Tested: Mac Studio with M1 Max vs. Mac Studio with M1 Ultra

13

Comments

  • Reply 41 of 71
    Tech607Tech607 Posts: 14member
  • Reply 42 of 71
    XedXed Posts: 2,519member
    Tech607 said:
    I am not trying to be argumentative but look at this. Come on $6000 and $1000 for the stand. Did the price of aluminum go up or something. Just acknowledge that this is gouging and I will concede to the rest of your argument. 
    You know that things in the same product category aren't necessarily the same thing, right? Why do you think the Studio Display costs considerably less than the Pro Display XDR? Why do you think its tilt and height adjustable stand is only $400 more and it's nano-texturing costs $300?

    https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-studio-display
    williamlondonFileMakerFeller
  • Reply 43 of 71
    It turns out you can upgrade the SSDs and it is easy enough that many people can do it themselves or can take it to a third party repair shop to get it upgraded (remember right to repair?) Now the question is: Why didn't Apple take the step of making it even easier by exposing the screws on the bottom, announcing the fact that the SSDs can be upgraded and providing a guide for users and technicians? The most incredible thing about this is that Apple would sell more Mac Studios if buyers were confident they could upgrade them in the future. Suddenly that $4000 or $5000 (with upgraded GPU) isn't such a bitter pill to swallow. 64GB is plenty for most users and bigger, faster SSDs are obtainable in the future if needed.
  • Reply 44 of 71
    XedXed Posts: 2,519member
    It turns out you can upgrade the SSDs and it is easy enough that many people can do it themselves or can take it to a third party repair shop to get it upgraded (remember right to repair?) Now the question is: Why didn't Apple take the step of making it even easier by exposing the screws on the bottom, announcing the fact that the SSDs can be upgraded and providing a guide for users and technicians? The most incredible thing about this is that Apple would sell more Mac Studios if buyers were confident they could upgrade them in the future. Suddenly that $4000 or $5000 (with upgraded GPU) isn't such a bitter pill to swallow. 64GB is plenty for most users and bigger, faster SSDs are obtainable in the future if needed.
    So you're saying that the world's most valuable company which took in $125 billion in profit last year needs to learn from you how to earn money. Maybe you should shoot Tim Cook an email: [email protected].

    edited March 2022 robabaJWSCFileMakerFeller
  • Reply 45 of 71
    Xed said:
    It turns out you can upgrade the SSDs and it is easy enough that many people can do it themselves or can take it to a third party repair shop to get it upgraded (remember right to repair?) Now the question is: Why didn't Apple take the step of making it even easier by exposing the screws on the bottom, announcing the fact that the SSDs can be upgraded and providing a guide for users and technicians? The most incredible thing about this is that Apple would sell more Mac Studios if buyers were confident they could upgrade them in the future. Suddenly that $4000 or $5000 (with upgraded GPU) isn't such a bitter pill to swallow. 64GB is plenty for most users and bigger, faster SSDs are obtainable in the future if needed.
    So you're saying that the world's most valuable company which took in $125 billion in profit last year needs to learn from you how to earn money. Maybe you should shoot Tim Cook an email: [email protected].

    Easier to block him than reply to his incessantly stupid posts which are so wrong every single time.
    mike1robaba
  • Reply 46 of 71
    timmilleatimmillea Posts: 242member
    Awful. The Mac Studio is the latest example of the disastrous downturn in Apple design. Apple has got so flabby that the machine that should occupy the size of a Mac Mini is now twice its size. 

    Once you start pandering to online wish lists then you include every which way port, double them and end up with a machine fit for no particular design aim and missing the price point for most use-case scenarios. Awful. 

    Are they going to double the size and weight of the MacBook Air next? This is the trend.

    Apple needs some serious discipline in the liberal arts design cutting-edge as was its history.

    Reduce ports, increase total (not Soc) efficiency per unit energy, make smaller, faster, better and please specific use-case groups. This shameful period of  pandering to the masses dilutes the essence of Apple. Apple's SoCs are great but they are not enough. 

    Bloat, bloat, bigger, please everyone only works for a limited time. By the time they need to turn around they are seven years too late. 

