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Art et designTranscription
00:00Welcome to the review of the Mac at the studio.
00:05I mean, welcome to the review of the Mac studio.
00:09All right, so this is the computer I personally got really excited about.
00:29When they announced it, because we've built a video studio here and this computer is literally
00:35called the Mac studio.
00:37So the entire purpose is to be the ideal computer that is small and powerful enough to be in
00:42a studio environment.
00:43And they had all these example studios in the Apple event from music studios to design
00:47studios to specifically video studios.
00:51And so they made a little cube the size of two and a half Mac minis with a bunch of
00:55IO, some new cooling and an M1 Max or an M1 Ultra chip inside specifically to live
01:04in these studio environments.
01:05And so now I've got one here in our studio.
01:08So I've been thrown all types of tasks and projects and accessories at this thing, including
01:14this new studio display, which I also plan on making a separate review about because
01:19it's pretty weird.
01:20Make sure you get subscribed for that.
01:22And I actually have two, but I've mostly been putting my time into testing this M1 Ultra
01:26version because it's the newest, biggest, baddest chip.
01:30So I call this the 2X machine.
01:33Basically everything about this machine is doubled.
01:37Now I'm going to be referring to the M1 Max chip a lot during this review.
01:40So if you haven't already seen the MacBook Pro review with the M1 Max chip in it, that's
01:45going to be very helpful.
01:46I'll leave that link below the like button.
01:48This one basically doubles all the things.
01:51So physically speaking, it's basically like two Mac minis stacked on top of each other
01:56melted into one thick Mac mini, three C's.
02:01And this is incredibly small for the amount of power it puts out.
02:03It can sit on any desk alongside speakers or a monitor or whatever you set it up with.
02:08Also, and this is a total coincidence, but I set mine up on this desk I got from Blue
02:12Dot, which already has a bunch of these perforated holes that remind me of the Mac.
02:16And it fits absolutely perfectly underneath the shelf so that a monitor can sit on top
02:22of the shelf without actually sitting on top of the computer.
02:26Anyway, this is the back of the computer, which has a full suite of IO, even more ports
02:30than the Mac mini.
02:32There are four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10 gigabit ethernet port, the power plug, two USB-A ports,
02:39an HDMI 2.0 port, not 2.1 again for some reason, and a headphone jack that can support high
02:45impedance headphones just like the MacBook Pro.
02:47Now it's not kicking out world-class audio by any means.
02:50It's not going to replace my universal audio deck, but it is convenient to have.
02:55Kind of the same way HDMI is convenient, although I'm kind of surprised this one doesn't do
02:59HDMI 2.1.
03:01I get it on the laptop.
03:03That's just so you can plug in a random monitor on the go.
03:06But this is going to sit at your desk and it would be nice to have higher refresh rate.
03:10But at the same time, the four Thunderbolt ports will support up to four Pro Display
03:15XDRs, which are all 6K.
03:18So I guess you got that going for you.
03:20But then at the front, hey, look, look at that.
03:22Front IO, which is nice because this is going to sit on a desk, not under it.
03:25So up front here, that's going to be two USB-C ports if you get the base M1 Max version,
03:30but those graduate to two Thunderbolt 4 ports if you get the M1 Ultra version, because there's
03:35literally more buses available.
03:37And then an SD card slot, because every studio I know has tons of SD cards lying around
03:44somewhere.
03:45So it turns out if I wanted to replace my Mac Pro today, that is enough IO for me to
03:49actually do that.
03:50So I've got two Thunderbolt displays and then one Thunderbolt RAID array and the DAC, the
03:56Universal Audio DAC is also Thunderbolt.
03:57So all together, plus a couple of card readers, I'd be set.
04:01Now, Apple did use the word modularity in their presentation.
04:06I don't know if that word means what they think it means.
04:09I mean, maybe if they're just trying to say, because it's not connected to a display and
04:13you can choose your own, unlike the iMac, that's what they're considering modular.
04:17If not, then I have no idea what they're talking about, because this thing is absolutely not
04:21modular at all.
04:22All of the parts inside are soldered in.
04:24There is no upgrading of the RAM or the GPU or any parts of this thing ever for the entire
04:29lifetime of the machine.
04:31I'm not even sure there's any reasonable way to actually open up and get into the Mac
04:36Studio.
04:37So yeah, I can't give you modular on this one, Apple.
04:41But also this level of vertical integration is basically required to get a computer to
04:46be this small and this efficient.
04:49Like I've seen some small PCs before.
04:51This one is tiny.
04:53Also the power supply is built in, so there's no wall wart.
04:56It's all just in this little box.
04:58And also fun fact, Apple did send both the M1 Max and M1 Ultra versions here to the studio
05:02to test.
