Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Mac Studio Review: Double Trouble!”.
Welcome to the review of the MAC at the studio, I mean welcome to the review of the Mac Studio. [ Applause ] all right, so this is the computer I personally got really excited about when they announced it, because we’ve built a video Studio here and this computer is literally called the Mac Studio. So the entire purpose is to be the ideal computer that is small and powerful enough to be in a studio environment and had all these example studios in the Apple event, from music studios to Design Studios to specifically video Studios, and so they made a little Cube. The size of Two and a Half Mac minis, with a bunch of i o some new Cooling and an M1 Max, or an M1 Ultra chip inside specifically to live in these Studio environments. And so now I’ve got one here in our studio. So I’ve been throwing all types of tasks and projects and accessories at this thing, including this new studio, display, which I also plan on making a separate review about, because it’s pretty weird make sure you get subscribed for that. And I actually have two. But I’ve mostly been putting my time into testing this M1 Ultra version because it’s the newest biggest baddest chip. So I call this the 2x machine.
Basically, everything about this machine is doubled. Now I’m going to be referring to the M1 Max chip a lot during this review. So if you haven’t already seen the MacBook Pro review with the M1 Max chip in it, that’s going to be very helpful I’ll leave that link below the like button. This one! Basically, doubles all the things so, physically speaking, it’s basically like two Mac minis stacked on top of each other melted into one thick Mac Mini three C’s, and this is incredibly small for the amount of power it puts out.
It can sit on any desk alongside speakers or a monitor or whatever you set it up with. Also, it is a total coincidence, but I set mine up on this desk. I got from Blue Dot, which already has a bunch of these perforated holes that remind me of the mac, and it fits absolutely perfectly underneath the shelf so that a monitor can sit on top of the Shelf without actually sitting on top of the computer anyway. This is the back of the computer, which has a full Suite of i o, even more ports than the Mac Mini. There are four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10 gigabit Ethernet port, the power plug two usb-a ports, an HDMI 2.0 Port, not 2.1, again for some reason and a headphone jack that can support higher impedance headphones. Just like the MacBook Pro now, it’s not kicking out world-class audio by any means. It’S not going to replace my universal audio DAC, but it is convenient to have kind of the same way. Hdmi is convenient, although I’m kind of surprised this one doesn’t do HDMI 2.1.
I get it on the laptop, that’s just so. You can plug in a random monitor on the go, but this is going to sit at your desk and it would be nice to have high refresh rate. But at the same time, the Ford Thunderbolt ports will support up to four Pro display xdrs, which are all 6K. So I guess he got back on for you, but then at the front, Halo, look look at that front.
I o, which is nice, because this is going to sit on a desk not under it so up front. Here, that’s going to be two USBC ports. If you get the base M1 Max version, but those graduate to two Thunderbolt 4 ports, if you get the M1 Ultra version, because there’s literally more buses available and then an SD card slot, because every Studio I know has tons of SD cards lying around somewhere. So it turns out if I wanted to replace my Mac Pro today.
That is enough. I O for me to actually do that. So I’ve got two Thunderbolt displays and then one Thunderbolt raid array and the DAC, the universal audio DAC is also Thunderbolt. So all together, plus a couple card readers I’d be set now Apple did use the word modularity in their presentation.
I don’t know if that word means what they think. It means I mean, maybe if they’re just trying to say, because it’s not connected to a display and you can choose your own. Unlike the iMac, that’s what they’re considering modular. If not, then I have no idea what they’re talking about, because this thing is absolutely not modular at all.
All of the parts inside are soldered in there is no upgrading of the Ram or the GPU or any parts of this thing ever for the entire lifetime of the machine. I’M not even sure, there’s any reasonable way to actually open up and get into the Mac Studio, so yeah. I can’t give you modular on this one apple, but also this level of vertical integration is basically required to get a computer to be this small, and this efficient, like I’ve, seen some small PCS before this one is Tiny. Also, the power supply is built in so there’s no wall wart, it’s all just in this little box and also fun fact, Apple did send both the M1 Max and M1 Ultra versions here to the studio to test and the M1 Ultra version is in fact notice.