    Jobs & Ive are dearly missed. I give Apple 7 years before becoming insignificant again - probably bought for its IP and trading name by its suppliers. That is all it is fit for, on current trends. 
  • Reply 47 of 71
    XedXed Posts: 2,519member
    timmillea said:
    Awful. The Mac Studio is the latest example of the disastrous downturn in Apple design. Apple has got so flabby that the machine that should occupy the size of a Mac Mini is now twice its size. 

    Once you start pandering to online wish lists then you include every which way port, double them and end up with a machine fit for no particular design aim and missing the price point for most use-case scenarios. Awful. 

    Are they going to double the size and weight of the MacBook Air next? This is the trend.

    Apple needs some serious discipline in the liberal arts design cutting-edge as was its history.

    Reduce ports, increase total (not Soc) efficiency per unit energy, make smaller, faster, better and please specific use-case groups. This shameful period of  pandering to the masses dilutes the essence of Apple. Apple's SoCs are great but they are not enough. 

    Bloat, bloat, bigger, please everyone only works for a limited time. By the time they need to turn around they are seven years too late. 

    Jobs & Ive are dearly missed. I give Apple 7 years before becoming insignificant again - probably bought for its IP and trading name by its suppliers. That is all it is fit for, on current trends. 
    “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time"

    Your post embodies that.
    muthuk_vanalingamGG1JWSCFileMakerFeller
  • Reply 48 of 71
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,328member

    This is a great review showing some benchmarks

    M1 Ultra Mac Studio - Benchmarks & Thermals (The TRUTH!) - YouTube

    Thanks for the link. I'm surprised more people aren't asking more questions and discussing why it appears that Apple is either intentionally or inadvertently throttling the power consumption on the GPU cores, which is obviously contributing to the lower than expected GPU benchmarks. To be clear, Apple isn't applying thermal throttling unless it is their intention to run the GPUs at less than one-half their maximum power consumption. The fans are barely above idle and the systems are running cool as ever, which makes me wonder what's going on. Hmmm.
  • Reply 49 of 71
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    flydog said:
    crowley said:
    crowley said:

    I'd love to hear from someone who would lay down $2,000 extra just for a couple of Thunderbolt ports.
    well... it was only $1400 ... and it gets you Thunderbolt ports AND twice the processing power.  you don't think there are people for whom that would be worthwhile?  You can't see where that would be lucrative without hearing from one of them? :) 
    Quoted text only mentions the ports, nothing about processing power. 
    Thanks captain obvious. That’s exactly the problem with the quoted text 
    Then why are you criticising me?  That's what I was calling out in the first place, and it was a joke more than a real criticism.
  • Reply 50 of 71
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    Tech607 said:
    I am not trying to be argumentative but look at this. Come on $6000 and $1000 for the stand. Did the price of aluminum go up or something. Just acknowledge that this is gouging and I will concede to the rest of your argument. 

    Is the stand mandatory?

    Then it can hardly be price gouging.
    dewmemike1
  • Reply 51 of 71
    mattinozmattinoz Posts: 2,299member
    ITGUYINSD said:
    darkvader said:
    Does anyone else think that paying $400 for 32GB of RAM or $200 for 512GB of SSD space is a bit expensive? Like perhaps four times what the parts should cost? I guess we will just have to upgrade them our... oh snap!

    No.  It's not "a bit expensive".  It's highway fucking robbery.

    Even if it was reasonable NOW (it's not) it'll be absolutely outrageous in 2-3 years after purchase which is the point when most people realize there's not enough RAM or storage and upgrade.

    The storage is the stupidest part.  The VAST majority of people don't know how much storage they'll need in the future when they buy a computer.  512GB is rarely enough.  And the only advantage of having the computer be a cute tiny little box is GONE when you've got to have an external box for the storage you'll need, the minuscule speed advantage of soldered storage is GONE when you're booting from that external box because the internal SSD is worn out.
    You might want to actually do a 5 minutes of research before thinking you know what you're writing about.

    The SSD in the Mac Studio is SOCKETED.  https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/20/mac-studio-ssd-may-be-upgradeable/

    It won't be long before someone (Apple or 3rd party) offers upgrades.  
    Still if you have a Pro workflow then the advice to buy what you know you'll need over the design life of the machine is still pretty valid. A day of downtime to switch out SSDs is still a day of downtime. 

