Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Apple Mac Studio vs Mac Mini M1 – $2000 vs $700 Mac”.
Hey, what’s up folks how’s it going. This watch hope you guys are all doing well and today we’re going to be taking a look at the mac studio. I’Ve been testing this thing out for the past several weeks. It’S basically the standalone apple pc to rule them all, it’s more powerful than potentially a mac pro with the same footprint and form factor that we all know and love with the mac mini now, we’ve been using the baseline configuration of the mac studio, the most economical Version you can get starting around two thousand dollars that gets you a m1 max chip that has a 10 core cpu 24 core gpu 16 core neural engine as well as 32, giga, sram and 500 gigabytes of long term, solid state storage. Now, if you have a little bit more pocket change to spend, let’s say eight thousand dollars, you can get the top version of the mac studio powered by the m1 ultra chip, which is basically two m1 maxes put together.
Now, even though we have the poor man’s configuration of the mac studio, it’s still way faster from a processing standpoint than any standalone pc that we’ve encountered from both apple and other consumer electronic manufacturers. Not only is the m1 max chip way faster than the m1 version of the mac mini that we’re going to be directly comparing the mac studio against in this specific video, but it’s at least twice as fast as our baseline configuration of the mac pro that we Tested out a few years back now, with these impressive performance gains, there are some serious limitations, obviously uh, being a system on chip platform, there’s pretty much, no user upgrade or expandability options from an internal standpoint. So that means the initial configuration that you choose is going to be critical in determining the future usability of this product, because all those specifications from the ram, gpu, cpu and long-term storage are unchangeable throughout the lifespan of the product. Now granted you actually do have a decent amount of connectivity options at the back in front of the mac studio, which we’ll talk about making a user expandable storage a viable solution via thunderbolt 4. But unfortunately, if you want to use an egpu to bring up your graphics, rendering and gaming capabilities, that’s unfortunately at this time, not supported by the apple soc. Now what i would like to do at this point, i should do a direct head head comparison between the mac studio that we have over here versus the m1 version of the mac mini.
Firstly, from a physical standpoint. They both have the exact same footprint of 19.7 centimeters, both in height and depth. So that means you’re not going to be sacrificing any more desktop real estate. When you’re, looking at the mac studio compared to the mac mini, the only real difference is going to be the height difference. 9.7 centimeters high on the max studio versus 3.6 centimeters on the the mac mini. In addition to that, the max studio with the extra hardware is going to be slightly heavier with the m1 max and m1 ultra configuration weighing around 2.7 and 3.6 kilograms respectively versus the m1 mac mini is only around 1.2 kilograms in weight, as we mentioned earlier.
One of the advantages on the mac studio is greater ports and connectivity options at the back. You can see we have two extra thunderbolt connections and in fact the thunderbolt 4.0 compared to thunderbolt 3.0, but both on the mac studio and mac mini thunderbolt can go up to 40 gigabits, a second in terms of data throughput. Apart from the extra thunderbolt connectivity, the mac studio is more or less the same as the mac mini with having two usb type-a connections: a full-size, hdmi 10 gigabit ethernet, as well as 3.5 millimeter, audio or headphone jack. However, as we mentioned earlier, the max duty at the front does have two additional usb type-c connections with 10 gigabytes, a second data throughput, as well as a full-size sd card reader, which the mac mini does not have beyond that. Here’S a little data cheat sheet to give you. The key differences between the two macs are a mac mini. Is the baseline 699 configuration with the eight core cpu eight core gpu 16 core neural engine, as well as eight gigabytes of ram and 256 gigabytes of ssc storage? Our max studio, as we mentioned earlier, is the baseline 2 000 variant powered by the 10 core cpu 24 core gpu 16 core neural engine, and we have 32 gigabytes of ram as well as 500 gigabytes of ssd storage. The first thing we’re going to do to test the key performance differences between the two is run some synthetic benchmarks; first, taking a look at the multi-core and single port performance of the m1 versus the m1 max, specifically taking a look at the cinebench r23 benchmark.
Now, here are the results over here, basically from a single core performance side, both are pretty much the same at getting around 1500 points, but from a multi-core standpoint, you’re. Looking at 7 500 points on the m1 versus over 12 000 points on the m1 max moving on to a geekbench. Again, it’s pretty much the same performance from a single core standpoint of around 1700 points, but again i’m much faster on the multi-core performance of 7 500 points on the m1 versus over 11 000 points on the m1 max now, based on these initial impressions, it looks Like from a multi-core standpoint, the 10 core m1 max is getting around 60 performance gains from the previous generation a core m1.