05:03And the M1 Ultra version is in fact noticeably heavier than the Max.
05:09It's two whole pounds heavier.
05:10It turns out that's because the heat sink they used in the Ultra version is made of
05:14copper instead of the aluminum one they put in the M1 Max.
05:18It's much more dense.
05:19It's heavier.
05:20That's pretty serious.
05:21But I think that's my cue to talk about the inside of this machine a little bit more,
05:24because that's where the 2X theme starts up again.
05:27So you remember the event.
05:28The M1 Ultra is literally two M1 Maxes basically fused together with a high enough bandwidth
05:35between them to behave like one huge mega chip.
05:38Which is awesome, because that means two times the CPU cores, two times the GPU cores, two
05:43times the memory bandwidth, and two times the total memory.
05:47So in applications that can take advantage of this stuff, well, this should be twice
05:51the machine.
05:52Now, Apple did the whole thing they always do with graphs.
05:57You know, you can never really take these completely at face value.
06:00I did do some synthetic benchmarks though, and for a lot of them, it does behave like
06:05twice the computer.
06:06It absolutely blew the doors off every other Mac ever made, especially including the iMac
06:11Pro, and it even flirts with the 28-core cheese grater Mac Pro that I've been using.
06:17So in Geekbench, it ties the highest single-core score I've ever seen, and then it drops a
06:21multi-core score literally double the M1 Max MacBook Pro.
06:26And yes, that also makes it more powerful in the CPU department than any other Mac
06:30ever, including 28-core Mac Pro.
06:33Then in the Cinebench test, which I think is a little more realistic, ran it for 10
06:37minutes, and it gave me around 24,000, which again, is about double the M1 Max, and is
06:42right in line between a 16-core Threadripper and a high-thread-count Xeon chip like the
06:48Mac Pro.
06:49Basically, the CPU benchmarks are killer, Intel could never.
06:52But then, we gotta talk about GPU stuff, it gets a little more interesting.
06:56So you might remember, Apple's graphs were comparing, at one point, the Ultra to an RTX
07:013090.
07:02They kept saying, it'll have the same performance as an RTX 3090, but at 200 watts less power.
07:09And that's very impressive, but it turns out, the graph should continue a little something
07:15like this, because the RTX 3090 will happily continue to draw way more power, up to 400
07:22watts of power.
07:23It's one of the power-hungriest cards ever.
07:25So shoutout to Haim Gartenberg at The Verge for this chart inspiration.
07:29So it turns out, it doesn't beat the RTX 3090 at anything that you would buy an RTX
07:353090 for, which I didn't really expect it to, because that card's almost exclusively
07:40for gaming.
07:41Like, you buy that to play games, and you would never buy this to play games.
07:45But hey, double the cores, still do double the work.
07:49So on Geekbench's Metal Benchmark, which measures GPU performance with things like
07:52image processing, I got nearly double the score of the M1 Mac's MacBook Pro, cracking
07:58100,000, which is around what a Radeon Pro Vega 2 Duo in my Mac Pro scores, but the Mac
08:05Pro has four of them.
08:06Now, synthetic benchmarks are cool and everything, but you don't buy a computer like this to
08:11just try to get the highest benchmark scores.
08:13You buy a new computer to see if that new power can translate to real-world performance
08:18and real-world workflows.
08:21And so basically what I've noticed most is the more well-optimized the app, the closer
08:27you get to those 2x performance numbers.
08:31Nothing really typically hits exactly 2x, but the M1 Ultra does feel faster a bit sometimes
08:37than the M1 Macs.
08:38I mean, in everyday performance, just zipping around the Mac, yeah, this thing slaps.
08:42It makes me really wish I had a high refresh rate monitor here that plays nicely with the
08:46Mac because that would actually feel way more responsive, like the MacBook Pro with
08:51its ProMotion screen, but you know, 5,000 plus megabytes per second read-write speeds
08:56from the drive, things open instantly.
08:58It's great.
08:59And then in my own workflow, you might know by now, I'm a Final Cut Pro editor here,
09:04it did give me more headroom and it did perform better than the M1 Mac's MacBook Pro.
09:10But again, it didn't quite beat the Mac Pro I'm currently using.
09:14It's gotten to the point where I can drop fresh 8K RAW files on the timeline in better
09:20quality playback mode, immediately hit play and start tweaking color and messing with
09:24RAW settings and it plays back perfectly at 30 frames without hesitation.
09:29Minimal lag when I hit the play button.
09:31I love it.
09:32It's when you start adding layers of objects and plugins and animations and trackers on
09:36top that things do start to slow down and I can still bring it to its knees with enough
09:40layers of moving objects like I had six at the beginning of the iPad Air review.