    With socketed SSD's Apple could offer a very solid second hand market as each Mseries update happens top end user bring in units switch up to the latest sell refurbished (ie fresh SSD and a clean) to next tier.
    edited March 2022
  • Reply 52 of 71
    Xed said:
    Rogue01 said:
    Other articles have already posted the benchmarks for the M1 Ultra.  Like all other M1 CPUs, the single core score is in the 1700 range.  The M1 Ultra only excels with the multi-core score, over 20,000 in Geekbench 5.  So unless your work specifically takes advantage of the multi-core tasks and video work, the Mac Studio would be a waste of money.  The other difference between the base model studio and the Ultra CPU studio is the massive 2 pound heat sink required to keep the Ultra CPU cool.  Shop wisely.

    Everyone loves to claim how fast the M1 Macs are, but that is only the single core processes.  Most Intel CPUs have faster multi-core scores than the M1, by a considerable margin.  That is why Apple continued to sell the higher-end Intel Macs, also with dedicated GPUs that were faster than the M1.  The M1 Pro and Max fix the limitations of the M1, and the Ultra has amazing multi-core scores.  But if your work does not take advantage of the Pro, Max, and Ultra CPUs, you won't see any increase in performance because the single core score is the same as the M1 CPU.  I wonder what the M2 will bring to the table?
    That's a whole lot of wrong information to unpack.

    1) Apple Silicon has been eating Intel's lunch for a long time. Even AnandTech has shown that Apple has had "desktop class" performance in tiny iPads for a very long time before the M1 was announced. This was inevitable and Intel has nothing on the board except a strong desire to best Apple Silicon at some future date.

    2) macOS and Xcode make it very easy for even a simple app to work across multiple cores and this has been the case for a very long time.

    3) And you din't even mention the power draw to compete with Apple Silicon. Besides the Intel i9 12900 costing $600 for just the chip, it uses many times the power to run it at the same speed as the M1 Ultra. This makes the Mac Studio a very economical buy not just in terms of time to compete jobs, but your TCO.

    Apple is eating Intel's lunch and this will get people to switch and we could even see Apple move back into the server market because a 10,000 servers running a fraction of the power saves cost of energy and also allows for many more devices to be places closer together without needing to increase the power coming into the server room.
    I’ll only address item #2: Xcode is no magic bullet to make using all these cores to useful advantage on the simplest applications, or even the most demanding ones.  It doesn’t work like that AT ALL.  Very few applications users use would be possible to make better by throwing more cores at them no matter what you do, beyond maybe a couple cores for most interactive applications, because most applications will use a single thread to handle all the GUI stuff, and then do other processing off the main GUI thread, with the observation most of those threads used off the main thread don’t run with other threads they interact with or do something truly parallel with beyond merely keeping the GUI main thread from blocking.

    Question: how many threads are used for I/O?  Answer: unless it’s an embarrassingly-parallel situation, often a single user-space thread can handle multiple I/O things at once, because it’s mostly waiting.  The OS and in the user space level Grand Central Dispatch may keep more up and running, in concert with other applications, but the majority of the time, most threads in a thread pool are waiting with nothing to do.

    For the vast majority of applications, there’s not even a reasonable way to use 4 threads at a time, let alone 4 cores for that application where you’d ever notice it.  Note: some of the higher-end games can and will make use of more cores, as will developer tools like compilers and build systems, things that do a lot of processing.  If you’re using something like Apple’s office suite, you’d have a hard time keeping 4 cores busy running all of those applications at the same time, let alone any single one of those applications: the most demanding application in that would be Numbers, if you push it hard enough.  Perhaps one day when I have nothing better to do, I’ll do a test and see if Numbers was written in a manner to possibly make effective sustained use of multiple cores when processing a large spreadsheet: I’d wager the answer is they have not done so.  Spreadsheet performance was a commonly used metric in the past, but it’s considered a ho-hum task these days.

