I’m not ready to buy a new Mac (My 2019 intel 27" i9 iMac is doing fine and I like being able to run Windows in in Parallels)
But I decided to take a look at what pricing is these days
What I found is that a maxed out (except for Drive size) Mini is the same price as a low end Studio.
The mini:
Apple M2 Pro with 12‑core CPU, 19-core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine
32GB unified memory
1TB SSD storage
Gigabit Ethernet
Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI port, two USB‑A ports, headphone jack
Price $2,199.00
Studio:
Apple M2 Max with 12‑core CPU, 30‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine
32GB unified memory
1TB SSD storage
Front: Two USB-C ports, one SDXC card slot
Back: Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports, one HDMI port, one 10Gb Ethernet port, one 3.5 mm headphone jack
Price: $2,199.00
So so why would anyone buy a Mini configured like that vs the low end Mac Studio?
The Studio has the better GPU, more ports, the card slot and faster ethernet (though I doubt ethernet speed matters for most users that would even consider a mini)
If a referb Studio with those specs became available, I might even be temped (although I don’t need the horse power, I do tend to keep my Macs a long time)
Mac sales are down 30% YOY so I think they’re throwing more variations out to see what sticks, if anything. I think the downturn in sales is due to a lot of people getting new computers during the pandemic and they haven’t hit their EOL yet. Mac’s seem to last a good 7 to 8 years before it becomes time to replace so they may have some awful sales for a while.
Even iPhone sales are slowing. We used to be get new phones every 2 years. We looked at the iPhone 15 and said our 2 or 3 year old phones are ‘good enough’ and we’ll upgrade if we break our phones or there’s a feature we gotta have. Same thing with our iPads. With what we do with them they’re more than serviceable so no need to upgrade for the foreseeable future.
The downside, I guess, of making durable hardware. Even if the software isn’t as good/reliable as we’d want.
3 different versions of the Apple Pencil, with different feature sets and compatibility. That’s insane.
Yet we still have that same crappy mouse from way back when. When I say crappy, it never tracked as well as 20 year old wired Microsoft mouse. I tried it again with a new mouse pad I got this year and oh boy, the Apple mouse really hates this one.
All the time, I’m happy with a product, I’ll upgrade. Weirdly enough, if the product doesn’t make me happy or pisses me off, I’ll stick with it longer or look at competition.
I bought a refurbished Zenfone a little while back and I felt guilty I got it for such a cheap price. Shortly after Asus announced their Zenfone 9 and I pre-ordered it for full price. I’ve owned this Zf9 for over a year and the battery still lasts a little over 3 days.
I used to willingly replace my Macs every 3 years. Now I’m forced to as my 2019 MacBook Pro only lasted 3 years. Logic board failure, like the 2015 MacBook, cost to repair, 1 brand new M1 MacBook Air.
I made a mistake with this M2 MacBook Pro, so I will have to upgrade that sooner. I bought it with 16GB of RAM. Which isn’t enough for my workflow, even though the 2019 16" MacBook Pro it was. I should have known better.
Well just for information, I jumped off the Apple Train aswell… buying only used Thinkpads for my Linux somewhere between 200-500 Euros. Quite the same power for far less price. And I have dedicated thinkpads for certain tasks makes me more flexible… and of course I have peace of mind regarding my ecological footprint.
Speaking of ecological footprint, my Mac Studio (M2 Pro, 64G RAM) runs off a 1 KwH battery which I charge at night when power is cheaper. This isn’t scientific because I have a hot spot and an ethernet switch and a 4T external SSD drive on the battery as well (plus the cost of running the inverter) but with the screen turned off it draws about 30W and with the display (Dell 27") on, around 50W. I don’t recall my Macbook Pro (M1, 32G RAM) ever pulling more than 30W with the display on unless it was trying to fast charge. At any rate I can run it on the battery from about 8am until well into the evening. I have a small / conventional UPS to keep everything alive for the cutover to AC power and back.
So in terms of electricity use, the Studio is somewhat hungrier. Worth it if you want the extra oomph and future-proofing and have faith in it holding up, I suppose.
The trouble is everything takes a huge amount of memory nowadays. Xcode or Xojo, FireFox or Safari, Pixelmator Pro, WindowServer etc. As I like to use it with an external display, bang goes down the memory even more.
Heck I can even put a 8GB M1 Air into the orange, by simply opening a web-browser with a dozen tabs.
Currently I’m converting my Xojo projects to Swift, so I have both Xojo and Xcode open, both of which are memory hungry apps.
The you have the hundreds of Apple “System” processes snapping 30 mb here, couple hundred there.
Here’s the thing, it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line that significantly if they dropped the memory prices, or gave more in the base model, but it would go a long time to repairing the reputational damage that Tim is constantly doing to the brand.
But I’ve come to the conclusion, he doesn’t care about the company his friend built.
I have 64G in my Studio for future proofing, ability to run multiple VMs, and elbow room for experimenting with locally-run LLMs. I went with the base CPU though as I doubt I will need more horsepower of that kind for my purposes.
I have 32G on my MacBook Pro for similar reasons … it is a couple years old now, an M1 vintage, and when considering current models I could not find a config larger than 24G unless I ponied up for processor power I don’t really need. I ended up spending an extra $600 or so for the Studio, got the RAM I really wanted and probably more processor than I really need (base M2 Pro).
When the MacBook eventually konks out (probably the battery) I will end up with an M4 or M5 or something anyway … all this bundling reminds me of TV cable companies, selling everything in packages to extort you into buying features you don’t want or need.
