I Used the 'Cheapest' Mac Studio for 48 Hours!
The Author's Impression of the Mac Studio
I'm impressed enough to trust this to be my primary computer yet we'll probably have to make that decision in the one month later follow-up video. The author seems to have had a positive experience with the Mac Studio, and their impressions are reflected in their writing style.
One thing that the author likes is that the Bluetooth connection problems they experienced with their previous Mac Mini have been cleared up. This is a significant improvement, as many users, including the author themselves, have struggled with Bluetooth connectivity issues on these devices. The author mentions that this issue has been present since the Intel version of the Mac Mini and notes that it's not exclusive to the M1 chip.
The Author's Experience with Accessories
The next thing I absolutely love about the Studio is the upgraded i/O compared to the Mac Mini. Holy crap, talk about the perfect amount of connections! The author got the M1 Max variant, which will have slightly different i/O ports than the standard model. They appreciate having front-facing i/O, as it allows for a cleaner and more organized workspace without having to deal with cables. There's also an SD card reader on the front, which is a must-have for the author, as they're contractually obligated to use SD cards for their YouTube work.
The author highlights the importance of front-facing i/O and the convenience it brings. They also mention the availability of USB-A, Thunderbolt 4, 10 Gb Ethernet, HDMI, and an HD audio jack – a veritable treasure trove of ports that will help alleviate storage issues and provide ample connectivity options for external devices.
Building a Server for the Mac Studio
The author has spent the last few days building a server for this computer. If you'd like to see a video on that, let me know in the comments below. The author is enthusiastic about showcasing their technical skills and sharing their experiences with readers.
Quiet Operation: A Key Feature
I really like how quiet this computer is coming from the absolutely dead silent Mac Mini. I have a pretty high standard when it comes to computers, having owned my MacMini for over a year without hearing it make a peep. This has been tested by running Cinebench and doing video editing tasks, with no fan noise detected. The author appreciates the quiet operation of this computer, which is a must-have feature for them.
Aesthetics: A Matter of Personal Preference
The last thing I want to mention that I've liked in the past 48 hours of use is how aesthetically pleasing this computer is. Yes, I get it – everybody can say that's a total Apple fanboy thing to say, and I can hear everyone rolling their eyes from where I sit at my desk. But my other desk is already messy enough during a normal workday, so the Mac Studio fits in nicely as a compact and sleek addition.
The author concludes by inviting readers to check out more of their content in the sidebar below. They express gratitude for watching this video and look forward to sharing more thoughts on consumer technology with their audience.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enfor the past 48 hours i've been using the cheapest version of the brand new mac studio that is essentially ever since i went and picked it up from my local apple store and i took it on a little bit of a fun day out this has been plugged in and getting work done have you ever thought to yourself i wish i could get all of the power of the latest macbook but spend a thousand dollars less on it well good news because the mac studio is perfect for you this promises to be a mac mini but more so like a lot more so and you should know that i think the mac mini was and still is the best value computer ever made so if it's better in every way that makes this quite the intriguing computer you can't talk about the cheapest version of anything without starting straight up with the price now the reason i have this cheapest in quotes is because the base model of this computer comes in at 19.99 that's not cheap in any way shape or form but youtube's got a youtube right at that base model 1999 price you get the 10 core m1 max processor 24 core gpu 32 gigabytes of unified memory and a 512 gigabyte solid state drive personally pulling part of my recommendation at the end to the front of the video i think this is the single best spec of this computer if i were to have you do any sort of upgrades i would tell you to get one terabyte of storage for 200 bucks now that that sounds expensive but for the kind of solid-state drives that apple uses they use very high quality drives that's not the worst value however as we'll talk about here in a minute this computer has so much i o built right into it that rigging external storage won't be that cumbersome or that expensive but i know what you're thinking gary if that's the cheapest version of the computer what's the most expensive and who we are quite daring today aren't we team what i want you to do right now right now sit down because the next model is not for the faint of heart you can take this demure model that we discussed and take it all the way up to a 20 core m1 ultra processor with a 64 core gpu 128 gigabytes of unified memory and an 8 terabyte solid state drive okay this is the scary part hold my hand here we'll get through this together the price for that monster is seven thousand nine hundred and ninety nine dollars even though that's the second time i've said that for a video i'm not ready for it anytime that's an ex it's an expensive computer and it's hard to mentally prepare yourself for that for a computer that costs the same as a car but again listening to your thoughts through my camera well gary if the cheapest version is so good what makes it that way well okay okay let's back up a little bit team and let's start off with the things that i've disliked about the computer first now when it comes to things that i dislike