
The all-new Apple Mac Studio computer
I can hardly believe my senses, but Apple yesterday appears to have introduced an all-new computer designed and aimed exactly at us—PHOTOGRAPHERS. Excuse the shouting.
The all-new Apple Mac Studio looks like a bulked-up and pumped-up musclebound Mini with two supercharged versions of the high-performance M1 chip—M1 Max ($2,000) for still photographers, M1 Ultra ($4,000) for videographers. With industrial-size fans. The M1 Ultra chip being basically two M1 Max chips joined at the hip, thus requiring less power than two separate M1 Max chips.
Its shape is kinda reminiscent of the Power Mac G4 Cube that appealed to me so much back in 2000. Neat, clean, contained, smallish and easy to site on a desk. John Gruber wrote of the Cube in July 2020: "The Cube was a worthy failure, deserving of our utmost praise in hindsight. Powerful computers needed to get smaller, quieter, and more attractive. The Cube pushed the state of the art forward." Apple could have called the Studio the Cube II—except that the Cube, which was before its time, was a commercial failure.
There's a matching monitor, the 27-inch 5K voice-and-video-ready Studio Display that has its own A13 Bionic chip onboard. It has a nanotexture glass option to cut glare and an adjustable-height stand as an option. Suitable for graphic arts professionals who use their monitors all day.
The Mac Studio's memory is "unified," (i.e., not user upgradeable), but you can choose 32GB or 64GB for the M1 Max version and those options plus 128GB on the M1 Ultra version. 512GB SSD storage is standard with options available from 1 to 8 terabytes. According to Apple, the new Mac Studios are significantly faster than the 27" iMac and the existing Mac Pro, from 50% to 3.8X.
Both the Mac Studio and Studio Display will start shipping March 18th.
Yay, I say. Although I can't afford one myself.
Pet peeve no more
And—OMG, be still, my beating heart—not only is there a built-in SD card slot on the Mac Studio, but it's on the front.
I couldn't believe my eyes—sat there blinking stupidly—but then I remembered, oh yeah, Jony retired. Apple has always wanted everything to be designy and clean even at the expense of usability, so it insisted the ports be on the back, out of sight. Bugged me for years, but then, the world is the world. The card slot on the front won't mean much to most people, but to me it's a flag that proclaims changed intentions for this product and renewed respect for the needs of photographers. Oh, okay, "creatives." (Man I hate that word.)
Because not only is an Mac Studio an all-new computer, for today's Apple it's an all-new computer category. For years you have been dutifully enduring my griping:
- Apple didn't make a good midrange desktop for a separate monitor, so we could upgrade separately and/or use third-party graphics arts monitors such as my NEC. Apple's choices were too much (the Pro) or too little (the Mini). High end or low end, nothing in the middle.
- Apple's focus was on lifestyle and the high end, and what photographers needed was a good solid middle-range workhorse, affordable but capable.
- Apple had forgotten the graphics arts market that had once been its most loyal constituency.
- Apple always put the bleeping card slot on the side, and then on the back, so we could get irritated just a wee bit every single time we had to get up and lean over and crane our necks to put a card in or pull a card out. Which was often.
- Well, then it solved that problem by eliminating the card slot altogether. Of course, we all still use cards on a nearly daily basis. So they cleaned up the sleekness of the computer just a tiny bit...at the cost of the outboard docks that now sit on our desks. Thanks for that.
- Couldn't we please get one or two ports on the front, where they'd be accessible, for frequently swapped peripherals? We already have cords all over our desks, we really don't mind one or two more. Ours are working offices.
- Apple's Mini, post-2014, was designed for switchers (from PC) and thus could be crippled. Didn't need the latest or best chips, didn't need upgradeable RAM. The fan could be an afterthought and too small, because grampas and soccer moms and humanities majors were only going to use the thing for email and YouTube—and now Zoom—anyhow.
- In short, Apple didn't deign to make a computer for us...or so I b*tched, when of course the iMacs worked well enough and I shoulda stopped my kvetching and gone along with that program like a good sheep customer. (I do have an iMac, upstairs.)
Happy day, Apple has just shut me up entirely. By addressing all those criticisms. In one fell swoop.
A win for photographers and we might as well shout it
The Studio is ours. It's for us. Finally, that midrange workhorse utilitarian monitor-less high-connectivity accessible affordable PHOTO-CENTRIC computer I always thought Apple should make for photographers. And for videographers. (It's for musicians, too.)
I'm getting carried away, so I'll just say thank you, Santa Apple, and go calm down.