    Unless a user has special types of work they do that inherently uses a lot of threads and processor cores at the same time, the biggest use-case where people will bog down all the cores of an M1 Ultra involve their web browsers with a very large number of tabs open that are doing an unusual amount of computation in each one: even with a lot of ads going, it’d be very hard to use up all the cores, even though most web pages have no dependency on what other web pages are doing.  The heaviest loads of the browser for each page would be dispatching a thread per object downloaded and decoded on the page, but short of constant media streaming, this is very short-lived and leaves the machine not working hard for any given page: how many pages do people have downloading and streaming at the same time?  On average, not many!
  • Reply 53 of 71
    thedbathedba Posts: 762member
    Tech607 said:
    I am not trying to be argumentative but look at this. Come on $6000 and $1000 for the stand. Did the price of aluminum go up or something. Just acknowledge that this is gouging and I will concede to the rest of your argument. 

    While this may sound outrageous to you, there is a market for these items you described above.

    For instance would you ever consider buying one of these?
    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1663570-REG/red_digital_cinema_710_0342_v_raptor_8k_vv.html



    And if so, then you'll probably need a few of these
    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1662883-REG/red_digital_cinema_7500098_pro_660gb_cfexpress_2_0.html




    And we haven't even gotten to the lenses or the microphones or the other accessories.

    Bottom line, none of the items you or I described are probably made for us. But there are "professional" studios out there that do make use of these, in fact their businesses depend on it.  A $1000 stand isn't breaking their bank account any time soon.
    dewmemike1GG1JWSCFileMakerFeller
  • Reply 54 of 71
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    thedba said:
    Tech607 said:
    I am not trying to be argumentative but look at this. Come on $6000 and $1000 for the stand. Did the price of aluminum go up or something. Just acknowledge that this is gouging and I will concede to the rest of your argument. 

    While this may sound outrageous to you, there is a market for these items you described above.

    For instance would you ever consider buying one of these?
    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1663570-REG/red_digital_cinema_710_0342_v_raptor_8k_vv.html



    And if so, then you'll probably need a few of these
    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1662883-REG/red_digital_cinema_7500098_pro_660gb_cfexpress_2_0.html




    And we haven't even gotten to the lenses or the microphones or the other accessories.

    Bottom line, none of the items you or I described are probably made for us. But there are "professional" studios out there that do make use of these, in fact their businesses depend on it.  A $1000 stand isn't breaking their bank account any time soon.
    I don't think the argument is that the Pro Display XDR is useless, or that there aren't studios who can afford it.
  • Reply 55 of 71
    thedbathedba Posts: 762member
    crowley said:
    thedba said:
    Tech607 said:
    I am not trying to be argumentative but look at this. Come on $6000 and $1000 for the stand. Did the price of aluminum go up or something. Just acknowledge that this is gouging and I will concede to the rest of your argument. 

    While this may sound outrageous to you, there is a market for these items you described above.

    For instance would you ever consider buying one of these?
    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1663570-REG/red_digital_cinema_710_0342_v_raptor_8k_vv.html



    And if so, then you'll probably need a few of these
    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1662883-REG/red_digital_cinema_7500098_pro_660gb_cfexpress_2_0.html




    And we haven't even gotten to the lenses or the microphones or the other accessories.

    Bottom line, none of the items you or I described are probably made for us. But there are "professional" studios out there that do make use of these, in fact their businesses depend on it.  A $1000 stand isn't breaking their bank account any time soon.
    I don't think the argument is that the Pro Display XDR is useless, or that there aren't studios who can afford it.
    His exact words are:
    I am not trying to be argumentative but look at this. Come on $6000 and $1000 for the stand. Did the price of aluminum go up or something. Just acknowledge that this is gouging and I will concede to the rest of your argument. 

    My argument is about putting everything into context. 
    Is being 6' feet tall considered a giant? 
    Answer: Not if you're a human especially male, in fact it's pretty ordinary these days. However if you're referring to the height of a wolf at the shoulder, then yeah, that's being a giant.

    Context is everything.

    FileMakerFeller
  • Reply 56 of 71
    ApplePoorApplePoor Posts: 286member
    My Apple IIFx cost close to $10,000 in 1991 dollars. It was the top Apple model and had the most memory (32 KB I think in 8 sticks) and "hard drive" (80 MB comes to mind) of the day, The Radeon video card and one color monitor (21" CRT if I remember right that was extremely heavy as I recall) were NOT included in that price. 

    My 2013 six core MacPro with 64MB of ram and 1TB SSD was around $5,700 plus close to $1,000 for one 27" Thunderbolt Display. I had one already for a two screen setup using VESA mounts. OWC provided a 128MB memory upgrade and a 2TB SSD.