Possibly heavier than the max it’s two whole pounds heavier. It turns out. That’S because the heatsink they used in the ultra version is made of copper instead of the aluminum one they put in the M1. Max it’s much more dense. It’S heavier, that’s pretty serious, but I think that’s my cue to talk about the inside of this machine a little bit more because that’s where the 2x theme starts up again. So you remember the event. The M1 Ultra is literally two M1 Maxes, basically fused, together with a high enough bandwidth between them to behave like one huge mega chip, which is awesome, because that means two times the CPU cores two times the GPU cores two times the memory bandwidth and two times The total memory so in applications I can take advantage of this stuff. Well, this should be twice the machine.
Now Apple did the whole thing. They always do with graphs, and you know you can never really take these completely at face value. I did do some synthetic benchmarks, though, and for a lot of them it does behave like twice the computer, it it absolutely blew the doors off every other Mac ever made, especially including the iMac Pro, and it even flirts with the 28 core cheese grater Mac Pro That I’ve been using so in geekbench it ties the highest single core score, I’ve ever seen, and then it drops a multi-core score, literally double the M1 Max MacBook Pro and yes, that also makes it more powerful in the CPU Department than any other Mac ever including 28, core Mac Pro then in the cinebench test, which I think is a little more realistic, ran it for 10 minutes, and it gave me around 24 000, which again is about double the M1 Max and is right in line between a 16 core thread. Ripper and a high thread count Xeon chip like the Mac Pro.
Basically, the CPU benchmarks are killer until could never, but then we got to talk about GPU stuff. It gets a little more interesting. So you might remember, Apple’s graphs were comparing at one point, the ultra to an RTX 3090. They kept saying it’ll have the same performance as an RTX 3090, but at 200 Watts, less power and that’s very impressive, but it turns out.
The graph should continue a little something like this, because the RTX 3090 will happily continue to draw way more power up to 400 watts of power. It’S one of the power hungriest cards ever so shout out to heimgartenberg at The Verge for this chart inspiration. So it turns out, it doesn’t beat the RTX 3090 at anything that you would buy an RTX 3090, for which I didn’t really expect it to, because that card is almost exclusively for gaming. Like you buy that to play games and you would never buy this to play games but hey double the cores still do double the work so on geekbench’s metal Benchmark which measures GPU performance.
With things like image processing, I got nearly double the score of the M1 Max MacBook Pro cracking a hundred thousand, which is around what a Radeon Pro Vega 2 Duo in my Mac Pro scores, but the Mac Pro has four of them. Now synthetic benchmarks are cool and everything, but you don’t buy a computer like this to just try to get the highest benchmark scores. You buy a new computer to see if that new power can translate to real world performance and real world workflows, and so basically, what I’ve noticed most is the more well-optimized the app the closer you get to those 2x performance numbers. Nothing really typically hits exactly 2x, but the M1 Ultra does feel faster a bit sometimes than the M1 Max I mean in everyday performance, just zipping around the Mac yeah this thing slaps. It makes me really wish.
I had a high refresh rate monitor here. That plays nicely with the Mac, because that would actually feel way more responsive, like the MacBook Pro with its Pro motion screen. But you know 5000 plus megabytes per second read: write speeds from the drive things open instantly, it’s great and then in my own workflow, you might know by now. I’M a Final Cut Pro editor here. It did give me more Headroom and it did perform better than the M1 Max MacBook Pro, but again it didn’t quite beat the Mac Pro I’m currently using.
Basically, it’s gotten to the point where I can drop fresh 8K raw files on the timeline in better quality. Playback mode immediately hit play and start tweaking color and messing with raw settings, and it plays back perfectly at 30 frames without hesitation, minimal lag. When I hit the play button, I love it. It’S when you start adding layers of objects and plugins and animations and trackers on top that things do start to slow down, and I can still bring it to its knees with enough layers of moving objects.