But oh, happy day. This one's for us.
Mike
P.S. I have no connection to Apple except as a customer, and was privy to no prior notification or information about any of the products introduced yesterday.
UPDATE: Thom Hogan has weighed in on the Mac Studio. One thing he points out that I should pass along is that the previous photographers' workhorse, the Intel 27" iMac with Retina 5K display, has been discontinued by Apple and is a bargain from resellers who still have stock (I believe it's what Ctein uses). Check out Thom's article. (Thanks to Richard Nugent for pointing this out—I hadn't caught up with it before he did.)
Book of Interest this Week
Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.
This book link is a portal to Amazon.
Today at B&H Photo
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Richard Parkin: "I solve the problem of the connections at the back by simply having the back at the front so all the ports are accessible."
Mike replies: Ha! I did the same thing with my subwoofer for my desk system...it's downward-firing, so I simply turned the front to the wall so I could access all the controls and connections.
Yuan: "Although it's drool-worthy, I'd rather call the Mac Studio video-centric. For the majority of still photographers, even the $2k version is over-kill. Nowadays you simply don't need to spend $2k to get a perfectly fine still photo computer."
James: "It's $2,000 before a screen. Five of those and you can have a pool shed."
Mike replies: True, but the Pro is $6k and up, and a Fuji X-Pro3, Panasonic S5, or Sony A7III are all the same price, and you could also spend the same on a Sony FE 50mm ƒ/1.2 GM or a Fuji XF 8–16mm ƒ/2.8. And some people already have monitors. But sure, it's not for everyone.
Michael Fewster: "SD card slot at the front! Loud cheers. Let's hope that the cheers are heard by laptop makers. In recent years SD card readers have almost completely disappeared from the laptops we photographers like to take when we travel. A MicroSD card reader doesn't do it."
Steve W: "This is good news. I have a 2018 Mac Mini, and I'm getting close to wanting to upgrade. The current Mac Mini has even fewer ports: it's been reduced from four Thunderbolt/USB-C ports to only two. That's not going to cut it. The Mac Studio is configured almost perfectly, and the SD card slot is frosting on the cake. The price seems about right given that a 14" MacBook Pro costs $1,999 as well."
Rob de Loe: "I used to teach in a lab full of Macs. Someone who wanted a nearly endless bounty of free SD cards could be happy in that room. There they were in the back of the monitor, forgotten by the previous user, waiting to be collected. There probably was someone coming around harvesting them each day, like the people you'd see running from pay phone to pay phone checking for uncollected change."
Mark replies to Rob: "What's a pay phone?"
Danielsroka: "I am just as excited as you are. My beloved 'trashcan' Mac Pro has been a workhorse, and served me well. But it is now eight years old now, and I've been waiting for a solid professional desktop Mac to come along to replace it. It feels like this machine was designed with the professional photographer in mind. Fast, efficient, and bang-on with the price. I calculated that $3–4,000 will get me a fast (but not outrageous) setup, which is the same price range I've paid for my high-end Macs in the past. And these new M1 Max chips are proving to be groundbreaking in speed and energy efficiency, a significant upgrade from the old Intel framework. Can't wait!"
Larry Angier: "Faster, cheaper, better continues! In 1984 my original Mac 128 with external floppy and ImageWriter printer cost (then) about $2,500 and it had a nine-inch monitor, 128 KB ram and 400 KB floppies.... Things keep getting better and better for us!"
Apple Point-Counterpoint
John Camp: "I'm typing this on a 2015 MacBook Pro, which will be my last Apple product, other than cellphones, and I'm taking a hard look at those. Most (maybe all) of what Studio will do can be replicated much more cheaply on Windows machines, although the Mac OS still seems easier and more intuitive that even the latest Windows 11. My problem is, if you interface (cliché) with the business world, the business world uses Windows, and even identically-branded software is not the same between the two worlds. I could no longer put up with the problems created by using Word for Mac when sending a manuscript to a publisher who is totally on Windows. Microsoft frequently updates Word, but not so frequently Word for Mac, which means there are always incompatibilities, and some of them can drive you crazy. So I'm forced to change.
"The Studio, it seems to me, is for professional videographers and perhaps professional still photographers, because Apple systems are widely used by 'creatives' (another cliché.) For artists and enthusiasts, who may only be dealing with couple of dozen photos a week, an expensive computer makes little sense. For somebody like Kirk Tuck, who may take several hundred photos at a single public event, with an ad agency demanding instant returns, the Studio may be something to seriously consider. IMHO.