    My fully loaded 16" 2019 MacBook Pro Intel was over $6,000 even with my military discount. The new fully loaded MacBook Pro M1 Max scales in at under $6,100 before my discount.

    Looks like perhaps the $6k number is the target price for a Apple top model laptop. 

    So I consider a fully loaded Mac Studio with a single Studio display (VESA base) a bargain at under $9,600 before tax or extended warranty with our deflated dollars. I also do not need to be superman to carry the computer or the monitor.

    I ordered the Mac Studio M1 Ultra with 128Gb of memory and 4TB SSD and one Studio Display with VESA mount. A second one will be ordered in the fall. The system will be future proofed for me at my age (77).


    edited March 2022 FileMakerFeller
  • Reply 57 of 71
    Xed said:
    Rogue01 said:
    Other articles have already posted the benchmarks for the M1 Ultra.  Like all other M1 CPUs, the single core score is in the 1700 range.  The M1 Ultra only excels with the multi-core score, over 20,000 in Geekbench 5.  So unless your work specifically takes advantage of the multi-core tasks and video work, the Mac Studio would be a waste of money.  The other difference between the base model studio and the Ultra CPU studio is the massive 2 pound heat sink required to keep the Ultra CPU cool.  Shop wisely.

    Everyone loves to claim how fast the M1 Macs are, but that is only the single core processes.  Most Intel CPUs have faster multi-core scores than the M1, by a considerable margin.  That is why Apple continued to sell the higher-end Intel Macs, also with dedicated GPUs that were faster than the M1.  The M1 Pro and Max fix the limitations of the M1, and the Ultra has amazing multi-core scores.  But if your work does not take advantage of the Pro, Max, and Ultra CPUs, you won't see any increase in performance because the single core score is the same as the M1 CPU.  I wonder what the M2 will bring to the table?
    That's a whole lot of wrong information to unpack.

    1) Apple Silicon has been eating Intel's lunch for a long time. Even AnandTech has shown that Apple has had "desktop class" performance in tiny iPads for a very long time before the M1 was announced. This was inevitable and Intel has nothing on the board except a strong desire to best Apple Silicon at some future date.

    2) macOS and Xcode make it very easy for even a simple app to work across multiple cores and this has been the case for a very long time.

    3) And you din't even mention the power draw to compete with Apple Silicon. Besides the Intel i9 12900 costing $600 for just the chip, it uses many times the power to run it at the same speed as the M1 Ultra. This makes the Mac Studio a very economical buy not just in terms of time to compete jobs, but your TCO.

    Apple is eating Intel's lunch and this will get people to switch and we could even see Apple move back into the server market because a 10,000 servers running a fraction of the power saves cost of energy and also allows for many more devices to be places closer together without needing to increase the power coming into the server room.
    I’ll only address item #2: Xcode is no magic bullet to make using all these cores to useful advantage on the simplest applications, or even the most demanding ones.  It doesn’t work like that AT ALL.  Very few applications users use would be possible to make better by throwing more cores at them no matter what you do, beyond maybe a couple cores for most interactive applications, because most applications will use a single thread to handle all the GUI stuff, and then do other processing off the main GUI thread, with the observation most of those threads used off the main thread don’t run with other threads they interact with or do something truly parallel with beyond merely keeping the GUI main thread from blocking.

    Question: how many threads are used for I/O?  Answer: unless it’s an embarrassingly-parallel situation, often a single user-space thread can handle multiple I/O things at once, because it’s mostly waiting.  The OS and in the user space level Grand Central Dispatch may keep more up and running, in concert with other applications, but the majority of the time, most threads in a thread pool are waiting with nothing to do.

    For the vast majority of applications, there’s not even a reasonable way to use 4 threads at a time, let alone 4 cores for that application where you’d ever notice it.  Note: some of the higher-end games can and will make use of more cores, as will developer tools like compilers and build systems, things that do a lot of processing.  If you’re using something like Apple’s office suite, you’d have a hard time keeping 4 cores busy running all of those applications at the same time, let alone any single one of those applications: the most demanding application in that would be Numbers, if you push it hard enough.  Perhaps one day when I have nothing better to do, I’ll do a test and see if Numbers was written in a manner to possibly make effective sustained use of multiple cores when processing a large spreadsheet: I’d wager the answer is they have not done so.  Spreadsheet performance was a commonly used metric in the past, but it’s considered a ho-hum task these days.

