My videos often involve playing 6 videos on timeline simultaneously (for reference, the video on my homepage) Is M1 Max powerful enough to playback such timelines without frame drops? THANKS in advance
I can see the Mac Studio being a real dust trap, especially where I live. To access the fans for cleaning, you pretty much have to completely disassemble the unit, which is not for the faint of heart. Other than that, it appears to be a well designed and thought out unit.
I think it would be interesting to see a computing power comparison between a Pi (or maybe two) going flat out vs a Mac Studio at idle. Two Pi4's flat out would be around 13W which is the listed idle power of the Mac. My guess is the Mac would win hands down.
How would you reasonably compare two cpu units units vs one? Also you are comparing a 28nm node processor (damn ancient by modern standards) to a 5nm, a process node not even accessible to intel or amd.... There is stacking the deck, and then there is comparing mopeds with sports cars
That was super interesting to see that efficiency difference between the PC and the Mac. I know many don't see any value in efficiency but with energy prices generally only increasing over time, I think they are good to take into account. If you hardly push the systems to their limits then the difference is probably negligible, about 250euro over a 5 year time period. If you push them for half the time that difference jumps up to 550 euro over a 5 year time period. If the energy prices go up, so will the value of that efficiency. I don't remember seeing that comparison anywhere else so it is great to have some numbers to compare things with and make an informed decision.
In high energy cost areas in the continental US, power is ~0.20 per kWh which means each additional watt of continuous load is ~$1.75 per year (including other costs like taxes, distribution, etc). In the winters this lowers heating and in the summers costs additional in A/C. Each HDD in a SAN can cost $20/year. Power efficiency matters a lot, especially in servers where it is unlikely that it is ever fully idle and thus the CPU can never really go to full sleep.
@@henryzhang7873 Totally agree. In Europe the price for electricity is much higher. I calculated that the difference in idle is 0.033kwh, I'm running my computer at least 10h a day, for at least 300 days a year. So 10*0.033*300=99kwh In many countries in Europe you pay 0.5 euro per kWh but more is also possible. So that is 50 euro a year. Over a 5 year period that equals 250 euro. But that is idling. The difference in watts almost quadruples under full load. I use my computer quite heavily but I estimated that mine would be under full load half the time so: 5*0.113*300=169.5kwh so per year that would be 169.5*0.5euro=84.75 If the other 5hrs a day are idling I would add 25 euro a year. So 84.75+25= 109.7/year electricity cost. In 5 years that would be 548.75 euro. If I would keep this Mac as long as my current MacPro (which I never needed to upgrade really) I would have to calculate the savings over 9 years which would be 987.75 euro. That makes it a pretty good deal all together. *energy prices will only continue to go up over the coming years as well
@@pilotboi69 Totally, friends of mine are selfsufficient as they generate power from solar and the river next to their house. They can't run too many appliances at the same time, especially during the winter. Additionally, my office is in an old building and the electrics are pretty bad. If I'm running just a few too many machines the breaker goes. I would never be able to have an intel/nvidia combo in there, it would trip the breaker every single time.
Isn't the big advantage of Mac that you get a tailored OS to the specific hardware? If you were dual booting maybe? The power consumption is compelling for a laptop perhaps? I imagine a comparable PC laptop performance for Linux is still cheaper.
@@steveseeger An OS tailored to the hardware is nice, but tailored to your needs is also important. If at some point in time Linux on M1/M2 is as stable as on any other hardware and supports all the hardware, people who need Linux will use it. People who want to use MacOS (how it is named today?) won't switch to Linux. But people who want to use Linux don't want to change MacOS until it works kind of like Linux. Because of a different use case, they will consider this platform with Linux, not with MacOS. The hardware is good, but I keep my distance from the Apple ecosystem.
The M1 machines are impressive, and I've been really happy with my M1 Air (albeit I still have a powerful desktop pc); the graphical power of their chips in particular for video/photo work is remarkable for such low energy chips vs the power hog my desktop RTX card is! Linux could be an interesting experience once the quirks are ironed out. That being said, I am getting pretty fed up with Apple's 'greenwashing' of their products and stupid design quirks though. It's disappointing they claim to be environmentally conscious in their supply chain, and with gestures like using paper packing, then go out of their way to design their machines to be difficult to repair/maintain, and I strongly suspect that 'expandable' storage in the Mac Studio isn't just a standard NVMe/m2 implementation, but linked to a proprietary chip model or standard. It just irritates me because despite all R&D costs they no doubt plough into these, there's still clear decisions made to compromise the product for profitability rather than just make it as good as possible. Sorry for the rant!
