Penzi

The Ultra chips have always been an odd duck, if you’re a consumer or photography professional. Even video has few things that genuinely benefit from the dual Max chip setup. The M1Ultra was worse than the M1Max at certain tasks as well, although I assume that was software needing to catch up to the new chip design for Mac. Even when you had noticeable benefits, the Ultra performance scaled nowhere near linearly. But there are benefits and they are tangible if your field takes advantage of them. That’s the nature of pro hardware: use case. I’ll paraphrase… “if you have to ask, you won’t take advantage of it”

I’m very glad that Apple produces the Ultra but the Max chip is the one for me. It actually exceeds my present use case requirements but the Pro chips bump up along my limits, so Max it is. With the MBPros and Mac Studios now sporting Thunderbolt 5, my hardware requirements for an upgrade are met. But since the point of said upgrade rests on monitors that don’t really exist yet, I will wait for their release before I truly struggle with “desktop or laptop?!” once again… I am optimistic that this will occur with the M5 generation APUs.

@Blastdoor I, also, am intrigued by your use case where, I assume, you wire two Mac minis together (Ethernet? Thunderbolt?) and also as to why, for the exact same price, having the exact same number of CPU cores make the mini more interesting than the Studio to you. Straight up that they are the faster M4 cores? I know that in AI neither Ethernet nor Thunderbolt has sufficient bandwidth to make two minis as efficient/competent as one Studio but I’d love to learn more!

My wife and I wouldn’t be together had Skype not existed. It has definitely been abused and undermined in the hands of MS. Fare thee well, old friend! You’re but a shadow of what made you an anchor in my life for years…

This depends heavily on whether you consider a computer with any NPU to be an “AI PC” or whether, like Microsoft, you have put a baseline down. If you use Microsoft’s requirement for 40 TOPs, you get Apple selling exactly zero capable AI PCs… there is so much conflation and chest thumping going on in ML at the moment that it’s hard to get an idea of who makes what and whether (and how much) it matters.

spheric said:

tiredskills said:

What I see as the primary reason for a guest mode is showing another person what the Vision Pro is all about.  Restricting apps and all that jazz is a relatively minor part of that, what the Vision Pro could really do with is a Demo Mode, where it walks a user through a few impressive functions, the same sort of stuff that is scripted in the Apple Store in-store demos.  

Gosh no. I absolutely despise when products shit a demo mode on their interface after I've already bought them. I'm a customer, not a salesman. 

Something that could grow out of this guest mode is great for my eventual primary usage: studio use with copious virtual real estate, several monitors for tracking, mixer, analysers, synched video track, as well as plugin interfaces placed virtually among the hardware in the studio. 

Having a second set of vision Pro to hand to a customer and being in the same space for would be great.

No need to be all down on a demo mode. Particularly if it’s something one can choose to download or not. Yes, I hate bloatware but I can see why some would want a demo mode. This is an entirely new computing paradigm and knowing what will be interesting to someone else is often difficult. Thinking of Ford’s old adage “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

All of my Apple devices have a folder labelled crApple filled with barely useful/used default apps.

Otherwise, great use case scenarios! Still waiting for something for me…

MacPro said:

I need to try out the Vision Pro.  I have always assumed that requiring reading glasses would make it a PITA; I know they offer lenses, but I am just dubious about how well that would work.  I have 20/20 over two feet and need correction for less than two feet; even 1.5 magnifiers work for me. I don't even need a prescription. Has anyone in a similar position tried the VP?

I have 30/20 with reading glasses that vary between 1.5 and 1.75 and tried it out. Works great!