The Mac Studio is a small rectangular box that can fit in a backpack, which might not be the most exciting aspect of it, but its size does offer a certain convenience. You can take it home into the office, drop it on someone else's desk and just plug it in, or put it in a backpack for travel. Although, Apple probably won't release a little square sling bag or travel case for this, and they might charge around $500 for one.
Now let's talk about money because I think the entry-level base model of this is actually not bad value for two grand. You get an M1 Max with 512 storage and 32 gigs of unified memory, which is a lot of money but similarly specced MacBooks Pro 14 would set you back $2800 although, of course, you do get a nice screen keyboard touchpad, it's a laptop but if you need M1 Max level performance I think that base model is ideal although maybe up the storage to one terabyte as nothing in here is upgradable. You can add an extra eight GPU cores for $200 if you like but the jump to the M1 Ultra is not just this whopping $1400 pounds it says here, but it also insists that you have 64 gigs of memory and one terabyte of storage so the minimum an M1 Ultra Mac Studio will cost is four grand.
One thing I actually didn't realize until I've been using this for a while is that it has built-in speakers. I've obviously been using this Studio Display most of the time but you can see if I go to the sound settings we have the Mac Studio speakers which come out the back they're terrible but they're useful for just basic use of, you know when you're first setting it up or if you haven't got anything else ideally you'd want to use a proper setup. The lower right of the camera module like this Display holding your phone like this there's a bit more room for your index finger without it going over the camera module so should you buy it well no 99 of people know that is what the Mac Mini is for with the M1 chip which is still very capable and for about $700 quid that is for most people but then as it says on the tin this is the Mac Studio it is meant for professionals designers render reverberators most professionals and businesses will be paying for this on their company credit card and then having the tax write-off as it's a business asset.
But on the flip side as I say I am a bit worried about how this will compare with the Mac Pro, I think it might be worth waiting and seeing don't forget though that you are literally just buying this box which also comes with a power cable nothing else so you will need a monitor it doesn't have to be this one but maybe this one and of course keyboards and track pads Apple actually sent over their new black and silver keyboard, the is the Touch ID model and also the very nice matte black surface Touchpad and of course the Magic Mouse which still has that ridiculous underneath underneath lightning charger no actual design changes just a fancy new color.
Let's wrap up and we have a lovely design all the ports you'd need incredible performance especially with the Ultra but even the Max is beyond pretty much everything else out there it also uses significantly less power than an equivalent Windows desktop with a high-end GPU plus it stays cool and quiet and actually I don't think the base model is terrible value for money downsides well it can get very expensive especially with the Ultra there's also no upgradability at all still I've got to say I am blown away by this coming from the old Intel and AMD powered Mac of the past with their Jet Engine fans and overheating and throttling issues where it always made sense to go for a Windows desktop PC where you can obviously upgrade it and buy the components yourself these days with the component shortages how expensive GPUs are and also just the optimizations of the software hardware their own architecture all in this form factor it's just a kind of beautiful harmony and I would recommend it if you are on the lookout for a well studio high-performance compact Mac but what do you reckon would you be tempted to buy one of these or not let me know what you make of it in the comments below and if you did enjoy this video a like and a subscribe would be very much appreciated and stay tuned for my full review of this and also my upcoming comparisons between this and the Max version and also this and my desktop gaming PC thank you so much for watching guys
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall right i think we're set hey guys antonio techchap and this is it the brand new mac studio and it's essentially a mac mini but on steroids it's not very often apple introduces a whole new product range and this kind of fills the gap between a mac mini or maybe an imac and a mac pro desktop and it is simply stunning it really is they've kind of reinvented what a desktop pc can be or at least what it looks like and while i know there's going to be a lot of eye rolling as tech reviewers drool over the new apple products i get it i do and while this does actually pose a bit of a dilemma which i'll come back to in a second right now if you want the most powerful mac you can buy but also happens to be in a pretty compact box that neatly fits under your monitor then