@Jake Siener That plug is a standard C5 power cord, that you can buy on amazon for 6$, not proprietary at all. I’m all for bashing apple but don’t make things up.
This is why I vote with my wallet. Never mind that I refuse to pay the apple tax. Apple's "engineering practices" and recent anti-repair efforts are enough to keep me away from any of their products. And no, I am not sold by their recent PR stunt to make people think that they are pro-repair. I cannot fathom how they can claim to be some jesus meets gandhi, leading the way in "green," we love recycling type of company. Just admit that your sole purpose is to obsolete last years product as quickly as possible and sell a new one this year, this is not a secret.
even worse, they market their paper packaging as environmentally friendly while it's 100% made out of new paper, the stuff that is actually still pretty harmful, because it's probably contains a lot of tropical wood because the wood marked is extremely intransparent and even without it still contribute to a lot of environmental damage.
The thing is, in the main, apple machines, whilst they can and do go wrong, in my own personal experience of using them for over thirty six/seven years I can literally count on one hand how many times they’ve needed repairing. I just use my Mac (for work) and keep it for years, then at some point 6 or 8 years down the road I exchange it for a higher spec model. My PC gaming buddies however are always tinkering and upgrading, cards, motherboards, cases etc etc. on balance I am not sure how much greener one is over another. But I’d say at least in my case and the companies I’ve worked with over the years, on balance using the Mac workflow has at least to me seemed a little more friendly environmentally speaking. Though it’s probably pretty close really. As far as repair goes again in general, and again in my own experience which admittedly is not all that expansive, it would seem to me that the average Mac user is really not about repairing, tuning, tweaking and upgrading. Part of the whole fun of PC ownership is tinkering and absolutely my PC buddies know waaaaay more than I do about computers. I know my way around a Mac and it’s systems and I can chuck in some memory (well, when we could do that, I admit that is frustrating that you cannot do that so much with the newer machines so you have to pay Apple prices which are often 4-5x the cost of equivalent third part), though again with the average Apple user you tend to just not over think such things and order from the apple store what you need. I understand that you should really have a choice as an end user and Apple are short sighted in taking that option off the table. I just think that they know their market and are trying to deliver quick, efficient machines that work out the box with little effort. If you are a PC head then you are probably not going to buy into that, and that is absolutely fine. I’ll stick with my Mac just because it’s just a tool to use and I just use it with little fuss, when I turn it off or on standby at the end of a days work, I forget about it. If I want to game I chuck my Xbox on and use that. I do miss the old days of turning up to lan Quake 3 competitions when everyone brought out their beige monster pc rigs and I just ran my original (titanium) MacBook Pro….
The M1 Max is great for editing video on the couch and in bed. The ultra is crazy powerful but I doubt you'll gain more time back over the M1 Max as you can't necessarily edit faster but you'll render faster, and the price savings with the Max I don't think you overspent. My edits take more time than the rendering so not worth the money for me.
So true! I always say the same thing about Office PCs. I used to always recommend a Core i5 over Core i7/i9 for office applications. Paying all that extra cash for anything more did not enable a user to type faster!
Depends on your work situation. I have a large number of files for which editing is minimal, and rendering multiple files simultaneously is a productivity bottleneck.
@@JeffGeerlingWith gas prices like this I guarantee my dad would be making room under the covers for that chonker. At 6.2W that’s a whole 1/2 cent of heat per night!
The power consumption comparison is interesting because one PC is half the price. If you were to idle the Ryzen pc 24/7 and not even turn on the the Mac Studio, at average KWH cost in the US you’d have to wait 25 years for it to hit the same cost as the Studio.
But the Carbon footprint isn't going to look good. I"m hoping the trend to more efficient power supply and lower idle becomes a popular trend across all computing platforms.
@@barbietripping When the energy costs start to ramp up and countries increase taxes on energy so people use less you will see way more value. Just hope AMD and Intel take notice.