Now that’s a decent little performance bump, but a more significant difference is actually on the gpu side. If you take a look at our geekbench metal benchmark, you can see that our 24 core gpu on the n1 max scored over 62 000 points versus 20 000 points on the 8 core gpu found on the m1 mac mini. And if you continue forward, we can greater illustrate at this point by using unigine’s valley benchmark set to 3840 by 2160 medium texture settings we’re getting an average frame rate of 65.1 on the m1 max versus 18.9 average frames per second using the standard m1 chip. Now, even though the games library on os 10 using the apple based silicon, is extremely limited, we still wanted to test out a couple of games, including rise of the tomb raider set to ultra hd resolution with very high details. We ran the benchmark and got an average frame rate of 46.25 on the m1 max versus the. In the exact same scenario, we only scored about 16.5 average frames per second on the original m1 ship.
Now so far, the m1 max has been pretty darn impressive. Given the fact that it’s an all-in-one system, you can certainly actually play games in quad, hd and ultra hd resolution at relatively high frame rates up to 40 60 frames per second on most of the gaming titles that i’ve experienced. That roughly equates the power of the gpu on the m1 max equivalent to what you would find with an nvidia rtx.
3060.. Now importantly, the mac studio is not really a gaming machine, more specifically a workstation pc, designed to be in an extremely compact form factor. So that means you have pretty much the power of the mac pro for multimedia creators, engineers, audio production, film photo editing, people that use the adobe and apple creative, suite, etc. Now, for me specifically, i want to see how the video editing performance stacks up against the mac mini m1 versus the max studio.
So i pulled out a 4k 16 minute video project. I want to see how long it would take to export that 4k file into a youtube friendly. Video output file took about 12 minutes 13 seconds on the m1 mac mini versus only 5 minute 34 seconds on the mac studio, less than half the time it took with the m1 mac mini, so that alone could actually justify the price of paying double or triple The amount uh coming from the m1 mac mini and uh, it’s pretty darn impressive, to see how how much faster the m1 max can be compared to the original m1 chip. Now, to do that, i also wanted to test out the read and write sequential performance of the ssds on both macs. To do that, we ran the blackmagic speed test and we got pretty much double the results on the mac studio.
You got 4.7 and 5.4 gigabytes. A second write and read, respectively, versus 2.3 and 2.8 gigabytes, a second write and read respectively. So that means data transfer rates are going to be almost double the performance on the mac studio, making backup, as well as transferring data back and forth between external drives and internal drive, even faster on the mac studio compared to the m1 mac mini now, beyond the Stellar performance of the mac studio, you do have to know that it doesn’t really come with any peripherals or display gon na have to supply those by yourself, which is gon na already add to a very expensive unit. Nonetheless, we went with the studio display for our testing, which is a great power up, and it definitely fits the aesthetics of the mac studio. Very, very well, in addition to having the magic keyboard with the touch id, as well as the new generation magic mouse, which makes a great combo unit for the mac studio setup that we have over here now. In summary, if we were to come back to our comparison with the m1 mac mini versus the mac studio, if you’re coming in from an upgrade standpoint, it’s going to be definitely hard to justify three times the price for basically somewhat double the performance of the m1 Mac mini, which might be worth it for some people that are super time.
Efficient users and i really value that extra processing power and that extra capability that the mac studio inherently has, in addition to the convenience factor of having all those extra corsican activity options. But i think users such as myself that on a little bit of a budget, i think the video editing performance on the m1 mac mini is enough to sustain for another two to three years and later down the road. Maybe a mac studio might be a little bit more fitting as we go into 8k video production and things like that. But for the time being, uh definitely enough for my demands and needs and if you’re in the world of audio and music production, as well as photography and stills editing the m1 mac mini is definitely perfect.
For that and going to a mac studio might be a little overkill unless you really want to show off and have that extra performance or for the sake of future proofing, your setup. But besides those things, i definitely love to know what you guys. Think of the mac studio. Do you think it’s worth it compared to the m1 and mac mini? Would you actually pick it over the mac pro etc? If you have any specific questions, definitely let me know check out the description down below for more details about everything. We’Ve talked about please make sure to like and share this content and if you haven’t done so subscribe and ring that bell we’ll see you real soon in the next one.
Take care. .