Apple Announces M1 Ultra CPU, Mac Studio and Studio Display

[Middleman]

Good points, well made.

And perhaps now people could stop blaming Apple for switching architectures, and instead blame Intel for sitting smugly on their laurels for too long!

Hackintoshing has been great for many years, well 17 I think. The chances of macOS ever being released as a stand-alone product now have diminished even further...

And a good 17 years indeed it has been! I guess one of the most compelling reasons for us building the hackintoshes aside from lowering costs has been the sheer convenience of upgradeability and the replacing of parts.

I've just gone and upgraded my Acer Nitro 5 laptop NVMe today to a beefy 2TB drive. Throughout the course of its life since it was bought in 2019, it has probably been upgraded around 4 times, 3 times being the hard drives being upgraded or swapped and the other being memory. Nothing else could be said the same about your typical Mac product these days, where you are locked into your hardware spec from purchase and paying through the nose for accessories, upgrades, servicing and storage. I guess that is something I'll miss if/when Mac fully transitions to Apple Silicon.

 

[craighazan]

Has the ‘Studio’ signalled the end of hackintosh?. It’s far to much power for my use and I’m happy with my M1 MBA. But I can’t imagine not tinkering and building a hack, just for the sake of building one. Until big games start appearing on the studio, (I don’t think so), I’m sticking with my hacks.

 

[CaseySJ]

Has the ‘Studio’ signalled the end of hackintosh?. It’s far to much power for my use and I’m happy with my M1 MBA. But I can’t imagine not tinkering and building a hack, just for the sake of building one. Until big games start appearing on the studio, (I don’t think so), I’m sticking with my hacks.

Here’s one perspective:

 

[scottkendall]

I have the same configuration in estimate but here in France update from 32 to 64go postpones the delivery in June!!
The other options are available in April...
Is the passage from 32 to 64 imperative to make audio ?

The Apple consultant was unable to give me the power consumption of the M1 Max vs M1 Ultra ?!..

View attachment 543762

It depends on how manny tracks, plug-in you are working with. More tracks and more plug-in will require more memory. That said how much memory do you and how much do you use now?

 

[vlad1966]

Does AppleCare Cover SSD's? So for example, If I got a Mac Studio & wrote/deleted tons of files over the span of 2 years & after 24 months the SSD dies/was no longer good, would Apple still replace the Mac Studio? Or would they consider it "normal wear/tear" like a car's brake pads & not cover it?

 

[trs96]

If I got a Mac Studio & wrote/deleted tons of files over the span of 2 years & after 24 months the SSD dies/was no longer good, would Apple still replace the Mac Studio? Or would they consider it "normal wear/tear"

It would be rather difficult to wear out a high quality NVMe drive in just two short years. It may be possible but I doubt that you could do it. Even writing data constantly for two years. A good quality pro grade 1TB NVMe drive should easily let you write a Petabyte or more of data to it. Even some very small, older Sata SSDs have shown they can do that. Here's a summary of an 18 month long experiment.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve watched modern SSDs easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need. Errors didn’t strike the Samsung 840 Series until after 300TB of writes, and it took over 700TB to induce the first failures. The fact that the 840 Pro exceeded 2.4PB is nothing short of amazing, even if that achievement is also kind of academic.

The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead

techreport.com

If you sign up for two years or more of Apple Care, yes, they would replace it. Since it's soldered on to the logic board, they would possibly replace just that logic board. A new Mac Studio costs a lot more than just the board in it. Depends on whether the store you go to has techs trained in swapping the board out or not.

 

[Going Bald]

I feel the Mac Studios are the best Mac bargains since the MacPro3,1.

Agreed. Now if they would just allow RAM and storage upgrades rather than soldering them on the logic board I would buy one in a heartbeat.

 

[robomartion]

Has the ‘Studio’ signalled the end of hackintosh?. It’s far to much power for my use and I’m happy with my M1 MBA. But I can’t imagine not tinkering and building a hack, just for the sake of building one. Until big games start appearing on the studio, (I don’t think so), I’m sticking with my hacks.