@@barbietripping the price difference if you toss the 6700xt in, which was included in his power draw test, would be a $500 difference in price and would be looking at 12.5 years instead.
@@hmurchison8123 is the carbon footprint on non upgradable hardware that physically cannot be fixed without throwing the the whole board out at an Apple store going to look good?
I WILL be watching for the Asahi linux review VERY, VERY, VERY closely, as I do not like OSX, but I do want to use their hardware, the ARM architecture VERY much interests me for this.
I would love to see some benchmarks on the Linux distro built for M1 silicon. Most of my workflows are built on Linux containers/VMs and seeing how the Apple silicon stacks up to X86 instructions would be very interesting...
If only apple was not apple, and would allow other ARM users access to the M1 Ultra technology, like say the Raspberry Pi foundation? A Pi 5 with an Ultra SoC? You know it makes sense!
Would be really nice to see Linux running on the Mac, but I really wanna see little pi boi finally using some GPU so I can finally use my 3090ti with my pi (jk, I don’t have a 3090ti, scalpers bought it all :,) )
Put all of your headless servers ( Rpis, clusters, boxes ) in a black cabinet on wheels with a UPS. Call it the COMPUTERINATOR ( flashy scifi lights necesarry )
"Selling my Mac Mini" and also "Shopping for a rack that holds both". Hmm, "what the wife was told when buying new stuff" vs "what's really going down".
I’m super excited to see Asahi performance. I’ve heard Asahi has been faster for some when it comes to certain tasks (all while rendering everything on the CPU!!), so maybe you could push the kernel compiling even further!
Well as you mentioned synthetic benchmarks are kinda useless. The over all comparison is kinda weird. You are comparing a 2 year old mid range 6 core CPU with a brand new 10 core one. Also the CPU is bottle-necking your system and while your graphics card is good, it doesn't matter in recompiling Linux kernel. Lastly if an Intel or AMD PC finishes a task in half the time, it will stop drawing as much power, while waiting for the Apple system to finish.
When you said that you wouldn't put it past Apple to weld the thing shut if they could get away with it (I agree), I immediately wondered that if you feel like that about the company (so do I), why give them your money? The best way we can deal with companies is to vote with our wallets.
I hate Apple - I really do, but damn their hardware performs so well in terms of efficiency. There's simply no product in the x86/x64 market, that could deliver such performance AND efficiency. That's why I just might get a M1 Studio or MacBook.
@@davidrgilson and also - all this efficiency, but still creates useless e-waste that could be avoided a lot, and you pay through the roof anyway, which devoids you of any 'savings' you made with efficiency
I'd take an Asus g14 over the M1 Mac my work gave me, but it's a long way in front of the Dell I had previously. Honestly though never going to buy one, purely down to the business practices.
There is something I really like about this guy's videos, but can't really put a pin on it. Sorry, Jeff. I usually try to give useable feedback on YT, but don't have much to offer here.
The SSD is in one slot (and there seems to be a second slot as well), but it's a proprietary system. The swappable part is just the memory - and that's dongled to the device. If you put it in another Mac Studio, it won't work. (I read that elsewhere, there are videos on RU-vid, too.)
If the firmware can be updated the actual SSD memory could be upgraded, most likely (just like on the existing Mac Pro). I'm hopeful Apple will offer upgrades-the decision to keep the memory in an expansion slot required time and money to do... they'd have to be able to change it out somehow.
I'd bet the ports were basically a response to supply chain issues more than Apple wanting to offer upgrades. Socketed ram and SSDs mean you can keep churning out main boards and lower spec versions even if there is another dram shortage. Also if they are planning on keeping this design around for a few years, this allows an easy mid generation refresh to higher ram and SSD capacities without re-tooling.
Although I don't expect miracles from Asahi at this point .. I'd really like to see how it runs on M1 Mini.. If AMD doesn't get their shit together I'll be running Linux on M1 machines at some point..
Nice! Silent and efficient! I'm certainly curious to see what the m1 mini is like running Linux. I would also have liked to see the Idle and under load number for the Mini using the same load and the same test equipment that you used for the Ryzen and Studio.