    Unless a user has special types of work they do that inherently uses a lot of threads and processor cores at the same time, the biggest use-case where people will bog down all the cores of an M1 Ultra involve their web browsers with a very large number of tabs open that are doing an unusual amount of computation in each one: even with a lot of ads going, it’d be very hard to use up all the cores, even though most web pages have no dependency on what other web pages are doing.  The heaviest loads of the browser for each page would be dispatching a thread per object downloaded and decoded on the page, but short of constant media streaming, this is very short-lived and leaves the machine not working hard for any given page: how many pages do people have downloading and streaming at the same time?  On average, not many!
    Numbers does push the CPU a bit with large spreadsheets. I've made up a US Covid spreadsheet which is over 20 megs, I find with a large recalculation, that it utilizes over 700% of the CPU and over twenty threads. This is on a M1 MacBook Pro, 8 core/8 gigs. I'm not saying Numbers would push the Studio Mac. Maybe if someone went really, really, large.
    edited March 2022 anonconformist
  • Reply 58 of 71
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,858administrator
    It turns out you can upgrade the SSDs and it is easy enough that many people can do it themselves or can take it to a third party repair shop to get it upgraded (remember right to repair?) Now the question is: Why didn't Apple take the step of making it even easier by exposing the screws on the bottom, announcing the fact that the SSDs can be upgraded and providing a guide for users and technicians? The most incredible thing about this is that Apple would sell more Mac Studios if buyers were confident they could upgrade them in the future. Suddenly that $4000 or $5000 (with upgraded GPU) isn't such a bitter pill to swallow. 64GB is plenty for most users and bigger, faster SSDs are obtainable in the future if needed.
    You can't, the video posted on Friday was irresponsible and incomplete. Another YTer swapped out modules, and it didn't do anything.

    Slotted != upgradeable.
  • Reply 59 of 71
    thttht Posts: 5,420member
    It turns out you can upgrade the SSDs and it is easy enough that many people can do it themselves or can take it to a third party repair shop to get it upgraded (remember right to repair?) Now the question is: Why didn't Apple take the step of making it even easier by exposing the screws on the bottom, announcing the fact that the SSDs can be upgraded and providing a guide for users and technicians? The most incredible thing about this is that Apple would sell more Mac Studios if buyers were confident they could upgrade them in the future. Suddenly that $4000 or $5000 (with upgraded GPU) isn't such a bitter pill to swallow. 64GB is plenty for most users and bigger, faster SSDs are obtainable in the future if needed.
    You can't, the video posted on Friday was irresponsible and incomplete. Another YTer swapped out modules, and it didn't do anything.

    Slotted != upgradeable.
    Yup. Those storage daughter cards are not SSDs. It's basically dumb NAND without a SSD controller. The storage controller is on the SoC itself. A SSD typically has a controller chip in it, and Apple changed the pin out so you can't stick an SSD in those slots.

    I'm not sure it will be even possible to have a 3rd party produce a compatible NAND storage card for any of Apple's machines. There is a whole security chain with Apple's storage solution and replacing the builtin storage with a 3rd party may make reinstalling macOS impossible. They would have to make the tools available to 3rd parties.
    FileMakerFeller
  • Reply 60 of 71
    Xed said:
    Rogue01 said:
    Other articles have already posted the benchmarks for the M1 Ultra.  Like all other M1 CPUs, the single core score is in the 1700 range.  The M1 Ultra only excels with the multi-core score, over 20,000 in Geekbench 5.  So unless your work specifically takes advantage of the multi-core tasks and video work, the Mac Studio would be a waste of money.  The other difference between the base model studio and the Ultra CPU studio is the massive 2 pound heat sink required to keep the Ultra CPU cool.  Shop wisely.