it depends on which computer hat i'm wearing at any given time if i'm wearing my i just wanted more power than my mac mini hat then i would say i have not had a single problem with the mac studio it's essentially a perfected version of that mac mini for you know more money but if i'm wearing my i'm in the process of building a linux based server and i'm a serious computer user hat my hats look very similar this hat the biggest thing i don't like is that you have no way to upgrade the studio yourself yes i've seen the tear down videos and no just because there are potentially open slots inside of this doesn't mean that you can or should do this yourself the studio is designed to be a closed system and while i don't mind that as much on the mac mini it still bothered me but it wasn't as big of a deal for me because of the price and the size and i don't mind it on the macbook so much because there are a lot of high-end laptops these days that are moving towards soldering things down to make the computers smaller and more efficient but when it comes to a desktop computer especially one that costs two thousand dollars at the cheapest i find it hard to accept that i can't replace or upgrade even simple things like storage plus computers get dusty and the way this cooling system works is it pulls a ton of air from the bottom of the computer which then pushes out the bag which again is unique and it seems like this has a very good cooling system in it obviously i've only had this two days and not much dust has had a chance to collect in here but you know you could potentially be owning this computer for a very long time and that's a lot of stuff to get stuck in there secondly i don't like the base model storage on the studio 512 gigabytes is the 64 gigabyte equivalent from the ipad air for a computer it's a pretty strikingly low amount of storage especially again at 19.99 yes it's the same amount as on the base model macbook pro 14 which also cost 19.99 but i don't like it there either for 2 000 and on a high-end desktop computer the bare minimum especially since you can't internally upgrade this yourself should be one terabyte and bringing up the pc hat again i could easily manage and upgrade the storage on my pc in just a couple of minutes but besides those complaints there's not really anything else that i dislike about this computer i would go so far as to say that i was taken aback by how much i've enjoyed using this i never really thought that i was gonna hate it but i did think that i was going to find it boring however i no longer think that let's first talk about raw power because according to my twitter timeline that's literally the thing that gets people riled up the fastest as previously mentioned i've got the version with the m1 max processor and after running a few simple benchmarks like cinebench and a few video render tests so i've pushed both the gpu and the cpu i can safely say that this has essentially the same power as my m1 max macbook pro 16. and for comparison yes my ryzen 5950x 3080 ti build is still far more powerful in raw computing and raw graphical horsepower so yes we get it bar chart folks some computers make the bar chart go up higher nobody's arguing that however i think raw power is a pretty useless conversation to have because power is about context your personal needs will dictate what is actually more powerful than something else so in this video you will have to see this through my context sorry if you don't like that go make your own context video my context is i'm a daytime office worker and nighttime superhero youtuber or at least maybe that's how i see myself but power in my day job is something literally a tablet could and has figured out thanks samsung tab s8 fist bump power for that night job is all about graphical creation through tools like davinci resolve final cut pro and adobe photoshop and occasionally i'll do some light wow classic raiding which i have to i have to be careful about that or it will trap another four years of my life and i'll just have to throw that away if that's not for you great that's fine not everybody is a youtuber but that's my context and it's my video here's where it gets interesting for me apps that have fully transitioned over to the armbase system used by apple are far more powerful than they have any right to be we remember that number chart from a few seconds ago right well when put into practice rendering out a video from davinci resolve which is my preferred video editor the m1 max max studio is almost two times faster than that monster pc and that monster pc is drawing a ton more power seriously i was taken back a bit by this because i know resolve has been optimized for m1 mac i just hadn't realized how optimized it had become because that's fantastic maybe i have a setting off in the pc version but i've got it defaulted to using nvidia cuda cores for the render and it's using a ton of graphical horsepower while under load so that's pretty crazy plus in doing that wow classic i was able to attend a light raid last night and i'm able to max out the graphics and have not a single slowdown or dropped frames now that's not running crysis or cyberpunk but it's still pretty darn good and that's enough for me the next thing that i've liked is how surprisingly smooth and snappy the operating system feels the reason i'm saying surprisingly is i've not had a great time with mac os monterey so far in its release cycle you've heard me complain in these videos and there's a reason that i typed this script and have been doing all of my work from that desktop pc which is on the other side of that wall but in using the studio some of those websites that used to give me problems on my macbook pro 16 they work really well things like realtor.com or twitter they are now very smooth and i don't know why this is maybe there was some subtle update to monterey maybe i have a bad macbook pro 16. but this is working far better more often and i'm impressed