Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Good. I hate external disks too, even SSD’s (Sandisk are almost as fast - 2050mb/s but not even near 6000mb/s plus I hate dongles they’re not handy). Why only 4TB though? You’ll be maxed out in no time. And in a few months you’ll regret not pulling the trigger on the 8TB.
Eh, my main usage right now is my Photos library, which is currently at 930gb. I like to keep originals on my main machine so that everything gets backed up to my NAS with TimeMachine as well as being in the cloud. With pets and young kids, I end up with quite a lot of photos and videos. I'm currently at 1.9TB used out of 2TB. The only real thing I can see needing additional storage for for the next few years is my growing Photos library but it would have to triple in size before I filled a 4TB drive.

To go to 128GB RAM and an 8TB drive instead of the 64GB RAM and 4TB SSD I've gone for, it would have cost an extra £2k. 64GB has been fine in the M1 Ultra Studio that I'll be replacing and so I'd rather put that £2k towards my next machine when 4TB finally ends up being restrictive for me in a few years time.
 
  • Like
Reactions: spnc
who can afford this crap. Looks great.. but I am so done with apple. They can claim being the fastest at whatever, but if you can't sell it to a modest consumer market, who cares. SGI machines back in the day were amazing, no one could afford them... Just sad. If it was 3-4g, I could maybe justify that.

Pros and prosumers. If you can't afford it, you're probably not the target market.
 
Eh, my main usage right now is my Photos library, which is currently at 930gb. I like to keep originals on my main machine so that everything gets backed up to my NAS with TimeMachine as well as being in the cloud. With pets and young kids, I end up with quite a lot of photos and videos. I'm currently at 1.9TB used out of 2TB. The only real thing I can see needing additional storage for for the next few years is my growing Photos library but it would have to triple in size before I filled a 4TB drive.

To go to 128GB RAM and an 8TB drive instead of the 64GB RAM and 4TB SSD I've gone for, it would have cost an extra £2k. 64GB has been fine in the M1 Ultra Studio that I'll be replacing and so I'd rather put that £2k towards my next machine when 4TB finally ends up being restrictive for me in a few years time.
Yeah makes sense I get you. Family and personal usage. Enjoy the beast when it lands cheers
 
who can afford this crap. Looks great.. but I am so done with apple. They can claim being the fastest at whatever, but if you can't sell it to a modest consumer market, who cares. SGI machines back in the day were amazing, no one could afford them... Just sad. If it was 3-4g, I could maybe justify that.
Well, we’re the 1% for sure: software development, machine learning and statistical programs, music production and heavy Kontakt/Spitfire orchestral librairies (up to 500GB each), photo editing, movie incl. drone footage production, bitcoin wallets, video games, you name it… you entire personal + pro life contents are to be on a single computer nowadays, obviously if you’re only going to go with Excel sheets and emails stick to 200 bucks Chinese PCs 😁

16TB is the bare minimum for anyone living in the digital world nowadays seriously
 
  • Haha
Reactions: canon-cinema-0r
Yeah makes sense I get you. Family and personal usage. Enjoy the beast when it lands cheers
Thanks! Looking forward to it. 99% of the time it'll be in clamshell mode under my desk but I just really need the portability for that 1% of the time when I need to be able to do certain work tasks while away. I had to take my Mac Studio with me with a portable display when we went on holiday earlier on in the year! From my estimates, the M3 Max will likely exceed even the multicore performance of my M1 Ultra Mac Studio so it'll still be upgrades all round. :D
 
  • Like
Reactions: spnc
Thanks! Looking forward to it. 99% of the time it'll be in clamshell mode under my desk but I just really need the portability for that 1% of the time when I need to be able to do certain work tasks while away. I had to take my Mac Studio with me with a portable display when we went on holiday earlier on in the year! From my estimates, the M3 Max will likely exceed even the multicore performance of my M1 Ultra Mac Studio so it'll still be upgrades all round. :D
Totally, it’s the best there is so far 🥳 and yeah never bought a Mac desktop either for the sake of occasional portability like you said.
 
who can afford this crap. Looks great.. but I am so done with apple. They can claim being the fastest at whatever, but if you can't sell it to a modest consumer market, who cares. SGI machines back in the day were amazing, no one could afford them... Just sad. If it was 3-4g, I could maybe justify that.
With inflation factored in, the current gen MacBook Pros are no more expensive than they were a decade and a half ago. I worked out the effective current day price of my 2008 mid-range 15.4" MacBook Pro and it ended up being smack bang between the two 16" Mac Pro models. Yes the Max models cost more but a decade ago, we couldn't get workstation level performance in a laptop. If they could have done that level of performance back then, they would have charged the same.

All computers cost more than they used to and it's largely due to inflation. Hell, for our general office staff, we've started getting MacBook Airs for them instead of the Microsoft laptops we used to get and one of the main factors was that they were cheaper, better value for what you get and should hopefully be more reliable. The current pricing trends isn't an Apple only thing.
 
  • Like
Reactions: neuropsychguy
Totally, it’s the best there is so far 🥳 and yeah never bought a Mac desktop either for the sake of occasional portability like you said.
I had an aging Mac Pro before my Studio. Honestly, my brain just hadn't accounted or adjusted for the fact you can get high end desktop or workstation performance in a laptop. I'd always had a 'big powerful computer' at home on my desk because it was so much more powerful than a laptop. So that's what I was looking to replace and I waited faithfully for a suitable model to be released before I upgraded. It was only after living with it for a while that I realised that a Max model would have been more than enough performance for my needs and I could have had the benefit of occasional portability!
 
who can afford this crap. Looks great.. but I am so done with apple. They can claim being the fastest at whatever, but if you can't sell it to a modest consumer market, who cares. SGI machines back in the day were amazing, no one could afford them... Just sad. If it was 3-4g, I could maybe justify that.
These are not aimed at modest consumers these are pro machines. The definition of pro being of course people who make money from it. This is cheap for pro equipment. You even compared it to sgi machines plenty of ‘pros’ (businesses which use them to make money) bought them too.

I think you want to look at macbook air.
 
If raytracing is THAT important to you when you play Myst in your Mac, then it’s totally for you.
This is a feature that might not mean much to most Mac users now, but as features iterate on the GPUs and they get faster and are capable of more, they will.
 
This example is akin to comparing a base trim BMW 330i @ $45,000 to an top trim M3 Competition (get it?) @ $84,300!
 
The prices for more ssd are just insane....

I like to wait until the top-of-the-line models hit the Apple Refurbished store. For example you can get a fully upgraded Macbook Pro M1 Max for just over $4,000.00 USD. I'm sure a comparable M3 Max will have a similar refurbished price when the time comes. They drastically cut the SSD prices on refurbished Macs.
 
I bought an M1 Pro with 32gb and a 1tb drive when they came out, and it is still a great computer. These M3s look amazing, and I’m sure the M#s of the future will be equally amazing, but I’m thinking that I won’t buy another MacBook until Apple rethinks their pricing for ram and storage upgrades. I built out an M3 pro and Apple still charges $400 to go from base ram (now 18GB) to 36GB, and another $400 to go from TB drive to 2TB drive.

With relatively low prices on DRAM and NAND, it is inexcusable that Apple still charges these inflated upgrade prices. When a gen5 NVMe with ~2x the speed and ~2x the capacity, cost about %50 less than the comparable upgrade from Apple, it becomes next to impossible to defend. The ONLY reason Apple gets away with it is because the unified architecture prevents any future upgrades or changes to storage and ram.

I’m sorry for saying what all of us here already know, and have known for a while. I don’t know why, but this year it really is getting under my skin.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.