09:46But then when I got to the export at the end of the video, it took the Mac Studio seven
09:50minutes and 30 seconds to export my iPhone SE review, which is pretty impressive.
09:55But interestingly, this same project took six minutes and five seconds to export from
10:00the Mac Pro.
10:01So it's still more powerful.
10:02It just has more raw horsepower.
10:04But of course, not everybody's using Apple's own apps like I do with Final Cut.
10:08There are plenty of Premiere studios.
10:10There are lots of DaVinci Resolve studios.
10:12Hell, even in this studio, we've got people using heavy Photoshop and After Effects stuff
10:18for thumbnails and motion graphics.
10:20So I am happy to report that Adobe has been working through their suite.
10:23The newest After Effects beta is dramatically faster on Apple Silicon.
10:28So that's awesome.
10:29And I'm going to link an article from Scott Simmons where he went through a bunch of tests
10:32between Premiere and Resolve comparing the M1 Ultra with the M1 Max.
10:37And you can see a consistent performance improvement with all the heavier stuff like
10:41adding warp stabilizer, rendering a heavy clip, etc.
10:44The only thing I did find where the M1 Ultra didn't beat the M1 Max was interestingly
10:51just a straight up ProRes video export.
10:54Sorry for the tons of video comparisons, but hey, it's a video studio.
10:57So this was one area where it did smoke the Mac Pro because the new ProRes, the media
11:03engines in these Apple Silicon products are great.
11:06The M1 Ultra has literally double the media engine of the M1 Max.
11:10So I thought it would be twice as fast.
11:13While they both beat the Mac Pro, it was roughly the same time to export a single ProRes clip.
11:18But generally, yeah, it might not have matched the Mac Pro at every single little thing I
11:23threw at it.
11:24But yeah, if you're not a video person, I'll let you find the benchmark that applies best
11:27to your workflow.
11:28But generally with the stuff I threw at it, M1 Ultra heavily outperformed M1 Max.
11:34And it did it all very quietly with very little heat in this tiny little box that
11:39just sits inconspicuously on your desk.
11:41I mean, this computer makes it so obvious why they were eager to ditch Intel.
11:46Also, let me give a shout out to the sustainability element here too.
11:49So they use recycled materials inside these computers.
11:53That's cool.
11:54And then even the packaging.
11:55I don't think people understand how hard this is.
11:57The packaging for these computers is absolutely incredible.
12:01Fully recyclable, lots of padding, moving parts, and then with a literal floating cardboard
12:07platform in the middle for shock absorption.
12:10It's wild.
12:11I would not be surprised if just this box added like 50 bucks to the price of the computer
12:16just to engineer such a ridiculous package.
12:19But as far as real world impact, the biggest chunk of that will come from the efficiency
12:24of these chips.
12:25Of course, Apple says that it'll use over a thousand kilowatt hours less energy per
12:30year than an average PC desktop.
12:33That's good for your electricity bill, but that's also good for the environment.
12:36But at the end of the day, look, this is just a tool, right?
12:39Just like the app or program you're using already is just a tool.
12:43And so I think people look for the benchmark that will prove that this machine will make
12:49them better at what they do.
12:51It can't do that.
12:52Like just because it's fast, if you're bad at editing and you get this machine, you'll
12:56still be bad at editing, but just faster.
13:00But I am really happy to see new machines like this still coming out that do make big
13:04leaps in performance and capability.
13:09Sort of raises the ceiling for what you can do.
13:11Now all that being said, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is still coming.
13:17And I say that not even like as a warning to most people, but just to remind myself
13:22because honestly, most workflows are covered with the Mac Studio.
13:26Like today, if I'm a YouTuber and I'm just editing 4K or 8K even, ProRes all the time,
13:34this will be able to handle it.
13:35But if you're doing large 3D modeling projects or tons of tracking and layers and After Effects
13:42or even in audio projects, lots of plugins and video stuff, if you're really pushing
13:46the limits of your machine, the Mac Pro platform still does offer the most horsepower.
13:52So I mean, it shouldn't be surprising that the current 40 pound, 28 core, 768 gig of
14:01RAM Mac Pro manages to slightly outperform this little tiny box here.
14:05But when we do get the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro, I do expect performance to double this
14:11one up again, which is crazy to say out loud.
14:15But for everyone else, this thing is overkill.
14:18And I love that that's the narrative around this computer.
14:20Like, do you really need that much power?
14:23Probably not.
14:24But hey, at least it's $5,000 of overkill versus $25,000 of overkill.
14:31So it's a bargain either way.
14:35That's been it.
14:36Thanks for watching.
14:37Catch you guys in the next one.
14:38Peace.
14:39Transcribed by https://otter.ai