Like I had, I had six at the beginning of the iPad Air review, but then, when I got to the export at the end of the video it took the Mac Studio, 7 minutes and 30 seconds to export my iPhone SE review, which is pretty impressive. But, interestingly, this same project took 6 minutes and five seconds to export from the Mac Pro, so it’s still more powerful. It just has more raw horsepower but of course not everybody’s using Apple’s own apps. Like I do with Final Cut.
There are plenty of Premiere Studios. There are lots of DaVinci Resolve Studios hell, even in this studio, we’ve got people using heavy Photoshop and after effects stuff for thumbnails and Motion Graphics. So I am happy to report that adobe has been working through their Suite, the newest. After Effects beta is dramatically faster on Apple silicon, so that’s awesome and I’m gon na link an article from Scott Simmons, where he went through a bunch of tests between Premiere and resolve, comparing the M1 Ultra with the M1 Max, and you can see a consistent performance Improvement with all the heavier stuff like adding warp, stabilizer, rendering a heavy clip, Etc. The only thing I did find where the M1 Ultra didn’t beat. The M1 Max was, interestingly, just a straight up.
Prores, video export sorry for the tons of video comparisons, but hey it’s a video studio. So this was one area where it did smoke the Mac Pro, because the new prores, the media engines in these Apple silicon products are great. The M1 Ultra has literally double the media engine of the M1 Max, so I thought it would be twice as fast while they both beat the Mac Pro. It was roughly the same time to export a single prores clip, but generally yeah it might not have matched the Mac Pro at every single little thing I threw at it, but yeah.
If you’re, not a video person I’ll, let you find The Benchmark. That applies best to your workflow, but generally with the stuff I threw at it M1 Ultra heavily outperformed M1 Max, and it did it all very quietly, with very little heat in this tiny little box. That just sits inconspicuously on your desk. I mean this computer makes it so obvious why they were eager to ditch Intel.
Also, let me give a shout out to the sustainability element here too, so they use recycled materials inside these computers, that’s cool and then even the packaging. I don’t think people understand how hard this is. The packaging for these computers is absolutely incredible, fully recyclable lots of padding moving parts and then, with a literal, floating cardboard platform in the middle for shock absorption. It’S wild.
I would not be surprised if just this box added, like 50 bucks to the price of the computer, just to engineer such a ridiculous package, but as far as real world impact, the biggest chunk of that will come from the efficiency of these chips. Of course, Apple says that it’ll use over a thousand kilowatt hours less energy per year than an average PC desktop, that’s good for your electricity bill, but that’s also good for the environment, but at the end of the day, look this is just a tool right. Just like the app or program you’re using already is just a tool, and so I think people look for the The Benchmark that will prove that this machine will make them better at what they do. It can’t do that like just because it’s fast, if you’re bad at editing and you get this machine, you’ll still be bad at editing, but just faster.
But I am really happy to see new machines like this still coming out that do make big leaps in performance and capability sort of raises the ceiling for what you can do now. All that being said, the Apple silicon Mac Pro is still coming, and I say that not even like as a warning to most people, but just to remind myself, because honestly, most workflows are covered with the Mac Studio like if I today, if I’m a YouTuber and I’M just editing 4K or 8K, even prores, all the time. This will be able to handle it, but if you’re doing large, 3D modeling projects or tons of tracking and layers and after effects or even in audio projects, lots of plugins and video stuff, if you’re really pushing the limits of your machine, the Mac Pro platform still Does offer the most horsepower, so I mean it shouldn’t. It shouldn’t be surprising that the current 40 pound 28 core – you know 768 gig of RAM Mac Pro manages to slightly outperform this little tiny box here, but when we do get the new Apple silicon Mac Pro, I do expect performance to double this one up again, Which is crazy to say out loud, but for everyone else, this thing is overkill, and I love that that’s the narrative around this computer like do you really need that much power, probably not, but hey at least it’s five thousand dollars of Overkill versus 25.
000 of Overkill, so it’s a bargain either way. That’S been it thanks for watching catch, you guys, the next one peace .