i don't know if i'm impressed enough to trust this to be my primary computer yet we'll probably have to make that decision in the one month later follow-up video the next thing i've liked is they also seem to have cleared up some bluetooth connection problems compared to the mac mini and i know a lot of folks including myself from time to time have had issues with bluetooth mice and keyboards on those mac minis apparently it's something to do with the shell of the device and has been a problem since the days of the intel version of that computer it's not just an m1 issue i've spent my entire time with the studio so far using a little microsoft reclaim ocean plastic bluetooth mouse that you might have recognized from a previous video i haven't had a single connection issue playing games or doing my work so i'm very optimistic that this is going to hold up talking about accessories and i o support the next thing i absolutely love about the studio is the upgraded i o compared to the mac mini holy crap talk about the perfect amount of connections i got the m1 max variant so it will be slightly different in that the front-facing i o will get a little different connections but i love there's front-facing i o so you don't have to plug stuff into the back and then pull it around breaking the nice blocky aesthetic and there is an sd card reader on the front which practically pays for itself because i'm a youtuber and i am contractually obligated by google to only use sd cards in everything and i have to call it the most important feature of any device ever that's hey i saw i don't make the rules but seriously though i love having front i o plus on the back we get usb-a which thank you apple thank you so much seriously because keyboards and mice still use usb-a and having that built-in standard just makes my life so much easier there's also thunderbolt 4 10 gigabit ethernet hdmi and a headphone jack chefs kiss perfection on a set of inputs now those inputs will help allay that storage problem that we talked about earlier by allowing for a bunch of connections do you want to connect to a network drive 10 gigabit ethernet do you want to connect to a thunderbolt drive tons of thunderbolt ports it's incredible and yes i've spent the last days building a server for this computer if you'd like to see a video on that let me know in the comments below and another thing about these ports is this will give a lot more external display support as opposed to mac mini the mac mini could only do a 6k out from the thunderbolt 3 and a 4k from the hdmi the mac studio does so much more so wallow monitors it's back on the table i also really like how quiet this computer is coming from the absolutely dead silent mac mini which i don't know that i've heard it make a noise in the over year i've owned it i have a pretty high standard coming to any computer because of that mac mini and this has the processor from my macbook and my macbook will turn the fans on when i'm video editing or while i'm playing wow yes it's bigger yes there's gigantic fans in here so i thought we'd hear something i haven't heard anything yet it hasn't made a peep when i was running cinebench it hasn't made a peep when i was doing all the video editing tests and it hasn't made a peep peeling a two-hour carazon run on my resto druid this thing i guess it has fans after the m1s were released i've become obsessed with quiet running computers and i am a huge fan of how this computer houses such a fantastically powerful chip in a comparatively small body and does not add to my office's noise level and the last thing i want to mention that i've liked in the past 48 hours of use is how aesthetically pleasing this computer is yes i get it everybody in the comments you can say that's a total apple fanboy thing to say and i can hear everybody rolling their eyes from where i sit at my desk but my other desk is already messy enough during a normal work day it's got notebooks papers sd cards just random junk it's a mess all over the place and i like that the mac studio is small enough and compact enough that it easily fits in a corner and it does not add to my problems it does all those things we already talked about but it's so nice compact and it takes up literally 1 6 of the space of my normal desktop computer and if you like this video and you want to see some more of my thoughts on consumer technology go ahead and find one of my videos in the sidebar over here go ahead and click on those and it will be a great and wonderful time click click click click click click click thanks for watchingfor the past 48 hours i've been using the cheapest version of the brand new mac studio that is essentially ever since i went and picked it up from my local apple store and i took it on a little bit of a fun day out this has been plugged in and getting work done have you ever thought to yourself i wish i could get all of the power of the latest macbook but spend a thousand dollars less on it well good news because the mac studio is perfect for you this promises to be a mac mini but more so like a lot more so and you should know that i think the mac mini was and still is the best value computer ever made so if it's better in every way that makes this quite the intriguing computer you can't talk about the cheapest version of anything without starting straight up with the price now the reason i have this cheapest in quotes is because the base model of this computer comes in at 19.99 that's not cheap in any way shape or form but youtube's got a youtube right at that base model 1999 price you get the 10 core m1 max processor 24 core gpu 32 gigabytes of unified memory and a 512 gigabyte solid state drive personally pulling part of my recommendation at the end to the front of the video i think this is the single best spec of this computer if i were to have you do any sort of upgrades i would tell you to get one terabyte of storage for 200 bucks now that that sounds expensive but for the kind