I was wrong about the Mac Studio. It is for normal people and pros alike. I initially said it is a great computer that almost no one should buy. That is simply not the case. Here’s why:

We are not getting the real story

The reason no one knows that the Mac Studio is faster at everyday tasks is that the kind of people who Apple wants to review these products only care about sensationalist speeds and feeds. Some members of the press who got both models only reviewed the Ultra because that is the new chip that brings the headlines. It is the new thing. And they only care about the new thing.

Further, they only care about the kind of benchmarks they can use in a computing horse race. It draws clicks from the kind of people who just want to continue the Mac/PC debate to no profitable end. These are the people who want a $1,000 xMac so they can put in a $3,000 graphics card to get a slightly higher frame rate for bragging rights in an unsupported game they pirated from the latest torrent site. I am sick and tired of the tech press catering to the whiny desires of neck-bearded man-babies living in their mother’s basement trying to turn playing games all day into a real job.

I am also not impressed with YouTube sensations who have managed to make a living playing with expensive tech toys as if that were useful to the world. They make videos about making videos. They buy and use computers to talk about buying and using computers. The world is falling apart while 40 year old men are falling all over themselves to buy the next toy so they can play the latest game marginally better than they could yesterday.

The reason I have gone through this long diatribe is to remind you of what you must surely already know. You are not getting the real story with regard to the Studio. You are getting a distorted version of the story because the sources are worthless bags of water who think themselves important based on their social media follows.

They are not telling you the consumer story of these machines because they don’t care about the consumer story of computers. Such stories are not sensational and do not advance their goals. As a prosumer, I want to tell you a different story than what you have heard. The Studio still might not be the machine for you. But my hope is that this will provide you with better information for making a purchasing decision.

Faster at everything

If you have an M1 or lower, the Studio is faster at everything. Reviewers are only focusing on the CPU. In doing so, they make a critical error. The error is based on an undeniable truth. All M1 cores are exactly the same. That big truth leads to an even bigger lie. They assume that all CPU-based tasks will have exactly the same performance across the line. This is only a half-truth on paper and a whole lie in reality.

M1 cores might or might not be clocked differently. But the reality amounts to the same thing. There are two different types of cores: high efficiency cores and high performance cores. They have different code names: Icestorm and Firestorm. The M1 has 8 cores. But the two types of cores are distributed evenly. The base model M1 Pro has the same number of cores. But 6 of them are performance cores. The next level up has 10 cores with 8 of them being performance cores. This is true for the M1 Max chips as well. The next step up is the newly released M1 Ultra which literally doubles the cores of the Pro. See the chart provided by Appleinsider

The upshot is that while the basic M1 core is the same when comparing performance core to performance core. But the overall performance of the M1 is very different from machine to machine based on the configuration of the cores. That said, where there are machines with the same configuration of cores, there will be similar CPU performance. And even that is not the whole story.

Thermals cannot be overlooked. An M1 inside of a well-cooled chassis will perform better than an M1 that is more thermally limited. All CPUs have the ability to throttle performance when they get too hot. In most situations, a desktop computer with the same CPU as a laptop computer will be more performant over load and over time. A few seconds worth of a CPU test will not yield a lot of useful information. You cannot do an encode test on a short video and extrapolate the performance of a long one. You actually have to do the work to see the actual performance over time.

I’m sorry about making this section so long. The point is that in real-world conditions doing real-world tasks, the Mac Studio is faster than any M1 Mac at just about everything. macOS is a massively multithreaded operating system. The basic functions are multithreaded. Depending on the task, 10 cores are faster than 8 cores. And in the Pro, Max, and Ultra, more cores are allowed to run faster, hotter, and longer. Everything that can be faster with those cores is faster.

While we are on the subject of specs, there are other hardware differences that I admittedly don’t understand, but that might account for differences in speed. The M1 has 16 billion transistors. Is that a lot? I don’t know. What I do know is that the Ultra has almost 10 times that number. The M1 Pro has over twice as many transistors as the M1 while the Max has over 23 billion more transistors than the Max. These numbers are sick. But I couldn’t tell you exactly what they mean for performance. I suspect they mean more than nothing.

One might suspect that RAM scales linearly across the lineup. But that is not exactly the case. You can get a Pro with 32 GB of RAM and a Max with 32 GB of RAM. But each level of machine has different RAM bandwidth. RAM bandwidth in the M1 is 68GB/s The Pro is 200. The Max is 400. And the Ultra is 800. Even with equal amounts of RAM, it doesn’t work the same way across the lineup. What this boils down to is a tautology: The faster machines really are faster machines at just about everything.

Don’t fall for the nonsense that because they are all M1s you will never feel the difference. That is the kind of untruth told by a person who only cares about a certain kind of performance. You will feel the difference. I can feel the difference between my M1 Pro MacBook Pro and my Studio Max. The CPU is not the reason unless those transistors are making the difference. The Pro has 16 GB of RAM and the Max has 32. As we have already noted, the Max has more memory bandwidth. It is faster in everyday tasks that you can notice.

One small example

I will offer just one, small example of what I mean: I use various accessibility features because I must. One of those features is the awesome and always buggy Hover Text. I get that you have likely never heard of this feature because no one writes about it. You don’t know of any podcasters that use it outside of a very small low-vision community. For this reason, I am not going to bother explaining it.

When it works, it is life enhancing. When it glitches, it is a terrible inconvenience. This feature has been neglected by Apple almost since its introduction. I have it turned off on all of my devices except my Studio Max because it is the only computer that can run it almost without a hitch. I can’t even run it in a useful way on the MacBook Pro.

What is the difference? Is it the number of transistors, the amount of RAM, the memory bandwidth, the speed of the drives? I have no idea and no way to test any of those theories. I just know that as a package, it is a pleasure to use on the Max and unusable on every other machine below the Max.

This example will never show up in tech reviews because almost no one uses or even knows about the feature. The closest thing to a real-world task they will mention is something to do with Chrome tabs. You really aren’t getting the whole story. And there is a good chance that something you use everyday is greatly enhanced by picking up a Mac Studio.

The price is right

Mac Studio Max is not expensive. That said, the Ultra seems a bit high. But for those who really need it, perhaps not. I suspect Apple is doing some real profit-taking on the Ultra. $2,000 is what people used to spend on a headless pro Mac. Studio is absolutely a pro machine. But it is also a prosumer machine because of all that it boosts in the real world. You do not need a crazy workflow to notice it.

It starts with 32 GB of really fast RAM. That is quite a generous amount. I haven’t even mentioned the graphics hardware which is rather beefy. You get a 24-core GPU to start, with access to all that RAM. There is no compromise on the ports, power, and cooling. All of these can be expensive considerations. Apple gives you the top of the line out of the box at the entry level. That 10 Gb ethernet port says it all.

$2,000 is prosumer pricing for professional-grade hardware. I don’t know what it is about this machine that makes it faster at all the things. But it is. You cannot buy an M1 Pro desktop right now. Getting a laptop that is mostly like this machine will run you $3,000.

If you are looking at the 24” iMac and wondering if maxing it out would get you close to the Max, it won’t! The entry-level Studio is a two-step leap above the iMac. I have one of those in the house right now. You are comparing apples to dragonflies. The base Mac Studio might well be the best deal in tech right now. The only thing I would change is the storage. Go for the TB. My understanding is that the bigger SSDs are also faster. Don’t worry that you don’t shoot 8K ProRes. That stuff is immaterial for the vast majority of people who can benefit from this machine. Chances are, you are one of them.

David Johnson