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Apple Announces New Mac Studio With M4 Max and M3 Ultra Chips, Thunderbolt 5, and More
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What I find highly suspicious are their benchmarks comparing the new machines to M1 max/ultras and not M2 max/ultras. And in one case it was only a 10% improvement and in another a 20%... over a m1 based machine. Hrm... Once again I'm really gonna have to wait to see benchmarks. Any idea when people outside Apple will start releasing benchmarks? Maybe the 12th...
It all boils down to how much the increase in productivity with an M3 Ultra is to your bottom line. You have an M1 Max, the M4 Max is out now, I’m not sure why the complaining? You obviously couldn’t justify the M1 Ultra when you bought your Mac Studio, but you could justify an M4 Ultra Studio now, but just not an M3 Ultra? Sounds like you can’t justify either and the M4 Max would work just fine, but you need to have something to gripe about on this thread. The M4 Max is eminently more capable compared to an M1 Max. Your math is adding up to clickbait.
Finally, someone makes an informed comment. I'm very excited about the M3 Ultra Studio. I do local LLM development and I need that 512GB RAM badly. I can't wait to get this machine! I don't think I've been this excited about a Mac desktop since the days of the classic iMacs.
I disagree. If they hadn't put a last gen chip in a machine that requires a significant investment A LOT less people would be complaining.
I am not enjoying complaining. I was waiting cash in hand for a M4 Ultra studio. I will not be put my money into a M3 Ultra.
I would have to upgrade the lowest Max CPU for 375€ to get more than 36GB RAM?
Luckily I didn't wait and got the mini with the upgraded Pro to have 64GB. I didn't need to upgrade it. But now it has the same CPU and neural engine cores as the lowest Max in the Studio, just GPU is less.
The only thing I miss is having USB-A ports and a little more size/weight. Those adapters and hubs are really annoying. I have a TB4 dock with several USB-A ports, but that isn't always connected. Only if I need to connect several external drives at the same time while having more than one display, what I don't have at the moment.
Luckily I didn't wait and got the mini with the upgraded Pro to have 64GB. I didn't need to upgrade it. But now it has the same CPU and neural engine cores as the lowest Max in the Studio, just GPU is less.
The only thing I miss is having USB-A ports and a little more size/weight. Those adapters and hubs are really annoying. I have a TB4 dock with several USB-A ports, but that isn't always connected. Only if I need to connect several external drives at the same time while having more than one display, what I don't have at the moment.
Why? Just because it is called M3 and not M4? Are you dissapointed about the performance?
512GB VRAM or 512GB RAM + 32GB or less VRAM? The former a lot more expensive and the latter a fair bit less.
Then Apple does price internal storage high but there you do have pretty good 3rd-party alternatives from external storage connected via TB5. It doesn't quite give you a single 16TB volume for the whole system but how many people actually need a 16TB system volume?
Same, I can't wait for the first benchmarks, on paper it looks absolutely wild.
It doesn’t look like it per Ben Bajarin, a chip industry consultant who also has a good podcast on the chip industry. He says the Ultra will skip a generation so the next one will be the M5 Ultra.
Unless there is some x-factor we don't know about that will give it a performance increase on par with M1 Max vs M1 Ultra, or M2 Max vs M2 Ultra, then yes, I'll likely be disappointed with the performance increase vs M4 Max for the price required for a M3 Ultra.
I'm paying $8,550 for a 'fully specced' M3 Ultra with 1 TB storage. I suspect a lot of the 512GB sales will be similar. A lot of these will be used for AI development (mine is), and I'm not sure why you'd pay that much for storage when it offers no meaningful advantages. I suppose if you're in a situation where $5,500 means nothing to you, you would buy it just because it's there, but otherwise?
Tell that to all the manufacturers of keyboards and mice. I’d love to drop those ports but they are still needed.
Hopefully AliExpress sellers come to the rescue on some 3rd party Storage that isn't "bend over and touch your toes" pricing that Apple "offers"
Say what you want about Intel, AMD and Nvidia. At least these manufactures are not confusing with their releases per. year
Up until the M2 cycle everything was uniform with the launch
- Spring = MacBook Air with Base M-Series
- Fall [Oct] = Macbook Pros with M-Pro and M-Max Series
- WWDC following year = Previous year M-Ultra
Now it's just all kinds of messed.
I don’t like the “M3” branding on the Ultra chip and would have preferred something like Mac Ultra Gen 2 but the Ultra is not for people who want the fastest single core performance. It’s for people with significant multicore workloads.
I have been an Apple customer since 1990. I am aware of their pricing going back to the original products. Apple customers have always had plenty of exercise bending over and grabbing their ankles if they want the top tier products.
The sign over the Apple Store should read "Apple: You Pay to Play" and the prices go up faster than the incremental performance gains.
The sign over the Apple Store should read "Apple: You Pay to Play" and the prices go up faster than the incremental performance gains.
Unless it comes from Apple directly, I won’t believe it. People were very strong with their opinions that the M3 Max was missing this too. Even showed evidence with the chip design.
An interesting point
Given the only occasional releases of the Ultra chips, I'm also surprsied they don't just call it the "M Ultra Chip (Gen 1/2/3)" so as to avoid the denigration due to the M3 part of it.
That would put the focus squarely, and only, on performance and benchmarks of the release.
LOL so you are now the arbitrator of what is based on reality or not? Btw, not my wild guess. You need to read before shooting. Just pointing out you're not being consistent. If Gurman says it, its real to you, anyone else, it's not based on reality.
what exactly are we apologizing for? It's hardly news if one says something less than a day before the formal announcement. That's not useful. Might have been useful if he had been saying it months ago, but he wasn't. Keep waiting for an apology, not all of us worship Gurman.
I’ve been into Apple since 2014. iPhones I’ll stick with as the only alternative is just more invasive spyware, and Apple does family accounts better
But their Macs and iPads are just out of control. I bought a 2018 i5 mini for my business when it launched. It still works fine but sometimes I get the upgrade bug and I browse the prices and want to throw up.
I’ll most likely be going back to PC when this thing needs to be shuttered. I spent my life on PC before 2018, it will be very familiar territory. And way way more affordable. Grab a gaming pc from Best Buy for $1000 bucks and you’ve got horsepower for years that stands toe to toe with any Mac for a fraction of the price.
Just wanted to mention that you can get a base Mini M4 for $499 (EDU) and add 2TB internally from AliExpress for about $180-ish ... and all in for around $700-ish depending upon sales tax it's an incredible machine and value (16gb RAM/2TB SSD)
Takes a touch of doing, but the install is super easy
(this is what I'm running)