Macs cannot compete with i9 and 4090 for some professional workflows either. We need a Mac Pro for this.
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Apple Halted M2 Chip Production in January Amid 'Plummeting' Mac Sales
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I'm sorry but I think this is fiction. The Mac Studio is more powerful than most "professional workflows" need. And beyond that, people are using remote servers for a ton of things these days, including ones with a bunch of Nvidia GPUs. If you need that, you just might have to forget about MacOS. Also, Macs will never support Nvidia GPUs again, so if the 4090 is some kind of bar you need to reach, a new Mac Pro won't help.
I would for sure like to see a new super powerful Mac Pro, but that doesn't mean Apple necessarily feels a lot of pressure to release one. They will be fine without one if they were to decide it's not worth it.
Then Macs would never be treated as powerful again. Macs are getting beaten by Blender, some video editing workflow, image processing etc. It's not NVIDIA specific, it's the overall performance of the 4090. No Mac can match its performance. And the i9 is beating out all Macs too in most areas. Only area Macs are far better is video editing, and that is purely due to the extra encoders/decoders.
No Mac can compete with top end PC hardware. This is why a Mac Pro is needed. Having Mac Studio be the top end Mac would just be a joke.
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We'll see if that holds true when the system is all on one chip, including the storage, and if any part fails the whole thing is a doorstop. Can't even boot from external storage.
There aren't that many people concerned if a Mac Studio Ultra can't fully match the fastest PC hardware. You're basically arguing that it's really important to have a Mac that can beat benchmark numbers... but it's not. If Apple announced the Mac Pro was being discontinued with no successor, nothing would really change.
It's not just benchmark numbers. Have you actually used a high end PC? And used actual workflow? Like I said, other than video editing, which is only an advantage because it has specialized encoders/decoders, Macs perform worse across the board. Mac Pro 2019 was the only thing close to a level playing field.
Yes it would change, since now the top end Mac would top out at 128GB of RAM currently which is a major joke to higher end workflows.
I've used plenty of high end PCs, Macs, and even SGIs. I haven't felt the need to buy anything super high end in a long time, because the price is not worth it when I don't neeed that kind of power. The last time I cared was mid 2000's when I was rendering lots of 3D graphics. I've been using a Mac Pro 5,1 for music production up until recently. Now I have an M1 Mac Mini.
Computers are so powerful these days, the number of people that would be so concerned about Macs keeping up with the fastest possible PC hardware in the world like you are is very, very small, and they probably aren't using Macs anyway. I just don't think this is a pressing issue, and Apple doesn't either. If they did, they would have released an Apple silicon Mac Pro 2 years ago.
That $200 to get to 16gb is what gets you right now. You really should spring for that basically no matter what your use case is. 8gb of RAM is already too little and will definitely be a performance pinch point in a couple of years for even casual users. I wouldn't say that Apple is so much cutting corners as that the $999 price point is teaser price. Except for the RAM, I really don't see any issue with M1 Air. We had 5% CPI in 2021 and then 6.5% CPI for 2022. That happened. So Apple delivering the M1 Air at $999 is solid. But I suspect the upgrades getting chosen (with the upgrades being nearly 90% margin choices) is helping a lot.
They couldn't even release a Mac Studio 2 years ago. So just because I need fast PC that means I am not using a Mac? I have said so many times, it's better for my video editing. But that is all it's good for. It absolutely cannot compete with an i9 and 4090 in many many MANY areas. Macs would be a joke if the Mac Studio is the absolute best a Mac can do. Especially with how darn noisy this thing is, I absolutely cannot stand the Mac Studio with its fans. Mac mini is not powerful enough, I have All in Ones even if I did we lost 27" iMac. A Mac Pro is needed in the lineup.
I'd say the 8gb of RAM gets stressed even if all you do is leave tabs open in Chrome and two or three applications going (example a video conference app, a productivity app, and an email app). But that is a very common thing for folks to do. The 256gb of storage though is fine for a lot of people though. External storage is cheap. Cloud storage is cheap. But RAM is needed for everything. I really hope Apple set 16gb RAM as the baseline soon. I think they will tarnish their reputation if they keep selling 8gb RAM computers.
I said most people like you probably don't have Macs.
You're making this out to be a huge deal like the fastest M2 Macs are too slow to do anything... it sounds pretty silly.