I still think the biggest thing Hackintosh has going for it is storage. Apple charges 3 to 5x the price for SSDs and a Hackintosh's storage is infinitely expandable. Outside of ProRes encoding a Hackintosh still gives you equivalent performance for half the price which is pretty much how its always been. I think if you're doing any sort of 3D work, a M1 Ultra is not good value at all, especially if you're using Blender which is heavily optimized for Nvidia, but for video editing, especially with ProRes in FCPX the base Mac Studio is basically going to be unbeatable.

 

[astrobruin]

Umm...I think you've probably underestimated how productive some of the newer systems are.

At one time I too had thought my Z270 Prime A was good enough for our work. Yet when it was replaced with a Ryzen 5900X we saw how big of a difference it made (Z270 was rather slow). Then when that too was replaced with the new Alder Lake, I realised performance of systems can now change dramatically between each year. Even though you thought they wouldn't change that much say 1-2 years, the performance jump between them is exponential. To give an example, if Z270 was the base line speed, the Ryzen 5900X and Alder Lake 12900K would be roughly 4x-5x faster in equivalent terms, (although Alder Lake runs macOS far smoother than Ryzen, and just a little bit quicker). In fact that is how Intel chips are developed and made. Between every Tick and Tock, the chip gets a roughly 2x jump in performance at the end of it. So the Alder Lake Z690 is now my office's main hackintosh workhorse until the foreseeable future.

It may not be for you, but for a business, those differences of not having to wait between seconds can really be the difference of how well a business like ours can perform and succeed. When you are having to edit and retouch certain numbers of files each day, each ranging anything from 500MB to 8GB in size (with multiple layers in between), the seconds count. When you are trying to add or change an effect on those layers, that is additional processing time. If you don't have an adequate IO subsystem for that (which the newer systems have) you simply cannot do the job properly.

The upgrades are in some ways a necessity if you are a working professional. A good friend of mine is a case in example. He's been working as a photographer for well over a decade, often shooting high end commercial work. When his business declined he moved onto making videos shooting 4K and drone videos. But it was taking a toll on his setup which was a 2015 Macbook Pro. The thing was always getting heated up and maxed out crunching files.
A Mac Studio or M1 Max Macbook Pro would probably be something that best suits such needs.

But the biggest question for us photo imaging users is not 'If I can do this with my hackintosh', but when Apple macOS Intel chip support will cease. When that happens you might see problems pop up on the Adobe platform for current Intel Mac users. And when that happens you'll wonder why you didn't upgrade to a real Mac earlier.

Simply put it is totally worthwhile to upgrade.

All good points. As you say, if I upgraded, I'm confident I'd enjoy improvements in speed and (more generally) have a better overall experience in the MacOS environment.

Because I'm not using my computer professionally (for photography), it's little harder to weigh the cost/benefit vs. fun/novelty factor. Had there been an M1 iMac 27" starting around ~$2000, I would have already ordered.

Instead, for (nearly) the same level of integration, the starting point is ~$3600, and easily over $4k for more future-proof specs.

I'm pretty sure it will be noticeably faster for 80%-90% of my use cases. But for that price, I'd also want to see a "wow" improvement with gaming (even though that's a low priority). And that remains to be seen.

So I'll probably wait a few more weeks to see more real world, side by side comparisons, to get a clearer picture - just to be sure.

Thank you again for your input. It really does help to hear different and informed perspectives on these kinds of decisions. I'm I'm sure others will also benefit for your thoughtful replies, too.

 

[sparkyboy767]

Has the ‘Studio’ signalled the end of hackintosh?. It’s far to much power for my use and I’m happy with my M1 MBA. But I can’t imagine not tinkering and building a hack, just for the sake of building one. Until big games start appearing on the studio, (I don’t think so), I’m sticking with my hacks.

Apple Silicon signalled the end of hackintosh, but I think the Studio will accelerate its demise.

As a video editor, I don't think I would bother with a Hack again. My 2019 Hack will probably last me another few years, and then I'll switch to the studio. The price to performance gulf has narrowed considerably, especially with GPU prices where they are. And with limited time remaining on support for Intel devices, it's just not worth the investment any more. Also, with work from home now the norm, the portability of the Studio is appealing - allowing me to easily move my edit suite wherever I go. Moving my big ass tower is a PIA.