Mac Studio – haunted by a Trash can
The moment Apple announced the Mac Studio I knew it was for me. I want a Pro desktop machine with serious performance, some portability, and I don’t care about expansion slots. I went for the 20 core CPU option because I spend a lot of my time in Xcode, but skimped on the GPU because there’s no tasks that I do that really tax it. I’ve been running this machine for a couple of months now and thought I’d write about it.
I’m fascinated by the Mac Studio. Not because it’s fast (it is, and that’s all I’ll say about it), but because it tells us so much about what Apple is today and how they have changed. It’s is a fascinating contrast to a similar, yet very different to a Mac Apple created a decade ago; the infamous “can’t innovate anymore, my ass” trash can Mac Pro, released in 2013. Both are compact pro machines which lack expandability, but beyond that they’re almost a study in opposites.
The trash can Mac Pro came at the beginning of a problematic area in Apple hardware design – from its negligence of Pro machines to the Touch Bar and the butterfly keyboard debacle. The Mac Studio rounds off of a solid reversal of said period, with Macs universally heralded as great, solid, fast, quiet computers with, in case of laptops, fabulous battery life. A reversal started with the M1 Macs that culminated in their fastest, most powerful chip yet, the M1 Ultra, only available in the Mac Studio.
With that Mac Pro, Apple seemed more interested its design than anything else; its sleek cylindrical shape and the machine’s clever cooling, than in serving Pro users’ needs. Mac Studio is the opposite; its design is utilitarian. It doesn’t even try to look like an object of art. Instead, it’s just a tall Mac mini, and there’s something charming in Mac Studio’s clunkiness – it’s solid, heavy and its unashamedly a machine for serious work. A square box with plain ventilation holes in the back and ports (ports!) on the front of the machine. There’s a time and a place for pretty, thin gorgeous machines and this Mac proudly isn’t one of them.
The trash can Mac Pro had a clever chimney-inspired ventilation system that couldn’t power the dedicated graphic cards of its day whereas the Mac Studio has only integrated (but impressive) graphics, a massive heatsink and two big boring fans. The Mac Pro ‘innovated’ in its shape, its design, its cooling. With Mac Studio, Apple innovated in chip design instead, making its biggest, most powerful chip yet.
In fact the trash can Mac Pro still casts its long shadow to today, haunting Mac Studio from beyond the grave if you will. During a rare moment of mea culpa at Apple, Craig Federighi admitted they painted themselves in a bit of a thermal corner with that cylindrical chimney design and I can only suspect they swore a solemn vow internally to never ever be in that situation again. It must have been a traumatising experience. Why do I say that? Mac Studio has a really good ventilation system: the machine remains cool no matter what you throw at it. In fact, its fans never spin up it seems and, unfortunately, never spin down either, which brings me to its one huge downside…
The Mac Studio’s fan is always on, at 1600 rpm, and I can hear that. I really can hear that fan quite clearly. In fact, I almost returned the machine until I discovered a very useful little utility: Mac Fans Control. With it, I can manually slow the fans down to 1100 rpm, which is quiet enough for me. And since my heavy CPU usage is always in short bursts, I trust my CPU won’t melt. Even in its failings, the Mac Studio is an interesting machine…
The last intriguing question this Mac Studio poses is; what room is there for a Mac Pro? Is the M1 Ultra really only shipping in one version of the Mac Studio? Is that really worth it to Apple? How many M2’s Ultra’s can they daisy-chain together for a Mac Pro? Who needs that power and is willing to pay that Premium? For all my love of Pro machines, I really do wonder if there’s room for a Mac Studio and a Mac Pro. Also, I think the area of third party graphic cards is over, which also makes you wonder what extensibility means; how much hard drive expansion slots do you really need to justify the old Mac Pro design? Anyway, that’s a story for another post. As I said, it’s a fascinating little machine.