Regarding idle power - it's actually not the CPU consuming that power, it's everything else. Mainly the mainboard (chipset, etc), RAM (a couple watts) and HDDs if you have them. The CPU will go waaay down in power consumption when truly idling. Power under load - just imagine if you'd measured against an Intel i9. (If you consider that an whataboutism... fair enough.)
True, when the PC is 'off', the thing is still pulling 1-2W (the Studio shows as 0.0W on the Kill-A-Watt). But the AMD CPUs are also not as good at idle power consumption as the latest Intel chips (especially lower end).
@@JeffGeerling i would say it's the opposite, ryzen 5000 are remarkably effective at low power compared to intel 12th gen - intel chips just scale very well when given enough power to draw
The best of the videos: the bloopers. You are a real person. A really SMART person, but still human like the rest of us. Keep up the great content, I drop what I am doing when I see a new video. When can we start buying autographed old gear from you???
Why aren’t anyone talking about the one single real issue with this computer? The worst and most horrible part! It’s not a cube:( I hope the Mac Pro is a true cube.
Great video, thank you for the information presented in a fun way. Wonder if you can help me make a decision. I am a full-time audio/video producer and currently use an iMac Pro (3 years old). I am upgrading my studio and I am having trouble deciding whether to pull the trigger on the new Mac Studio with the M1 Ma. I have an i7, 64 gigs of ram, and a 1 TB of storage in my Pro. Do you think I would get considerably better performance with the M1 max version than what I currently have. I use Premiere Pro as my primary video software and Ableton Live and Audition for Audio Production. Or…the big question…should I look for a PC like the HP Z series? Thoughts?
Please, please do the Asahi linux ASAP. I have a macbook air, that I love the hw, but I really hate mac os X, so to me, moving back to linux is something I've been wanting to do since day 3 or 4 since I got the macbook.
I think you hit the nail on the head. The M1 is amazing hardware wise. As for performance, it's only good for the things that are actually optimized for it. Which is basically creative productivity work. As for everything else, either it won't perform as good, or in worst case, it won't support it at all - like gaming, which is a joke on Mac.
Exactly, good summary. Though the base M1 is great for general (non-gaming or casual gaming only) computing, makes for a great laptop or simple family desktop like the iMac or M1 mini.
the "gaming is a joke on mac" is so overplayed and outdated. nowdays, basically anything will play games. People even got games to run on Chromebooks. Whether its steam streaming, xbox xcloud, nvidia thing, whatever, you can game on pretty much anything now. Not to mention more games have native mac versions than native linux versions, but people wont shut up about that :P
I'd be very interested in a look at Asahi Linux, as long as people watching understand it's not finished and certain things are still actively being worked on -- GPU support is missing, some hardware/peripherals won't work, etc etc! Still, it'd be really neat to see Linux properly coded up for the Apple M1 family of machines!
about that comparison, the ryzen has only 6 cores, the m1 has more cores and the hardware acelerators, it does better, but this is just a r5, not inpressive tbh
Wait, you're comparing it to a 5600x?? That's basically the lowest 5000 series Ryzen CPU you can get lol this is like some sort of fake advertising commercial 😂 "If it's benchmarks you're after, the latest 'Threadripper' is the one for you" this would be more honest.
Problem is the ryzen PC can be upgraded and it will probably outlast the studio. Main complaint about apple products in general is their anti consumer e-waste policies.
upgradable yes ...outliving is debatable. I'm running Monterey on 4 macs bought off of eBay from 2014 and 2015. Macs last a long time while retaining the ability to run the current OS.
@@hmurchison8123 Those Macs just use Intel processors. You could easily run a non-Mac with the same processor. You also have a plethora of OS options as well as desktop environments.
@@hmurchison8123 You comparing the only macbooks that don't die to modern macbooks only show that you literally do not have an idea how horribly unreliable macbooks from 2016 and onward are. Also don't kid yourself, apple dropped newest OS for your 2014 models "because fuck you". You trying to defend apple is pathethic, especially considering the shady shit apple is trying to pull with these studio macs and the studio panels.
@@hmurchison8123 My 2012 macbook pro can not be upgraded to the latest macos, my 2012 windows laptop can be upgraded to windows 11. So no macs do not outlive windows PCs, that is a myth. And this is coming from someone that has a 2020 Macbook Pro, it will last a while but not as long as a windows PC since Apple treats it like smartphone updates.
