.

Professionals are highly paid because of the tools they know. A Final Cut Pro pro isn’t going to switch to an off the shelf Linux or windows workstation and learn a whole new paradigm just because it’s cheaper. What I’m saying is the Mac platform is o be seen as a whole since some popular and useful Mac software like Final Cut isn’t 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

I dabble in video editing and it seems most people work with Adobe Premiere Pro or Davinci Resolve. FCP has not been getting the love from Apple that it used to get. Same with Aperture vs Lightroom. I could be wrong though, but many people seem to be using cross-platform software on Macs, much more than a decade or two ago when it really was two different worlds.

You dabble. Pros are beholden to their tools. Some are experts at Premiere and others at FCP. Some even migrate to and fro but the mac has enough inertia here that they’ll still have the market enough to justify these insane chips and computers even if they are not pushing the software as hard as they are the hardware.

> $8k for 128GB RAM, 8 TB solid state storage

Maybe not, but 32GB RAM + 512GB SSD for $2k is a pretty competitive price point.

a 512 gb ssd is kinda inexcusable in a machine that costs more than $1000 1tb of ssd is only around $100.

It's a bit miserly, to say the least

But ssd is not 100 usd gumstick from of the shelf it’s integrated and sports speeds of 7.4GB/s at the top end. Shrug

No, it's a $200-400 gumstick that you can get off the shelf

https://www.newegg.com/seagate-2tb-firecuda-530/p/N82E168202...

The Apple upgrade cost to 1TB is also $200.

Right, but the link was for 2TB at the same speed, and it's a $600 upgrade for 2TB from 512, which means literally $800 for 2TB in total, plus tax! To be fair, it is likely higher quality, more efficient maybe, but I just think it's quite a reach to charge $800 USD for 2TB of storage that's not uniquely fast or anything. If you think that's a good value, it certainly might be depending on your work, but it would be twice as good value if it wasn't twice the price as off-the-shelf.

That gumstick can be replaced in two minutes with a single screw if and when it goes bad. As opposed to spending your day at the Genius Bar. I like Apple stuff but let's not make specious comparisons. Unless you think Apple SSDs are magic and can never go bad just because they are soldered in.

A terabyte of dead-slow and flaky SSD costs a hundred bucks, sure. But it doesn't matter much because, in the kinds of professional workflows this machine is targeting, local storage is more like swap space than anything. It needs to be fast more than it needs to be big.

A 1TB Samsung 980 Pro is $150 retail and arguably overpriced. 512GB in a $2000 computer is a joke in 2022.

You're forgetting Apple sources their SSDs from the same merchant that sold Jack the magic beanstalk beans. Or they just get generic chips from Hynix. One of those.

>arguably overpriced

Find me a 1TB SSD that perform as fast as Samsung 980 Pro and is much cheaper. Say under $125.

$600 extra for a 2tb drive. So they're just giving them away now? /s

it's there for framing, solely to push you to the next tier

Not at all. You could buy 32GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe drive for a couple hundred dollars.

That’s less than my 2019-ish desktop, and I don’t remember paying that much for it.

Depends on what we're comparing, an average 20-core Dell Precision workstation costs about $10k.

I think you would struggle, TBH. The m1 ultra will likely have geekbench scores equal to the 3990x ($5k). The gpu (based on double performance of the max) should be something similar to an RTX 3070 ($1k). 128GB RAM is going to set you back another $1k. 8TB of storage will be another $1k.

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.

If one is only interested in single core performance, the M1 Ultra doesn't offer anything significant from the M1 Pro/Max, AMD, or Intel CPUs.

> I think they're blowing all their competitors out of the water with the price point.

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.

And you can tell because they were marketing their products in relation to older Apple products rather than other manufacturers.