Detnator

brianmw1 said:

Boy I would like this monitor but I'm torn, I need VESA mount right now but I think that should be an option to purchase/addon like on the old iMacs, in the future I may need a normal stand but as usual new Apple makes you make a choice that has no future option for you, get a stand no VESA, get VESA, never get a stand.

I too have dual needs for this monitor, one of which requires VESA.  The solution is get the VESA one (and never get a stand) and there are a bazillion VESA monitor stand options for just sitting it on a desk, while of course having all the other VESA options also.

I have used this company before: https://www.ergomart.com and been pretty happy.  They have a wide range of all kinds of options.  Their stands (for just sitting on a desk) are here: https://www.ergomart.com/monitor-mounts/monitor-stands.  

I bought an expensive extended reach heavy duty arm from them in 2017 and it's still going strong.  It's currently supporting my LG 5K which I'll be replacing with my ASD when it arrives end of March (which I ordered as soon as the store came back online).

cgWerks said:

Can someone explain the pricing of this display to me? Is it that much better than the screen that came in the $1800 iMac? I was hoping it would be closer to $1k. While I realize the options for that exact kind of display (resolution, size, specs) limits you to one 3rd party (ie. LG UltraFine), do most of us really need those specs? I think I'd be just fine with something like a BenQ 4k, etc. (or almost a half-dozen of them!) What am I missing?

For most people 4K, 350nits, clunky build quality, and woeful customer support is enough.  That's what you get for $500-$1000.  Some of us want more than that. When the onIy 5K monitor around that's remotely Mac compatible was the LG I tried that, had multiple hardware issues with it, and dealing with LG's support probably took years off my life.  I tried 4K as an alternative, but for me at least, it just doesn't cut it.  Some people say they can't tell the difference between 150 and 220dpi, or 350 and 500 nits.  I don't get it. It's night and day for me. The extra pixels (it's almost twice as many) and increased brightness of the LG 5K make a significant difference to my productivity (when it's not going through LG's warranty repair processes).

Now, that covers differences between the many 4K options and the LG 5K.  Then there's the LG 5K vs this new Apple Studio Display (ASD)...

waveparticle said:

Buy the LG UltraFine 5K 27" monitor for $1299. The two are almost the same. 

Not quite (actually not even close).  There are some very significant differences, such that I'm surprised there's only $300 difference.

LG 5K:

• 500 nits
• USB3 5GBps
• 14lb
• 1080p camera (~2MP)
• Crappy speakers
• Crappy mic
• Terrible build quality with persistent hardware issues
• Woeful LG customer support
• $1300

Apple Studio 5K: 

• 600 nits + True Tone
• USB3 10Gbps
• 12lb
• 12MP camera (6x the pixels, + Center Stage)
• High quality 3 mic array, directional beam forming (if these are anything like the MBP mics then they're amazing)
• Superior speakers (+ spatial audio)
• Excellent build quality (presumably, if it's typical Apple).
• Best in class Apple customer support
• built in A13 CPU
• $1600

Bottom line, other than the 5K resolution part, nothing is the same.  (More here)

lordjohnwhorfin said:

Not that much less than the Apple monitor then. And if you consider the rear ports, Center Stage camera, Spatial compatible speakers, the classy look and the high end aluminum construction instead of cheap plastic, the LG doesn’t seem like the better deal really.

Far from it.  And it seems many others agree. I ordered two of these ASD's within seconds of the store coming back online this morning, and enough people still got in before me that mine aren't coming until the end of the month.  They're either very short on supply or a lot of people want them.

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

What's missing?
No upgradeability. At all. None. Zero. Nada.
No way to upgrade the RAM, SSD or any other components.
What you get is what you get. Forever. You are welcome.
Not even a M.2 slot for when the built in SSD seems very slow and small two years from now.

Those GPU speed/power charts were missing the name of the discrete GPUs they used for comparison. The charts shown when the M1 Pro and Max when the MacBook Pro was released ended up being very misleading. How exactly does the M1 Ultra stack up to a RTX 3090 when ray tracing in Blender? Who knows? Guess we have to wait for a real review to find out. We do know that that the M1 Max hash rate is around 10.7 MH/s while a 3090 gets 121 MH/s so even if the M1 Ultra is twice as fast, it is still 1/6th the speed of the 3090.

