512 Pixels

I’m on Vacation, but This Take is So Bad and I Wanted to Burn it So Badly, I Posted This From the Mountains with my iPhone ⇢

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Daniel Howley, writing at Yahoo Finance:

Apple says a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra will outperform a Windows PC outfitted with an Intel Core i9 desktop chip and Nvidia’s formidable RTX 3090 graphics card, while consuming less overall power.

That not only means the Mac Studio will run at lower temperatures than competing PCs, but it will also maintain peak performance longer than its PC counterparts.

The M1 Ultra seems incredibly impressive, but then Howley goes on to quote Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush:

“This latest M1 Ultra is a game changer on the graphics front and ultimately is competitive versus Nvidia,” Ives said. “Now it’s about how big Apple goes outside Cupertino and selling its chip to third parties.”

Yes, Ives is suggesting that Apple would sell its custom silicon to other companies for use in their products.

I mean … has Ives ever thought about Apple for longer than about 14 seconds? Since the return of Steve Jobs, the company has done all it can to keep as much of its fate under its own control as possible.1 Apple silicon is the inevitable outcome of that mindset. To consider the company selling Apple silicon chips to the likes of NVIDIA, AMD or PC OEMs is downright laughable.2

  1. This includes its financial fate. There are many reasons that Apple was near death before Jobs returned, but losing Mac sales to clone makers was one of them. Today’s Apple fights tooth and nail for every dollar that passes through things like the App Store, and they wouldn’t risk hardware sales to make some money selling chips to other companies. ↩︎

  2. It’s not like Windows on Arm has gotten off the ground anyway. ↩︎

Unite 4 ⇢

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My thanks to Unite 4 for macOS for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week. It allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.

512 Pixels readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 at bzgapps.com/unite512 or when you use the promo code ‘512Pixels’ at checkout.

The M1 Ultra Mac Studio is Two Pounds Heavier than the M1 Max Version

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Quite a few people noticed an oddity on the Mac Studio tech specs page:

  • Height: 3.7 inches (9.5 cm)
  • Width: 7.7 inches (19.7 cm)
  • Depth: 7.7 inches (19.7 cm)
  • Weight (M1 Max): 5.9 pounds (2.7 kg)
  • Weight (M1 Ultra): 7.9 pounds (3.6 kg)

Turns out, the weight difference between the two specifications of the Mac Studio comes down to cooling. In a statement to The Verge, Apple said:

They [both models] have the same 370W power supply. The additional weight is due to M1 Ultra having a larger copper thermal module, where as M1 Max has an aluminum heatsink.

Base Model Mac Pro Receives Spec Bumps ⇢

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Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:

Apple this week upgraded its base model Mac Pro to include 512GB of storage and AMD’s Radeon Pro W5500X graphics for the same $5,999 starting price. Previously, this configuration included 256GB of storage and Radeon Pro 580X graphics. These changes apply to both the tower and rack versions of the Mac Pro.

It’s not the spec bump that has been rumored for the 2019 machine, but it’s something. Interestingly, the Trashcan got a similar update later in its life.

As a side note: I’ll be selling my 12-core Mac Pro after my M1 Max Mac Studio shows up in early April… but more on this later.

The Future of the 27-inch iMac

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As previously noted, the 27-inch iMac is gone from Apple’s website, and John Ternus said the Mac Pro would be the final Mac to make the switch to Apple silicon.

I think this means the 27-inch iMac as we knew it is gone forever. In my mind, this leads to two questions:

First, does Apple intend the Mac Studio and Studio Display to act as the replacement for the high-end iMac? The last 27-inch Intel iMacs were no slouches, but the Mac Studio will still smoke them in terms of performance, after all.

The problem with this is price. The final 27-inch iMacs came in at:

  • $1,799 (3.1 GHz)
  • $1,999 (3.3 GHz)
  • $2,299 (3.8 GHz)

The modular Mac Studio / Studio Display combo just can’t beat that pricing, with the cheapest setup possible coming in at $3,600. And that’s before you buy input devices.

(Of course, the combo of a Mac mini and Studio Display would be less, but with the M1 being the only Apple silicon option on that machine, it doesn’t play in the same sandbox as these other machines.)

I think it’s more likely that we see the iMac Pro resurrected as an all-in-one companion to the Mac Studio. This could take place even with Ternus’ wink-and-nod show at the end of today’s event.

I like the idea of the iMac really being the consumer desktop model — after all, that is where it started life way back in 1998. It was only in more recent years that the iMac really stretched upwards to meet the needs of professionals. An iMac Pro would put a cap on that upward reach and clarify things a bit from a branding perspective.

So, is the 27-inch iMac dead? Yes, yes it is. Does that mean Apple won’t release another high-end all-in-one at some point in the future? No, no it doesn’t.

More on the ‘Studio’ Line ⇢

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Chance Miller at 9to5Mac has outlined a new video by Luke Miani, who is reporting that the “Mac Studio” is a taller Mac mini, paired with a new display that looks like a larger 24-inch iMac.

Miani’s version of this display seems to not serve as the Pro Display XDR’s replacement, as was reported over the weekend. Miani has mixed track record on these things, but at least this version of the story makes more sense to me than what we’d previously seen.