this is it look at that clearance it's almost as if they knew what they were doing over apple this i should say is also the new studio display which is very nice but i will be doing a separate review on that but this video is all about the mac studio and you too can have this shiny aluminium box on your desk for the cool sum of 2 000 pounds which is actually the same in dollars although if you do want the m1 ultra version of this then well you can double that and design wise it looks very much like two mac minis on top of each other and actually feels incredibly dense there's also a genuinely impressive range of ports on this thing including thunderbolt 4 hdmi ethernet headphone jack even a couple of usb a ports and around the front we have two more usb cs although on the m1 ultra version they are also thunderbolt as well as a fast sd card reader which i found incredibly useful actually as i've edited this entire video on this mac studio the m1 max version of this weighs 2.7 kilograms whereas the m1 ultra for some reason actually weighs 3.6 kilograms in fact the extra couple of pounds or 900 grams is due to the m1 ultra model having a larger copper thermal module versus the max's aluminium heat sink but surprisingly whether you go for the max or the ultra they're both rated at the same 370 watts which is actually about half what you'd expect from a modern windows desktop pc i genuinely don't know the answer to this but how can an m1 ultra version of this have the same max power draw as an m1 max version i mean the ultra is essentially two maxes super glued together it's a bit more complicated than that we'll come to in a second one theory i have is that perhaps they're under clocking the ultra a little bit to save some headroom for the upcoming mac pro which might come out later in the year it's absolutely insane the kind of performance we get from this in a form factor this size while only drawing a maximum of under 400 watts even more incredible is the fact that over there on my desktop pc where i have an rtx 3090 that thing under load actually takes more power about the same amount as this entire mac studio combined and that's before the processor and all the extras on the ssd and ram and all that business so this review model sent by apple has the m1 ultra as well as 128 gigs of unified memory and four terabytes of storage quite a beefy spec but let's talk about the m1 ultra for a second because as i say this is essentially two n1 maxes on the same chip and everything is doubled double the cpu and gpu cores double the neural engine cores also support for double the memory and also the media engine in the ultra has twice the power for encoding and giving you up to 18 8k pro as video streams simultaneously if you want so if you are thinking about buying one of these there's a few big questions firstly what's the difference between the max and the ultra of which i cannot tell you because i currently do not have an m1 max version of this but i have bought one myself and it should be coming soon so i'll be doing a separate versus video the second question is just how fast is this apple have some crazy claims about being up to three and a half times faster than an imac and twice as fast as a top spec mac pro in some situations so i'm gonna put this to the test and thirdly the big question should you actually buy it well to help answer that a little bit while as i say i don't have the m1 max studio i do have this it is the macbook pro 16 with the m1 max and while it is not a like for like comparison because this has double the memory 128 gigs versus 64. and also bear in mind that the max version of this will probably be faster than the max version of this because they don't have to you know cram it into a laptop chassis with all those constraints and also have it run off a battery but let's have a bit of fun with this comparing the fastest macbook pro 16 you can buy to the fastest max studio and in cinebench 23 we're looking at a 95 boost in multi-core that's nearly twice as fast although as you can see single core is actually the same so really the only cpu boost here comes down to having more cores but then jumping into a bit of blender the dedicated cpu test of this renders 30 faster on the mac studio whereas it's 83 faster in the gpu test which is huge but what about video editing well your mileage may vary depending on whether you read it in premiere davinci or file cut but to test it i ran the extended puget premiere pro benchmark which replicates a project with 4k and 8k footage it tests how fast the timeline is adding effects rendering all that good stuff now these results are interesting because the mac studio overall is 36 faster however when you break it down actually the effects and the gpu scores are 61 and 51 high respectively so really it's these graphically demanding tasks that are seeing the biggest benefit with the ultra so this is that puget test running now and i actually ran this a few times on both because i had some weird results particularly on the macbook pro 16. i actually found for some reason this was scoring roughly the same as this until i then broke it down it was actually the live playback score which