curtis hannah

timmillea said:

eightzero said:

AniMill said:

It really feels like foolish to buy a Mac Studio M2 Max/Ultra right now. An M2 Max system comes to $3800…and slower than the M3 14” MBP spec’ed above.

my guess would be the M3 studio line shows up when they can actually get the chip supply. the "missed opportunity" likely caused by the chips not being available in quantity yet. and something had to come out first.

Yesterday's announcement feels more like the death knell for the Studio. It always was a short-term product to cover up the lack of a Mac Pro. Now that an M3 Max can be put in a MacBook, it can be put in the Mini. The Studio should always have been Mini-sized. Only the top end Studio configurations justified the extra size and heat sinking - the lower-end Studios never did. The M3 range of Mac Minis will be coming out in a few months. They will embarrass the current Studio models, which I would expect to be quietly dropped. 

The MacBook Pros have been capable of running the M series Pro and Max chips from the start, the Mac mini is capable of of running the regular M series and the Pro and the studio was developed for the Max and Ultra chip variants, and the Mac Pro runs the Ultra only, this has no affect on the M3 generation as all this structure is on the M2 generation. The curious revelation here was that they did not add an M3 Pro variant to the iMac, so the Mac mini still offers a superior chip option.

harry wild said:

Between the 14” and 16”, difference is $1K!

$300 when spec’d the same, which is more than the $200 difference in the M2 generation as I recall, but that’s still pretty reasonable.

The key thing here is they introduced the base M3 model which is the same processor that a MacBook Air has, It being added to the MacBook Pro doesn’t affect the price scheme from before starting at the $2000 level.

The introduction of an M3 model of the 14 inch is odd, especially since the 15 inch MacBook Air is meant to fill that larger cheap MacBook Price point(and it's still $200 cheaper than the Pro with a larger screen than it), I guess some will really pay that much more for the Mini LED display. Otherwise introducing the M3 processor on 2 products that never even had an M2 chip I guess implies they really are trying to slow the rollout till later into next year. The M3 chip still having 8GB ram base is now even more out of date and ashamed since the M3 Pro is now at multiple of 18GB of ram.

It's nice to see the MacBook Pros received 2 upgrades this year and the legacy 13" is gone, and there is even more options than before both on the high and lower prices side, so it's certainly a nice update.

If it's not an M3 reveal, the event seems pointless, the M2 MacBook Pros were released with no prior notice of the press event, so that was less of a deal than an M2 iMac nearly 18 months after the M2 came out. Also they're clearly talking a speed increase. The bigger question is what's receiving M3, iPad Pro's, a MacBook Air or both MacBook Airs and the 13 inch Pro, Mac Mini, or will it be dedicated to the iMac?

The biggest weird thing about the current Mac Pro is they kept the design and only upgraded it with a chip they effectively had 2 years ago.

Also the PCI expansion has long been redundant with Thunderbolt and Apple has actually surprisingly killed the need for the Mac Pro with the Mac Studio being the same thing for $3k less. If they had kept higher end desktop chips tied to the iMac, the Mac Pro would have still been relevant compared to the alternative of more expensive iMac Pro models.

As for them updating the Mac Pro and money, I assume they kept the design so moving forward they can annually or semi-annualy update the Mac Pro alongside the Studio with a current gen Ultra chip. I also assume they currently have a team working on a redesigned Mac Pro chassis aimed for the late 2020s, but they might use these metrics to abandon that redesign. But unless that redesign brings back upgradability, it's a moot point anyways.