"I will concede that changing operating systems is a pain in the ass, and I'm currently experiencing that. There is certainly a solid value in staying within a familiar, comfortable system, which is why I still shoot Nikons along with my Micro 4/3 stuff. But for me, from here on, it's Windows."
Alex Mercado: "I'm a staff photographer and certainly welcome the Mac Studio.
"My department is currently making use of a small fleet of Mac Minis from 2018 and, while the Mini I use exhibits no significant performance issues—as I have the luxury of only running Capture One—my colleagues in production have been feeling the limitations of theirs for some time. The suite of applications they need to run simultaneously on any given day visibly taxes the hardware of their 6-core Mac mini. And we even ponied up for them to have the maximum of 64BG of RAM from the start.
"If it were possible to cram even more RAM into the Mac Mini to help things run more efficiently, the dated CPU would still have trouble juggling the multiple threads of all the updated, and increasingly processor-intensive, applications. If the CPU could be upgraded, then every other part of the motherboard would likely become a bottleneck. The notion of long-term upgradability for an affordable computer is not terribly realistic; there will always be a component, either hardware or software, that will fail to deliver to the peak performance of the computer as a whole.
"This lack of upgradability for most of Apple’s current computers is a non-issue in our 'corporate' setting by the simple virtue of having to work within the recommendations of the IT department. Ours require us to update the OS and software regularly to keep up with security updates and network compatibility; meaning we eventually need to replace the computer to keep up with the times. Today’s Adobe Creative Cloud applications running on Monterey isn’t nearly as speedy on our Mac mini as the 2018 suite was on Mojave.
"Our replacement options before the Mac Studio were: The 2020 Mac mini. For $1,300, it has two additional CPU cores, but the RAM tops out at 16GB. It will logically struggle to keep up with demands rather quickly.
"We use Eizo displays so considering any iMac is basically pointless.
"Lastly, the 'base mode' 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro with 48GB of RAM will cost $6,500 (the next step up is 96GB for $7,200!) and is just overkill in more ways than one. Also, how long is Apple really going to keep supporting x86?
"Now, $2,600 for a Mac Studio with its 10-core M1 Max and standard 64BG of RAM is the Goldilocks Mac we’ve been waiting for. And I suspect it will remain usable for more than the four years we've managed to squeeze out of the Mac Mini."
Ed Hawco replies to John: "Another counterpoint to John Camp's point that 'if you interface (cliché) with the business world, the business world uses Windows, and even identically-branded software is not the same between the two worlds.'
"John says he wrote that on a 2015 Macbook Pro, and I think his thesis is also from 2015, if not earlier. I work in the business world, and have done so happily for over a decade on Macs. At my employer we're pretty much evenly split between Macs and Windows machines, and it is exceptionally rare to find any issues crossing platforms. My macOS MS Office interfaces flawlessly with MS Office files from Windows users. Ditto other applications we use.
"The only exception I'm aware of is the screenshot application called Snagit from Techsoft; the native image format on macOS is '.snagproj' and on Windows it's '.snag,' and they are not compatible. This is a very weird thing in 2022. Six or seven years ago I asked one of their product managers why they don't make the formats compatible across OSs, and the reply (which I don't remember verbatim) left me a bit stunned, as it implied the person did not understand what the 'use case' was for having cross-OS compatible files. Whaaaaaaa?"
Thom Hogan replies to John: "Message to John Camp: stop using Word on the Mac. The best, most compatible word processor on the Mac is Nisuswriter Pro. Has been for years as Microsoft slowly let their Mac software slide. But that should tell you something about reliance on Microsoft software in the first place. Office is a lowest common denominator product now, and as such is going to have problems long-term even for an all-Windows user."
Eric Brody (partial comment): "Like Larry Angier, my first Mac was purchased for US$2,500. I got it on April 18, 1984! 400K single-sided disks, no externals. My first external drive was a 20 megabyte, not terabyte, drive that cost hundreds! It always seemed to me that one spent the same $2,500 every few years, but got a lot more computer power."
Mike replies: My first computer was the 512K Macintosh, 1984–86, which I got for a graduation present from art school in May of '85. It was called the "Fat Mac" because it had, woo-hoo, 0.000512 GB of memory, which was a lot. Like you guys, my Macintosh and an Imagewriter daisy-wheel printer cost about $2,600. For the same dollars you can get a Mac Studio with a 2TB SSD, which can do even more than my old Fat Mac could. (I kid, don't yell at me.)