of solid-state drives that apple uses they use very high quality drives that's not the worst value however as we'll talk about here in a minute this computer has so much i o built right into it that rigging external storage won't be that cumbersome or that expensive but i know what you're thinking gary if that's the cheapest version of the computer what's the most expensive and who we are quite daring today aren't we team what i want you to do right now right now sit down because the next model is not for the faint of heart you can take this demure model that we discussed and take it all the way up to a 20 core m1 ultra processor with a 64 core gpu 128 gigabytes of unified memory and an 8 terabyte solid state drive okay this is the scary part hold my hand here we'll get through this together the price for that monster is seven thousand nine hundred and ninety nine dollars even though that's the second time i've said that for a video i'm not ready for it anytime that's an ex it's an expensive computer and it's hard to mentally prepare yourself for that for a computer that costs the same as a car but again listening to your thoughts through my camera well gary if the cheapest version is so good what makes it that way well okay okay let's back up a little bit team and let's start off with the things that i've disliked about the computer first now when it comes to things that i dislike it depends on which computer hat i'm wearing at any given time if i'm wearing my i just wanted more power than my mac mini hat then i would say i have not had a single problem with the mac studio it's essentially a perfected version of that mac mini for you know more money but if i'm wearing my i'm in the process of building a linux based server and i'm a serious computer user hat my hats look very similar this hat the biggest thing i don't like is that you have no way to upgrade the studio yourself yes i've seen the tear down videos and no just because there are potentially open slots inside of this doesn't mean that you can or should do this yourself the studio is designed to be a closed system and while i don't mind that as much on the mac mini it still bothered me but it wasn't as big of a deal for me because of the price and the size and i don't mind it on the macbook so much because there are a lot of high-end laptops these days that are moving towards soldering things down to make the computers smaller and more efficient but when it comes to a desktop computer especially one that costs two thousand dollars at the cheapest i find it hard to accept that i can't replace or upgrade even simple things like storage plus computers get dusty and the way this cooling system works is it pulls a ton of air from the bottom of the computer which then pushes out the bag which again is unique and it seems like this has a very good cooling system in it obviously i've only had this two days and not much dust has had a chance to collect in here but you know you could potentially be owning this computer for a very long time and that's a lot of stuff to get stuck in there secondly i don't like the base model storage on the studio 512 gigabytes is the 64 gigabyte equivalent from the ipad air for a computer it's a pretty strikingly low amount of storage especially again at 19.99 yes it's the same amount as on the base model macbook pro 14 which also cost 19.99 but i don't like it there either for 2 000 and on a high-end desktop computer the bare minimum especially since you can't internally upgrade this yourself should be one terabyte and bringing up the pc hat again i could easily manage and upgrade the storage on my pc in just a couple of minutes but besides those complaints there's not really anything else that i dislike about this computer i would go so far as to say that i was taken aback by how much i've enjoyed using this i never really thought that i was gonna hate it but i did think that i was going to find it boring however i no longer think that let's first talk about raw power because according to my twitter timeline that's literally the thing that gets people riled up the fastest as previously mentioned i've got the version with the m1 max processor and after running a few simple benchmarks like cinebench and a few video render tests so i've pushed both the gpu and the cpu i can safely say that this has essentially the same power as my m1 max macbook pro 16. and for comparison yes my ryzen 5950x 3080 ti build is still far more powerful in raw computing and raw graphical horsepower so yes we get it bar chart folks some computers make the bar chart go up higher nobody's arguing that however i think raw power is a pretty useless conversation to have because power is about context your personal needs will dictate what is actually more powerful than something else so in this video you will have to see this through my context sorry if you don't like that go make your own context video my context is i'm a daytime office worker and nighttime superhero youtuber or at least maybe that's how i see myself but power in my day job is something literally a tablet could and has figured out thanks samsung tab s8 fist bump power for that night job is all about graphical creation through tools like davinci resolve final cut pro and adobe photoshop and occasionally i'll do some light wow classic raiding which i have to i have to be careful about that or it will trap another four years of my life and i'll just have to throw that away if that's not for you great that's fine not everybody is a youtuber but that's my context and it's my video here's where it gets interesting for me apps that have fully transitioned over to the armbase system used by apple are far more powerful than they have any right to be we remember that number chart from a few seconds ago right well when put into practice rendering out a video from davinci resolve which is my preferred video editor the m1 max max studio is almost two times faster than that monster pc and that monster