atonaldenim

Well, it happened! I'm glad that Apple didn't do the 3 price tier structure that I mused about, M4 Max for $2000 is a way better starting point. And I'm glad they made the M3 Ultra better than simply M3 Max x 2, with Thunderbolt 5, and 512GB max RAM (still not as much as the 1.5TB of RAM supported by the 2019 Xeon Mac Pro). M3 Ultra is kind of an M3.5 that holds its own against M4 Max. It's common with Intel chips too that the biggest baddest top of the line multi-core Xeon chips have slower single-core performance than the mid-tier chips. Pro buyers are probably somewhat used to it. But yes, the M3 / M4 naming is pretty confusing. The target audience for M3 Ultra probably just cares most about the fastest multi-core render times and won't be worried that the box says "3" rather than "4". The people who are the most confused by it, are probably the type of user who would be buying the M4 Max base model anyway.

Thinking about it more, they could use the “Tim Cook doctrine” to lower the entry price of the Mac Studio with the M3 Max.

Something like…
$1799 M3 Max
$2799 M4 Max
$3799 M3 Ultra

A price cut compared to last gen would at least soften the blow of no M4 Ultra, a little.

People said the M3 was a stopgap generation that would quickly be dropped due to the difficulties of the silicon node process or whatever. But they kust announced M3 iPad Airs which must be a pretty high volume product. So maybe M3 is not going away so fast after all. 

I think you meant to write “That was in part because the M4 Max was already available in the MacBook Pro.” There is no Mac Pro with M4 Max of course. 

As to the rumor, offering an M3 Ultra and M4 Max at the same time seems pretty weird, and also a bit insulting to their highest end, biggest spending customers not to offer a chip with the improvements of the M4 generation. The M4 Max would be closer to the performance of an M3 Ultra than it would an M4 Ultra, I think you’d see a lot of people choosing the M4 Max as the best value option.

The only strategic reason I could imagine would be to push high-end buyers to an M4 Ultra Mac Pro, but I don’t think Apple wants to push the Mac Pro. They don’t want to be on the hook for supporting whatever people might plug into those PCIe slots. It feels more like they are stuck supporting the Mac Pro for a segment of their pro customer base that demands the PCIe slots for specialized I/O, ultra fast data storage & networking. I think Apple would be happier if everyone bought Mac Studios and the Pro tower went away.

So if this does happen, it would have to be down to some kind of manufacturing limitations. Would they also offer an M3 Max Studio along with the M3 Ultra? Call that the base model, and then offer M4 Max as an upgrade option? While not offering an upgrade option on the Ultra.

It could be something like…
$2000 M3 Max
   $3000 M4 Max upgrade option
$4000 M3 Ultra

This is cool, I hadn't heard about this before. Valve recently gave away Half-Life for free or very cheap, can't remember, but yeah the Mac version on Steam is 32-bit only which won't work on any Mac OS after Mojave / Catalina. So combining those official Steam Half-Life assets with this upgraded 64-bit version should make Half-Life playable on modern MacOS, very cool. Gotta try that out soon!

AppleInsider said:

There's been a lot of complaints about terrible Wi-Fi with the new under-mounted docks -- now you know why.

Great article Mike, thanks for sharing your experiences. This is the first I’m hearing about wifi problems with a hub sitting under a Mac Mini. That sounds like a good subject for an article, if it’s true! I think a lot of people are interested in those hubs and it would be really good to know if they should be avoided, or redesigned.