Software wise Microsoft supports their hardware longer than Apple. Hardware wise, intel Macs and PC are basically have similar internals. Apple's new hardware is still unproven since the M1 is just first gen. Theoretically, if the SSD of m1 hardware can somehow be replaced, it should last a very long time because it runs much cooler than Intel chips. I had a few Windows gaming laptops and one desktop die on me because of heat.
Asahi Linux on the Mac Studio really seems interesting. It's not officially supported by the Asahi Linux installer but it's worth a shot and tinkering around. Maybe you can also contribute to Asahi.
Ooo yes test out the M1 Linux distro!! I was thinking “man that low power draw and high core count would make for a great virtualization machine” Would love to see if you can do VMs or containers with Asahi. Bonus points if you could do GPU pass through or somehow do hw accelerated H.264 encoding (ie, plex)
So far GPU on Asahi isn't supported, probably will take a bit more time to reverse-engineer. But even without it, the rest of the hardware could be compelling for certain Linux use cases.
Well true... I was just trying to think of all the things an anti-Apple commenter would pick up like "the Mac Studio doesn't have a discrete graphics card" and "the Mac Studio can't play current AAA games" :P I figure those of us who know... we don't need to have all the things explained.
I've never really have been a big fan of apple mainly for their high price and polices but I've got too admit their editing software and quality in the devices & packaging is outstanding.
What a beast of a computer! I'd love to see some Asahi Linux in action, I heard about it shortly after Marcan had a hand in stuffing Linux on the Nintendo Switch which I use a lot, and been following the project for a long time now. I've never even used a Mac, well, besides a bit of clicking around on a public Mac at a cafe. And scratching my head over the mouse. But anyways, yeah, Asahi. Sounds awesome, you have my thumbs up.
Why did you pay for the built in 4TB when you have (I think) 2 different NAS's in your rack?? I realize that SSDs are faster but it's a huge price premium. I am considering a base studio/1TB model and just putting a local thunderbolt or USB-C drive for my local video editing.
I've decided over the years that editing everything on one local volume is worth the one-time price Apple charges. I have everything local backed up to a NAS over a 2.5G network. Someday if I can upgrade everything to 10G, and I can get a NAS that can transfer at 500 MB/sec all day (the current NASes I'm using don't have the horsepower), I could edit over the network more easily. As it is, running local is just easier. I could do an external Thunderbolt volume, but those are similarly expensive, and would add more equipment in my rack.
@@JeffGeerling I've looked at the OWC ministack, as it has the same footprint. Wondering if more such devices will be marketed now that Apple has released the Studio
@@JeffGeerling An NVMe stick and USB adapter are relatively cheap and could be taped onto the top of the computer. I don't know what the practical performance difference would be but I can't imagine it would be too significant for video editing. If you keep all your video files on the external drive it's still all on one local volume.
I feel like the M1 generation of Mac machines would work as amazing servers, they consume very little power, even under load and they have a pretty damn reasonable amount of horsepower compared to Raspberry Pi's and other consumer ARM systems. Only unfortunate thing being that there's very little room for upgrades or expansions.
Indeed, I find it very hard to say it as Apple's walled garden business models really make me want to hate everything they do, but these M1 chips do seem to really hit a great sweet spot of performance and efficiency - far better for a large variety of users that don't really need the super computer number cruncher than the AMD/Intel competition, and for once don't seem quite so stupendously overpriced for the hardware insides capabilities. But really they need to put out a workstation/server version so you can choose to expand the IO/Storage etc to actually have the damn thing meet your needs.
cost is a bummer, i dont think u need much power to host even a small office server, for bigger commercial usage, dedicated modules are certainly better
@@foldionepapyrus3441 And of course I'd love to see proper Linux support if they ever do release a workstation/server M1 Mac. Not sure if they ever would, but a man can certainly dream. :)
@@thesilverydragon It would certainly be basically useless to me without proper Linux support, still not everyone cares or hates the 'Apple experience'....
@@thesilverydragon I would jump on that - only reason I didn't get a mac mini was the lack of linux support. Using a 1000$ gpu less 5600G (those 1.5tb nvme ssds, and 32Gb of fast ram wasn't cheap)