Just because I like PCs? Wow I am an Apple fan but now I know what users feel like about us. I have 5 Macs and 2 Windows PCs.
You're obviously misunderstanding what I've been trying to say. I don't have any negative feelings about you or people who like PCs. I myself have multiple PCs running Linux.
I just simply don't agree that it's a huge problem if we don't have a Mac Pro that competes with the fastest PC hardware in the universe.
Final cut pro is a good software, and is optimized for their processors, Adobe premiere sucks, agree with that, but that doesn't means macs are faster than a core i9 13th gen because of Final Cut Pro.
Davinci is probably using some extensions that make it faster on mac than on PC but those are pretty much the only "benchmarks" in where a mac is faster (for now).
Well that was called Mac Pro with intel Xeons, now they are going the dodo, I doubt an Apple Silicon can compete with newer intel/amd high end CPUs and definitively GPU can't compete with Nvidia.
Apparently the New Mac Pro is the Mac Studio with just a better cooling in a bigger case.
The days of computer towers are not gone, are just a niche as they were in the 80s, early 90s, not everybody had a tower PC back then, the ones that had one, was just that one Tower Computer, now days only hardcore (gamers/renders/workstations) have them.
It is fair to say that the only people that claim that configuration is enough for most people are Apple apologists or shareholders. The main group of people that is enough for (now and in 5 years) are probably retirees that don't take many photos or videos or use much software.... Seriously, an SSD so far below average size in a premium product is ridiculous.
I do worry that history will repeat itself again. I thought Microsoft would jump on the ARM train and that would create a better situation but it doesn’t seem to be making much traction, for now. Unless Qualcomm or the other big two manufacturers go big on ARM and release much better chips then this doesn’t feel like its going to happen.
I used to work in an Apple retail store during the Intel transition and the amount of people who became interested in Intel Macs vs when the PowerPC models were around was night and day. The risk of owning a Mac had decreased significantly. People need to remember that software support wasn’t always there and users fought hard to get things ported over, if macOS loses market share and it doesn’t make sense for them to write software for it then those companies aren’t going to spend development costs supporting that software. This could become worse when companies are cutting back for leaner times and they don’t have the employees to do the development work.
For me I don’t think for a minute that a computer should be treated like an iPhone and users need to upgrade every gen so I think we need to look at the longer term pattern of this economic downturn and not just this dip in manufacturing. Long term M3 sales will give us a better understanding. The ones who upgrade every gen tend to be using it for moving image where export time matters and affects their productivity/income, the rest probably keep their computers for multiple years.
I do wonder how many Intel Mac users have still not upgraded and have decided not to upgrade. I know I have spent the money I could have used for a Mac on a self build PC because the long term value is not there for me at this point and my SSD requirement is 4TB and up which makes any Mac for me not practical when spending so much for a fixed system I would usually hold on to for 5 years and expect to adjust to my data requirements. I will obviously keep an eye on what happens with Apple, but I’ve lost my loyalty to macOS for now.
Considering there has been a consistent push to 3D production in many fields and Macs are just not as good in that department I think you‘re disregarding something quite important especially when Apple are about to try their hand at VR/AR and someone is going to have to produce all that content. They are going to want to use the fastest possible machine to get their work done and preview renders etc. Maybe it will be no coincidence that the new Mac Pro and their headset and its OS will be announced so close to each other.
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The Mac Studio has been the biggest disappointment with these apple Silicon systems. I would rather the Mac Studio be one and done than the Mac Pro dropping. The fans are just so insanely annoying on the studio.
Well that's probably gonna be fixed with the Mac Pro, probably a trash can sized "Mac Studio".
I definitely think Apple should focus on increasing the power of their GPUs if they are going to never support 3rd party GPUs again, which seems to be the case. However, Apple isn't doing anything the way I would if it were up to me. Before even thinking about a VR headset they should be taking gaming seriously and making Macs with very powerful GPUs, and really push for game developer adoption, and buy some game studios like Sony and Microsoft always are. They should also make a game console version of the Apple TV also with a powerful GPU. But Apple isn't interested in any of this, nor are they interested in making a new Mac Pro with GPUs that beat out Nvidia and AMD.
Also if the VR headset rumors are true, we aren't even talking about a Mac Pro, because the headset is supposed to be a standalone device. It will have the graphics power of an iPad. Apple just doesn't care about the kind of hardware modern PC gamers care about.