You can do MADI and Dante over thunderbolt or ethernet, and with the amount of compute UAD DSP days are definitely numbered (as shown by UA themselves now offering native). I don't see audio as a driver, given what I can do as a composer/producer on my laptop (m1pro)

For sure — the convergence towards Ethernet based AV protocols (esp. in broadcast) seems like it has a promising future (as we’ve seen with Dante), possibly for video too (SMPTE 2110, etc).

But we’re not quite there yet.

I'm not sure how you'd replace a decklink card with ethernet. The bandwidth just isn't there. Same issue with the TB ports, there's not nearly enough bandwidth for pro AV.

The question is how many of those cards that would work as a USB-C or Thunderbolt-4 box (or maybe even 10G ethernet).

At least all the audio cards should be doable as external boxes.

That's the situation AV pros were in during the Trashcan era and they hated it.

The TrashCan is 10 years old. It had only Thunderbolt 2 and gigabit ethernet.

We've also got USB-C in the meantime, including a lot of USB-C displays.

So I think this is a case of "too early". The market looks very different today at how fast external communication is.

I'd say that MacStudio is really todays TrashCan. Much better timing, so much better success.

USB-C displays only use the connector, the traffic then goes over alternate mode, mostly DisplayPort. For 4k@60, unless both devices support DP 1.4, then both USB3 pairs are used for DP and there's no wiring left for USB3, only for USB2.

It is almost the reverse of TB1/TB2, when a mini-DisplayPort connector was used to negotiate TB.

I know this is a meme, but if you're using these aren't you better off with a Windows/Linux box? You can shove an actual modern GPU in there as well and get considerably more peformance.

I struggle to think of workflows that require macOS for this, given it has conceeded the high end of performance to others.

The niche killer feature is the 800GB/s SSD ...so long as you only need 8TB.

You can't match that speed with nvme. Samsung 990 Pro only gets 7.3 GB/s sequential read.

You seem to be confusing RAM with SSD. Apple's SSD is nothing special.

The latest MKBHD video on this is interesting. You’re paying $3K for the Max Pro to have the PCIe ports. Almost the only difference per the Mac Studio.

Thunderbolt 4 can do 40Gb/s, many of these cards would work fine with an external PCIe enclosure.

Only the the highest bandwidth cards, like certain NVMe SSD's, and network cards, need a full bandwidth slot.