I am typing this response from my 5k iMac, which I adore (huge, beautiful screen and sleep and compact form factor), and it's frustrating how Apple seems to be the only company who knows how to make a decent AOI PC.
I don't like AIO (in my eyes more disadvantages than advantages) and I like the fact that there is now a Mac Studio instead of a 27" iMac.
That's the engineering way of thinking, which is what led me down the path of embracing the Apple ecosystem in its entirety, because Apple is at its core a design-led company, with Apple designers calling the shots, and searching for and having technology made to serve the product experience, rather than engineers being excited about about new hot tech and then trying to turn it into a product.
But there were also some Macs with problems or bad products. Because they only looked at the optics. That's why I don't think Jony Ive is a good designer. Much of what Ive did has not been design, but merely styling.
With Ive, however, "looking good" was the be-all and end-all, and functionality and ease of use were carelessly sacrificed whenever there was a conflict. This resulted in round mice that caused wrist inflammation, or mice with the charging port on the bottom, and Macs with all ports on the back, even those that were meant to be constantly changed (USB, SD card slots). Some Macs also had poor cooling. With the Mac Studio, this was finally corrected (and even there, some things are suboptimal, like maybe the small ventilation holes => but a step in the right direction).
Is there no value in being able to tuck your desktop neatly under your monitor, or in having it chug quietly away in the background so there is no loud and distracting fan noise that might distract you or interrupt your recording?
In principle, this is also possible with a PC, even though Apple has delivered a very good package here that sets a high standard.
And a tower isn't so bad either.
A good tower can be quieter than a Mac Studio. Large heatsinks and large and slowly rotating fans can provide good and quiet cooling. A tower is normally under the table and you don't see it anymore, so it's further away from your ears.
And the Mac Studio still winds up being cheaper than an equivalently-specced windows PC, even after all those markups.
I don't know current PC components and prices that well anymore, but I still think this is a general statement that is not generally true. You can install a stronger graphics card in the PC alone if you need it.
I can't quantity these the same way I can compare single-core benchmarks on a spreadsheet, but I will wager that they do matter to the creative market that Apple is evidently trying to court here.
That's just talk. If you need power, you need power. And that was also the original post:
"Actually, Nvidia GPU is the performance per watt king. 70W mobile Nvidia 3060 is 3x faster than Macbook Pro M1 Max 32GPU and 2x faster than Mac Studio M1 Ultra 64GPU on Blender rendering."
Your response: "Do they fit in an enclosure the size of the Mac Studio?"
Someone who really uses Blender a lot probably has corresponding priorities.
And can you imagine what an M1-pro equipped iMac would look like?
I don't care.
I guess my answer to your "so what" is that not everything which can be measured matters, just as not everything which matters can be measured. I am willing to concede that Intel may have an edge when it comes to absolute performance in a vacuum, but are we saying that it is the only thing which matters to the end user?
OK