I agree re: RAM/GPU, but please drop the SSD. They are so easy/cheap to expand with fast storage later on, it just isn't inside the case.

As for the GPU, yes, we'll have to wait and see. But, keep in mind they should be fast on-paper. A lot of the issue is just software compatibility. Your hash-rate is a great example. While the Max isn't going to match a 3090 due to memory bandwidth, it would probably be close if the mining software were Metal. People currently getting that 10 MH/s are essentially doing an emulation hack. That's actually pretty good considering.

If I had to take a guess, I think with a Metal miner, we'd see like 70-80% of like a 3080 for the Pro and then given more memory bandwidth, faster than a 3090 on the Ultra (would need to do more math than I care for right now to find out by how much ).

I am not sure I understand your point about the SSD being external. A M.2 is a SSD. Externally you can get about 1GB/sec on a USB C 3.2 and about 2GB/sec on thunderbolt (although I have yet to see one get that much when tested). A M.2, on the other hand, can currently get as much as 7 GB/sec. The one I have in my PS5 is 6 GB/sec and costs about $220 for 2TB currently. SSDs have been getting a lot faster recently at reasonable prices. Even if the M.2 speed is limited, you can expect to see a lot larger ones in a couple of years (unless China invades Taiwan in which case all of this is moot anyway).

A M1 Max gets a compute score of 61256 on GeekBench 5 for OpenCL. A RTX 3090 gets 205005. Apple's performance graphs are a complete fantasy.

I don't get it. Why are you going on about OpenCL?  See here:  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202823.  OpenCL and OpenGL are not supported on any Apple Silicon Macs.  Modern Macs use Metal: (bottom right https://developer.apple.com/opencl/  ;"If you are using OpenCL for computational tasks in your Mac app, we recommend that you transition to Metal".

Meanwhile, there hasn't been any Metal (or even Mac) support for NVIDIA cards since around the GTX1080 -- years ago.

So there's no sensible "benchmark" comparison tests with NVIDIA cards. Apple's tests are based on Metal, and where they're comparing to NVIDIA cards they're doing real world tests with actual apps, on PCs with the 12th gen Intel chips and NVIDIA cards.  I expect it's probably similar to the Photoshop and other shootouts Steve used to do in keynotes.  What you're saying makes about as much sense as people who used to try to say a Pentium chip is faster than a G5 because it has a higher clock speed.

Your failure to understand their testing procedures doesn't make the results a fantasy.  If you want to mine cryptocurrency, or do anything else with NVIDIA cards, you don't want a Mac.

Regarding SSDs.  Unlike a small vocal few here, the vast majority of Mac users DO NOT CARE about adding hardware inside their Macs.  I'm sure you know there's a limited supply of PCI lanes that can be managed by any chip.  You want to take some of the available lanes and dedicate them to an internal SSD slot that almost no one will use, crippling the potential Thunderbolt and other peripheral access available to the rest of us. If there was nothing to lose, you'd have a case, but Apple is not going to take away functionality from the vast majority of their users to appease the tinkerers like you, when there are perfectly reasonable other solutions available to you.

1. Just buy what you need up front.  
2. Or add to it externally later.
3. Or wait for the Mac Pro.

I stripe three M.2 NVMe drives over the three Thunderbolt 4 ports in my M1 Max MBP, and I get about 5500MBps.  You get up to SIX TB4 ports in the Studio.  Stripe your beloved M.2 drives over four of them and you'll get your 7000.

auxio said:

fastasleep said:

auxio said:

forgot username said:

Needed: way to use an old 27-inch iMac as a display for the Mac Studio. 

What model is it?  You might be able to use target display mode.

Not with an Apple Silicon Mac. 

Thanks for the info.  I guess Apple had to forgo some features to get the ASi transition going, and TDM didn't make the chopping block.  Not many people really knew about it outside of us power users.

Not sure if someone else said this.  

As far as I'm aware they stopped Target Display Mode when they doubled the resolutions to retina displays in 2015.  I am fairly certain that no 4K or 5K iMac has ever been able to be used as a display for another Mac via TDM. (D= Display, not Disk).

