As some of you know, I'm a digital artist, but also into workplace ergonomy, which means I'm always trying to optimize my workspace to be more productive and healthy.
When my maxed out late 2015 - 4, 0 GHz iMac died on me last year, it was possible to recover the dead internal drive from a time machine backup and use it with an external SSD. But, it wasn't quite the same and not up to speed as before.
That means no dedicated port that passes through the speeds of an external NVME-SSD to get the old thing to be as speedy as the internal thing. And no; I didn't want to get my hands dirty, replacing an SSD on a 7 years old iMac.
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So the interim solution was to use an inexpensive M1 Mac Mini that I already had for some Photoshop painting and doing all the rest of the work on the recovered iMac, such as printing jobs, emails and small renderings.
While this solution worked to some degree, I found my limits in Photoshop very fast (with just 8 gigs of RAM) and dropping files from one computer and organizing files around different devices wasn't as easy.
That's when I realized at the March 8 event this year, the Mac Studio is exactly what I needed. An expensive excuse to get a 32" display, I know ;)
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And actually I'm not the apple-keynote person, but since my iMac was crumbling down, I hoped for a replacement that was powerful enough to do all the work I might dream of.
The main reason I ordered so early on, was because I expected delivery delays because of either lockdowns or a huge demand - and both was true and even I had to wait for around 6 weeks - but it was really worth it, the M1 Ultra is a beast!
Now you could argue that the M1 Max would have been sufficient for a 2D-Artist like me. And usually I would agree. However, the reason for my decision was 50% to be future-proof and the other 50% comes from the experience, that workload and usage grows with the possibilities of the machine you are working with.
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Here is a screenshot of my secondary screen that is just for references and stuff, add Photoshop and one mid-res PSD-file into the mix and the Mac Mini with 8 GB of RAM was at its limit.
Of course; I can not make use of some of the main features that are targeted at video editing such as the built-in encoders, but the 20 CPU-cores, the 48 GPU-cores and the 64 GB of Ram do plenty in 3D-editing as well. And you never know, maybe I do video-editing at some point too.
One of the main advantages I experience right now is, that I can multitask so much more by having a lot of RAM-hungry programs open, such as Chrome with 20 tabs, Photoshop with around 3-4 heavy PSD's, Zbrush, Keyshot, Blender, PureRef, Notes, Gigapixel and heck, even with all these apps open, starting a fourfold - scaling operation in Gigapixel only took 1/10th of the time it took on my maxed-out iMac!
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The RAM-pressure also never got over 40%, regardless of what I did, but so far I did not work with full force ;)
I can only imagine when the heavy workload comes, which means 4-5 PSD's open with around 7k x 10k resolution at 300 dpi and around 50 - 80 layers each, zbrush open to work on 3D-models while Keyshot is rendering in the background, it might go up a bit.
Imagining the hair and dust alone made me think twice, the noise-issue was just another nail on the coffin of using that thing ON my desktop surface. Also our cats often use the desk to chill and that made me move all unused equipment away from my desktop;)
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Below is an image of my solution and I really like it. It is sturdy, cat-proof and it gets a lot air from below but no dust and as a special bonus I don't hear it AT ALL because the table is a sound absorber as well.
Another thing that was important for me is the 6-7 external drives that have to be connected. Under the desk, I can just utilize an old HDD-Tray from an old PC for that to hide them (and make them cat-proof:)
One of the most problematic things on finding reviews, especially if you are like me, working 90% in Photoshop, is, that the one program everyone uses - is not in there. I don't care if Lightroom just crashes it, when importing 100.000 files, I want Photoshop to be 100% faster with a 5000px brush. Period.
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I found that there is more that can't be tested such as snappiness when it comes to painting with custom brushes and also the startup of the program.
And since we are at it, the snappiness of an M1 machine is hard to beat, that was the case on the M1 Mac Mini as well, but the M1 Ultra is just in its own league. Regardless of file size, layers or amount of files open in Photoshop, the snappiness of working with brushes is amazing and it shows to have 8 times the power of a small Mac Mini ;)
Starting Photoshop just takes 3 seconds, given the fact that I have around 500 MB of brush files, around 100 Lookup tables and 2 big Filter suites - SnapArt and Topaz Studio 2, as also a lot of Neural-Filters active, consider me impressed!
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Now I have to add that on the M1, I need to use Photoshop under Rosetta because my creative work depends on some third party plugins such as MagicSquire and GuideGuide. The starting time and also the overall feel is very fast! It would be really great to have those plugin being native running under the M1, as far as speed goes, that would be insane!
I saw some promising video with the M1 Max Macbook pro of Adam Baroody using zBrush and the polygon count was amazing and so was the speed. Given the fact that the Ultra is just 2 times the max, there is plenty of power for that.
Also blender in version 3.1 has included support for apple's Metal-Engine, there is also a lot of discussion around and I'm sure if other programs start to support Metal, it can truly lead to remarkable changes in render times. In blender especially, render times in version 3.1 on a M1 Mac are up to 4 times faster.
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After watching that video I thought giving the heaviest demo, "The Lone Monk" a try and it took 09:16s minutes rendering in the background(!) using GPU and CPU, compared to 24:46s the M1 Max took in the benchmark above which was the alpha version.
I also use Keyshot because of the bundle I have bought back then with the zBrush-to-Keyshot bridge. It relies on CPU but with 20 cores it is faster than with the M1 Max and 10 cores, even on that front it is a win, even if Keyshot is not optimized for Metal yet.
I tried Marmoset Toolbag and will observe how they deal with the transition of apple from Intel to M1, if it is their market, they might win a user, if not, I don't care.
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Actually you can never have enough RAM, and I regret that I did not get the 128 GB RAM version, but maybe it is good to have something left for another update in 5-6 years or so...
On the other hand, I watched some reviews on YT from Max Tech and even with all the Benchmarks and Tabs open and programs running, they did not get the M1 Max Macbooks to run out of RAM, which makes me confident that 64 GB is for now the best choice.
Other than that, with the Ultra, you can't go lower than 64 GB, if you are thinking about the M1 Max, I'd suggest investing in getting 64 GB. In Photoshop it makes a huge difference.
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I don't care really. The Mac Studio is all I needed. I embrace the freedom of picking the display size I want or need. Of course the iMac 5k displays are in a league of their own, but then again they are all LG-Displays and to be honest I only need a 4k-display to store many open windows at any given time, not for color accuracy or anything else. That's why I went for the LG 32UN880-B.
I also don't want to do a bet on the question if apple will come up with a new iMac or if the Mac Studio just replaces the big AIO computer from Cupertino. Mostly because apple is always good for some surprises. But honestly, I actually considered getting an iMac Pro 2 years ago and calculated putting 7.5 to 8k for a powerhouse like that aside and then the Mac Studio came around, a lot cheaper and I can pick a 32" screen, what else could I ask for?
When it comes to the noise-issue,
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