seemed to be much higher on this and therefore across the average boosted the performance which i couldn't really understand what was this live playback why is this faster than that well it's the screen this is a 120 hertz pro motion screen whereas this studio display is still sadly 60 hertz so to remove that variable i switched this down to 60 hertz and then we had the results i showed you a second ago which make a lot more sense but it kind of raised an interesting point that yes playback is faster when you have a smoother 120 hertz refresh rate and so while again this is for a separate review video as nice as this is there are benefits to actually editing and working on a mac screen or on a high refresh external monitor anyway i digress let's jump over to adobe lightroom and in my test of exporting 500 raw photos taken on my sony a7s 3 to jpegs it took the macbook pro 2 minutes and 10 seconds versus just 1 minute 4 on the mac studio which is almost exactly half the time which considering it's a cpu intensive task makes sense considering we have twice the number of cores and finally while macs really aren't meant for gaming in shadow of the tomb raider maxed out at full hd we're looking at a slightly more modest but still impressive 35 boost so to the surprise of absolutely no one yes the m1 ultra in here is faster than the m1 max in here the true test will be a max versus a max which is to say i don't have just yet but it is interesting to see just how much of an upgrade we are seeing with that m1 ultra and also how well it's utilized and remarkably since most of this space inside is taken up by the cooling system and fans it is actually incredibly quiet during my test i heard it maybe once during the end of one of my benchmarks and that was barely audible whereas the macbook pro 16 which itself is already very quiet the fans did get louder at the same point in the test so we have performance for days and its days cool and quiet the thing is everyone has different workflows so it can be kind of hard to quantify what this performance actually means for you but let me just show you what i'm doing right now so this is what i'm looking at i have my premiere pro edit my project and this is actually 4k 10 bit 422 h264 footage which doesn't play back nicely on anything really except a top spec macbook pro or indeed this mac studio i'm also blendering as you can see here i've got my little ripple water going at the same time nine more streams of that same 4k 10-bit video now you can see that is not playing back smoothly i have apparently found the limit of what this machine can do but if this was prores it would be a totally different story if we jump over to the activity monitor you can see that we really are maxing out that ram 119 gigs of the 128 being used so if you do want to pay more for ram it is certainly utilized let's do one more little test and this is octane x and i've got some of the default projects here so let's jump over to the hallway render target and it is choking away rendering nicely as you can see let's see how long it takes this is the mac studio 11 seconds to fully render that frame all right so let's see how long this takes 18 seconds versus 11 the mac studio wins but let's back up for a second how have apple done this well firstly i think apple's design and engineering teams need to meet up with their marketing teams because we had the m1 then the m1 pro then the m1 max and now obviously we have the m1 ultra because ultra is higher than max i don't know what comes next maybe the m1 super duper deluxe legendary edition or something i don't know but all m1s are based on apple's own silicon which uses a 5 nanometer architecture and so the transition from intel is almost complete only the 27 inch imac and the mac pro still use the old tech but then we thought oh we're going to see a new m2 chip perhaps to replace the macbook air and that imac the 27 inch which is very old now and not worth buying but no instead we have the m1 ultra which is as i say essentially two maxes in one but crucially thanks to the crazy high bandwidth and also the fact that software and apps only see this as one chip not two maxes there are no optimizations or app updates required to fully take advantage of it which is a massive deal because as you guys know if you're a pc gamer or you just have a desktop pc there's been issues with you know sli graphics cards and also in some cases those intel xeon workstations where you had two cpu chips in the same pc there were so many issues and driver problems and you did not get twice the performance sticking two gpus in there i don't even think the r6 300 series support sli anymore but in the past if you whacked in another 2080 with your 2080 you might get 15 20 25 boost it is a genuine technological revolution not only the m1 architecture but the fact that they can combine them into one soc and there are no problems and it scales almost perfectly you may still have bottlenecks elsewhere and not all apps are fully optimized to take advantage of this kind of performance but across the board whether you're rendering an octane or blender editing and premiere or final cut and yes even gaming the ultra