Because of this, the other comment confused me for a moment: 

• "The other Mac that you're connecting it to must have been introduced in 2019 or earlier and have macOS Catalina or earlier installed."

I now realize the "other" Mac means the Mac that's not being used as a display -- ie the Mac you want to add an iMac as a display to.  So, Mac mini, for example. Interestingly, it specifically says 2019 or earlier, which doesn't necessarily tie it to Apple Silicon...?  Nor to the T2 chip (since that first showed up in 2017's iMac Pro I believe.

The link again.  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204592

So... needless to say TDM not an option here.

Other ideas... So this is actually something I've been wondering about.  This probably won't work for you since it sounds like you're looking to use your old iMac as the only display for the Mac Studio. That seems a bit of a waste (of the Mac Studio).  Have you seen how much more awesome the retina displays are?

Still just something to consider if you were to use the iMac as a SECOND display for the Mac Studio:  

With the new Universal Control feature (coming any day now in macOS 12.3), you might be ok with the iMac as another Mac, beside your PRIMARY display.  For the most part you could use them as if they're one machine, but actually distribute the load a little.

For me for example, I'm a developer as much as other things.  I currently use my MBP as a second screen beside my LG 5K connected to it as main screen. I'll usually have my IDE full screen on the main 5K display, and then other subsidiary things like web browser looking up documentation, Messages, Email, etc. on the MBP display beside it.  

But I've been thinking I really want a bigger second screen, but don't like any of the options (at least until this ASD came along).  But even then I don't know if I want a full size 27" display when it's only secondary, but I still want it bigger than 16".  The 24" iMac might be perfect...  

But if I can control the other Mac from the primary Mac's keyboard and Mouse just by moving it over (as Universal Control promises), there's really no reason all those other things I do have to be running on the primary Mac, when they could be on a second Mac, beside the screen for the main Mac.

In fact, there's something to be said for offloading those other things (especially web browsing that likes to chew CPU sometimes) to another CPU (as well as another display) and have my main Mac do nothing but that primary work at hand (code, building, etc.).  But I can still control the second Mac from the primary Mac's keyboard and mouse as a fairly seamless experience.  The only thing I really can't do is drag windows between them.  But with everything synced up over iCloud and with the Coherence and Handoff features, I could start an email on the secondary Mac, and continue it on the primary Mac if I want to.

There's a lot to be said for a configuration like this.  I have a fully loaded M1 Max MBP.  I put my order in for the ASD as soon as the store came online after the event (to replace the LG 5K which I hate and will sell). Then run the MBP in clamshell mode, and have a 24" iMac on the right as the secondary screen instead of the MBP.

Just waiting for Universal Control to arrive to try it out before I go all in on this.  Not sure if anything like that might be an option for your old iMac, but thought I'd share in case it's of any use.

ericthehalfbee said:

Two words to destroy this gatekeeper bullshit:

PWA
Porn

You can access iOS and Android devices via the web and completely cut out Apple/Google. Either through PWAs or even just websites. You don’t need to be in The App Store or Google Play for the majority of tasks people do.

Now some idiot is going to say that PWA/web isn’t good enough. To that I say look at the porn industry. They are locked out of App stores so they rely on the web. And if there’s one thing the porn industry does well it’s to make sure their content is available to the widest possible audience. Which means cramming as much functionality as possible into web pages. Maybe those whiners should try to innovate (like the porn industry).

There are some things you can’t do on a PWA, but they are good for a great many things.

All good points.

Let me add, despite how good web apps are, native apps are still better in many ways, and there's a good reason for that.  150,000 APIs.... that Apple provides, (along with payment process, hosting, vetting, curation, delivery, and access to Apple's customers, etc.)  all for the meager price of $8/month ($99/year) + 15% commission on sales.  Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Or... if you're jumping up and down in court saying all those APIs and services aren't worth $8/month +15% commission on sales, then no worries.  You have a choice.  Don't buy those services, and provide your customers web apps and pay Apple nothing.  Web apps can even have Home Screen icons, so getting into them is as easy as any other app.

Looks to me like developers have plenty of choice.  For Epic, Spotify, etc. I don't get what the problem is.