    Everyone loves to claim how fast the M1 Macs are, but that is only the single core processes.  Most Intel CPUs have faster multi-core scores than the M1, by a considerable margin.  That is why Apple continued to sell the higher-end Intel Macs, also with dedicated GPUs that were faster than the M1.  The M1 Pro and Max fix the limitations of the M1, and the Ultra has amazing multi-core scores.  But if your work does not take advantage of the Pro, Max, and Ultra CPUs, you won't see any increase in performance because the single core score is the same as the M1 CPU.  I wonder what the M2 will bring to the table?
    That's a whole lot of wrong information to unpack.

    1) Apple Silicon has been eating Intel's lunch for a long time. Even AnandTech has shown that Apple has had "desktop class" performance in tiny iPads for a very long time before the M1 was announced. This was inevitable and Intel has nothing on the board except a strong desire to best Apple Silicon at some future date.

    2) macOS and Xcode make it very easy for even a simple app to work across multiple cores and this has been the case for a very long time.

    3) And you din't even mention the power draw to compete with Apple Silicon. Besides the Intel i9 12900 costing $600 for just the chip, it uses many times the power to run it at the same speed as the M1 Ultra. This makes the Mac Studio a very economical buy not just in terms of time to compete jobs, but your TCO.

    Apple is eating Intel's lunch and this will get people to switch and we could even see Apple move back into the server market because a 10,000 servers running a fraction of the power saves cost of energy and also allows for many more devices to be places closer together without needing to increase the power coming into the server room.
    I’ll only address item #2: Xcode is no magic bullet to make using all these cores to useful advantage on the simplest applications, or even the most demanding ones.  It doesn’t work like that AT ALL.  Very few applications users use would be possible to make better by throwing more cores at them no matter what you do, beyond maybe a couple cores for most interactive applications, because most applications will use a single thread to handle all the GUI stuff, and then do other processing off the main GUI thread, with the observation most of those threads used off the main thread don’t run with other threads they interact with or do something truly parallel with beyond merely keeping the GUI main thread from blocking.

    Question: how many threads are used for I/O?  Answer: unless it’s an embarrassingly-parallel situation, often a single user-space thread can handle multiple I/O things at once, because it’s mostly waiting.  The OS and in the user space level Grand Central Dispatch may keep more up and running, in concert with other applications, but the majority of the time, most threads in a thread pool are waiting with nothing to do.

    For the vast majority of applications, there’s not even a reasonable way to use 4 threads at a time, let alone 4 cores for that application where you’d ever notice it.  Note: some of the higher-end games can and will make use of more cores, as will developer tools like compilers and build systems, things that do a lot of processing.  If you’re using something like Apple’s office suite, you’d have a hard time keeping 4 cores busy running all of those applications at the same time, let alone any single one of those applications: the most demanding application in that would be Numbers, if you push it hard enough.  Perhaps one day when I have nothing better to do, I’ll do a test and see if Numbers was written in a manner to possibly make effective sustained use of multiple cores when processing a large spreadsheet: I’d wager the answer is they have not done so.  Spreadsheet performance was a commonly used metric in the past, but it’s considered a ho-hum task these days.

    Unless a user has special types of work they do that inherently uses a lot of threads and processor cores at the same time, the biggest use-case where people will bog down all the cores of an M1 Ultra involve their web browsers with a very large number of tabs open that are doing an unusual amount of computation in each one: even with a lot of ads going, it’d be very hard to use up all the cores, even though most web pages have no dependency on what other web pages are doing.  The heaviest loads of the browser for each page would be dispatching a thread per object downloaded and decoded on the page, but short of constant media streaming, this is very short-lived and leaves the machine not working hard for any given page: how many pages do people have downloading and streaming at the same time?  On average, not many!
    Numbers does push the CPU a bit with large spreadsheets. I've made up a US Covid spreadsheet which is over 20 megs, I find with a large recalculation, that it utilizes over 700% of the CPU and over twenty threads. This is on a M1 MacBook Pro, 8 core/8 gigs. I'm not saying Numbers would push the Studio Mac. Maybe if someone went really, really, large.
    Thank you for that report, keeps me from deliberately testing the theory when I don’t need to!

    Pages and Keynote have no viable room for using multiple cores in any useful manner, but Numbers, given a large and complex enough spreadsheet, is graphically-identical in dependencies of tasks in the same manner as developers have with building applications, with one notable exception: Numbers won’t allow a spreadsheet to contain circular dependencies, while Xcode and all the developer tools do.
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