in here is a significant step up and right now it represents the best performance you can get on a mac but that is until we see a new mac pro desktop which i suspect we will see at wwdc not that far away and i would be a bit concerned about dropping between two and eight thousand pounds on this if you need that kind of performance for your workflow and then in just a couple of months a mac pro desktop comes out which no doubt will be more powerful because of the well thermal headroom and it's not constrained to this tiny little box and also it's going to be a lot more flexible and upgradable yes more expensive but if you're buying this for the performance and you're not that bothered about it being a small rectangular box you can fit in a backpack then it might be worth waiting for the mac pro having said that part of the charm of the mac studio is this size you can take it home into the office you can drop it on someone else's desk and just plug it in you can put it in a backpack although i think apple maybe needs to offer a little square sling bag for this or travel case although they probably charge 500 for it so let's talk about money because i think the entry level the base model of this is actually not bad value for two grand you get an m1 max with 512 storage and 32 gigs of unified memory which is a lot of money but a similarly spec macbook pro 14 for example would set you back 2800 although of course with that you do get a nice screen keyboard touchpad you know it's a laptop but if you need m1 max level of performance i think that base model is ideal although maybe up the storage to one terabyte as nothing in here is upgradable you can add an extra eight gpu cores for 200 quid if you like but the jump pop to the m1 ultra is not just this whopping 1400 pounds it says here but it also insists that you have 64 gigs of memory and one terabyte of storage so the minimum an m1 ultra mac studio will cost is four grand one thing i actually didn't realize until i've been using this for a while is that it has built-in speakers i've obviously been using this studio display most the time but you can see if i go to the sound settings we have the mac studio speakers which come out the back they're terrible but they're you know useful for just basic use of you know when you're first setting it up or if you haven't got anything else ideally you'd want to use a proper setup the lower right of the camera module like this display holding your phone like this there's a bit more room for your index finger without it going over the camera module so should you buy it well no 99 of people know that is what the mac mini is for with the m1 chip which is still very capable and for about 700 quid that is for most people but then as it says on the tin this is the mac studio it is meant for professionals designers render reverberators most professionals and businesses will be paying for this on their company credit card and then having the tax write-off as it's a business asset but on the flip side as i say i am a bit worried about how this will compare with the mac pro i think it might be worth waiting and seeing don't forget though that you are literally just buying this box which also comes with a power cable nothing else so you will need a monitor it doesn't have to be this one but maybe this one and of course keyboards and track pads apple actually sent over their new black and silver uh keyboard which the is the touch id model and also the very nice matte black surface uh touchpad and of course the magic mouse which still has that ridiculous underneath underneath underneath lightning charger no actual design changes just a fancy new color so let's wrap up and we have a lovely design all the ports you'd need incredible performance especially with the ultra but even the max is beyond pretty much everything else out there it also uses significantly less power than an equivalent windows desktop with a high-end gpu plus it stays cool and quiet and actually i don't think the base model is terrible value for money downsides well it can get very expensive especially with the ultra there's also no upgradability at all still i've got to say i am blown away by this coming from the old intel and amd powered max of the past with their jet engine fans and overheating and throttling issues where it always made sense to go for a windows desktop pc where you can obviously upgrade it and buy the components yourself these days with the component shortages how expensive gpus are and also just the optimizations of the software the hardware their own architecture all in this form factor it's just a kind of beautiful harmony and i would recommend it if you are on the lookout for a well studio high performance compact mac but what do you reckon would you be tempted to buy one of these or not let me know what you make of it in the comments below and if you did enjoy this video a like and a subscribe would be very much appreciated and stay tuned for my full review of this and also my upcoming comparisons between this and the max version and also this and my desktop gaming pc thank you so much for watching guys and i'll catch you next time right here on the tech chat\n"
