Not sure about US prices, but I took a screenshot of the UK store page yesterday for comparison.
I'm curious how people are expecting AI to be used. I may be wrong, but in my mind AI is mostly something you would use every now and then, sprinkled in between other use. Not something you would set the computer to be chugging at for hours. So, in the real world, are you that likely to be using AI in parallel with "normal" processes? Perhaps this will evolve over time, but I'm not convinced this is much of an issue. More RAM is better of course, but it's not like AI is just sitting there idling while hoarding your RAM. But, I may be wrong and I'm willing to learn.
Yeah but you’re going to need a very expensive hub/dongle to actually split Thunderbolt 5 out, and who knows if the Studio Display would play nice with that since it’s so picky.
Last week I purchased an M2 Max Mac Studio with 32/512 and it is still sitting here in the unopened box. I got it for $1799 on sale and was feeling good about it, I still pretty good about it. Costco has 90 day returns so I'll wait it out a bit and see some real world reviews but I'll probably stick with the Mac Studio since I'm coming from a 2018 Intel Mini and know that this thing will blow me away.
Application developers may very well find a.o. AI useful for expanding existing and developing new features. Sometimes they succeed being rational about it, and sometimes they suck. Resources. I don`t know how it will evolve, but Apple doubling the base memory without jacking up the price plus increasing bandwidth, should be a nice indicator of expectancy.
I’m a photographer. There are very useful ai denoising tools. If I set those running on a large shoot then they can very much lock up the ram for the whole system if there is only, say 16gb of ram. That’s the computer rendered not useless, but certainly not optimal for concurrent tasks for hours at a time. It very much depends on what you’re using the ai for, as to how long the process takes or how much resources it uses.
But an M4 Mac Mini with 32/512 would run you $1,199. $600 is not nothing. Even a M4 Pro Mac Mini with 24/512 at $1,399 or a M4 Pro Mac Mini with 48/512 at $1,799 and no savings is more RAM and I would hazard the M4 Pro is faster than the M2 Max in single-core benchmarks and possibly on par in multi-core benchmarks, added to which most of us rarely run into multi-core use cases. Which is why for my RAM is so much more of a defining metric and why I opted for the Studio over the M1 Mini due to the Mini's RAM limitations at the time.
For most users use cases, I would hazard that the benefits of the M4 Pro, even the standard lower M4 with 32GB RAM at $600 less than the M2 Max Studio, the GPU is not enough of a differentiator, as it likely is not a sufficient metric for 90+% if not even higher % of users.