pc is drawing a ton more power seriously i was taken back a bit by this because i know resolve has been optimized for m1 mac i just hadn't realized how optimized it had become because that's fantastic maybe i have a setting off in the pc version but i've got it defaulted to using nvidia cuda cores for the render and it's using a ton of graphical horsepower while under load so that's pretty crazy plus in doing that wow classic i was able to attend a light raid last night and i'm able to max out the graphics and have not a single slowdown or dropped frames now that's not running crysis or cyberpunk but it's still pretty darn good and that's enough for me the next thing that i've liked is how surprisingly smooth and snappy the operating system feels the reason i'm saying surprisingly is i've not had a great time with mac os monterey so far in its release cycle you've heard me complain in these videos and there's a reason that i typed this script and have been doing all of my work from that desktop pc which is on the other side of that wall but in using the studio some of those websites that used to give me problems on my macbook pro 16 they work really well things like realtor.com or twitter they are now very smooth and i don't know why this is maybe there was some subtle update to monterey maybe i have a bad macbook pro 16. but this is working far better more often and i'm impressed i don't know if i'm impressed enough to trust this to be my primary computer yet we'll probably have to make that decision in the one month later follow-up video the next thing i've liked is they also seem to have cleared up some bluetooth connection problems compared to the mac mini and i know a lot of folks including myself from time to time have had issues with bluetooth mice and keyboards on those mac minis apparently it's something to do with the shell of the device and has been a problem since the days of the intel version of that computer it's not just an m1 issue i've spent my entire time with the studio so far using a little microsoft reclaim ocean plastic bluetooth mouse that you might have recognized from a previous video i haven't had a single connection issue playing games or doing my work so i'm very optimistic that this is going to hold up talking about accessories and i o support the next thing i absolutely love about the studio is the upgraded i o compared to the mac mini holy crap talk about the perfect amount of connections i got the m1 max variant so it will be slightly different in that the front-facing i o will get a little different connections but i love there's front-facing i o so you don't have to plug stuff into the back and then pull it around breaking the nice blocky aesthetic and there is an sd card reader on the front which practically pays for itself because i'm a youtuber and i am contractually obligated by google to only use sd cards in everything and i have to call it the most important feature of any device ever that's hey i saw i don't make the rules but seriously though i love having front i o plus on the back we get usb-a which thank you apple thank you so much seriously because keyboards and mice still use usb-a and having that built-in standard just makes my life so much easier there's also thunderbolt 4 10 gigabit ethernet hdmi and a headphone jack chefs kiss perfection on a set of inputs now those inputs will help allay that storage problem that we talked about earlier by allowing for a bunch of connections do you want to connect to a network drive 10 gigabit ethernet do you want to connect to a thunderbolt drive tons of thunderbolt ports it's incredible and yes i've spent the last days building a server for this computer if you'd like to see a video on that let me know in the comments below and another thing about these ports is this will give a lot more external display support as opposed to mac mini the mac mini could only do a 6k out from the thunderbolt 3 and a 4k from the hdmi the mac studio does so much more so wallow monitors it's back on the table i also really like how quiet this computer is coming from the absolutely dead silent mac mini which i don't know that i've heard it make a noise in the over year i've owned it i have a pretty high standard coming to any computer because of that mac mini and this has the processor from my macbook and my macbook will turn the fans on when i'm video editing or while i'm playing wow yes it's bigger yes there's gigantic fans in here so i thought we'd hear something i haven't heard anything yet it hasn't made a peep when i was running cinebench it hasn't made a peep when i was doing all the video editing tests and it hasn't made a peep peeling a two-hour carazon run on my resto druid this thing i guess it has fans after the m1s were released i've become obsessed with quiet running computers and i am a huge fan of how this computer houses such a fantastically powerful chip in a comparatively small body and does not add to my office's noise level and the last thing i want to mention that i've liked in the past 48 hours of use is how aesthetically pleasing this computer is yes i get it everybody in the comments you can say that's a total apple fanboy thing to say and i can hear everybody rolling their eyes from where i sit at my desk but my other desk is already messy enough during a normal work day it's got notebooks papers sd cards just random junk it's a mess all over the place and i like that the mac studio is small enough and compact enough that it easily fits in a corner and it does not add to my problems it does all those things we already talked about but it's so nice compact and it takes up literally 1 6 of the space of my normal desktop computer and if you like this video and you want to see some more of my thoughts on consumer technology go ahead and find one of my videos in the sidebar over here go ahead and click on those and it will be a great and wonderful time click click click click click click click thanks for watching\n"