> What would be more interesting is to see how Nvidia's laptop cards fare here though - they're constrained to much lower wattage (80-120w) and would make for a much fairer fight against the ~200w M2 Ultra.

Doesn't look like Apple offers Ultra in a laptop - just the Basic, Pro, and Max.

It's interesting. I assumed at least their power consumption should have been much better/lower than an avg orthodox desktop setup of current days.

It's not unreasonably high for a TDP, and the idle consumption of ARM is de-facto lower than power an x86 package.

That being said, it's pretty obvious that Apple's mobile-style solution isn't really working out on the desktop side of things. The new iMac feels starkly pedestrian compared to the old ones, and the Mac Mini/Studio are both neat but not unprecedented. The M2 Ultra represents a lot of engineering effort going into flipping that status quo, but its still slipping behind by a considerable margin. Don't forget that a second "Ultra" style SOC with 4x M1 Maxes was supposedly cancelled for drawing too much power and being too hot. It's just not effective or efficient to force that much silicon that close together.

A decent 4090 GPU alone is over $3000 in Australia - that’s half the price of a Mac Studio with Ultra - just for the GPU.

Then you’d be looking for a 24 core CPU, 64GB RAM, 1TB PCIe 5 SSD, mainboard with 6x thunderbolt ports, a silent cooling setup, high quality case that is both small and all the gear while running cool. and if you’re stuck with MS Windows - an Operating System.

Yeah, you gotta pay a premium if you want the highest performance on the market. If you're just looking to match the GPU performance of the M2 Ultra though, there are several gaming laptops that will run circles around it in Blender. Many are cheaper than the base model Mac Studio.