Haha. Not that high! I’ve got no reason to run a Studio. My M1 Max MacBook is more than ample for a long while.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I am still shocked how much better in benchmarks the M2 is to my Tower. I suppose technology moves on, my machine is over 4 years old now, maybe 5.

Take with a pinch of salt, but along the lines of what you were saying...

https://youtu.be/j9mAGHAtLkg

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Take with a pinch of salt, but along the lines of what you were saying...

https://youtu.be/j9mAGHAtLkg

Geekbench the M2 is a lot faster than my Ryzen 7 1700, but the cinebench scores not so much, 8610 for the M2 and for my machine 7972. I found a site that compares scores

https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m2-vs-am...

But as you said, take benchmarks with a pinch of salt.

It is amazing how technology have changed over the years, My Ryzen is around five years old, has to be, maybe a bit older. To be honest, it has been a good workhouse and is the longest I have had a PC without updating it. The sound card went belly up on it last night, but that is a lot older, i think the pre amp may have gone, so I have to use the on board sound now.

It is difficult to know what to do, I feel i need a change from windows and while I would love to go to Linux full time that is really not a option, so Mac OS is the next thing, if I could run MAc os on a PC that would be ideal. I know there are ways, but it can be a pain.
My original plan was to get a Mac laptop and then connect it up to the monitor and keyboard, but I hate laptops,

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

It is amazing how technology have changed over the years, My Ryzen is around five years old, has to be, maybe a bit older. To be honest, it has been a good workhouse and is the longest I have had a PC without updating it. The sound card went belly up on it last night, but that is a lot older, i think the pre amp may have gone, so I have to use the on board sound now.

I just replaced a 7 year old tower (i7 4th generation / 16GB RAM / SATA3 SSD) with a new i7 tower (i7 12th Gen / 16 GB RAM / M.2 PCIe 4x SSD). This machine benchtests on CPU about the same as the M1 Mac Mini or an Air laptop. Graphics is different though.

Many of my colleagues at work whom have moved from Mac Intel CPU machines to Mac with Apple Silicon love the speed and the instant on/off (like a tablet or phone) for the laptops…. But many of us are in software development and document production jobs (MS Word, VSCode etc etc).

I think the Mac is really best for what you are talking about, graphic work, photo and video. Its okay as a platform for software development, but you can’t easily take a compiled program and run it on a Linux server in the cloud (as you could with an Intel mac).

So longer term I can see plenty of Mac’s being sold by Apple, but more so into the YouTube or Graphics world… and why most US universities filled themselves with Apple computers in the late 80s and 1990s. What happens in corporate is unknown… as so many of my colleagues need occasional access to Windows.

I played with a Surface Pro laptop with 12th gen i5 CPU, and in responsiveness its so close to the Macbook air M1 that I don’t think most people would notice. Not as good benchmarks, but the battery life is very close…. So its not yet “game set and match” to Apple. Its all for Intel and AMD to lose !

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

You won't need the pro one, the 16GB machine is very capable.

I've got a 32GB M1 Max and it is total overkill for just about anything I might do with it. My 8GB M1 can do almost as well for most people's workload.

But what do you do?

I would not go for 8GB, 16GB is the minimum, I got to do some more research

I did not recommend you went for 16GB. When I said the 8GB machine can do almost as well as my 32GB Max "for most people" I was using "most people" in the broadest possible way. Most people use their Macs to surf the web, edit some documents, send some emails and look at their photos.

And for them the 8GB machine will work really, really well.

From what you've said about getting a Mac over the months, I don't think you're most people, hence I didn't recommend the 8GB. But did suggest the 16GB would be good enough and it was unlikely you'd need the Pro.

I used the 8GB M1 Mac mini for six months for:

- Final Cut video editing (including a multi camera 40 minute long video of a friend's wedding)
- All my photo editing/management
- My daily work tasks as a software developer (Javascript, c# and a bit of Swift iOS development)
- Running Teams, Word, Excel for all the dull bits of software development

It didn't cause me any problems running that workload, it was fast and snappy, the fan rarely ever span up. It was much, much faster than the four core i5 2.5 GHz 16GB Intel MacBook I was coming from.

So I'm not claiming everyone should buy an 8GB machine, but for many, many people it can do everything they need to pretty much as fast as a 16GB model. And the 16GB model is 30% more expensive than the 8GB.

As someone else pointed out, thanks to the different architecture, 8GB on Apple silicon feels very different to 8GB of an Intel Mac or a Windows PC.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

So longer term I can see plenty of Mac’s being sold by Apple, but more so into the YouTube or Graphics world… and why most US universities filled themselves with Apple computers in the late 80s and 1990s. What happens in corporate is unknown… as so many of my colleagues need occasional access to Windows.

The lack of the ability to run x86 Windows is the only downside of of my M1Max MacBook Pro. I've got round the issue by having an Azure virtual machine for when I need do to stuff that I absolutely need Windows for.

Longer term, if Microsoft continues to put effort into ARM Windows (including making the licensing on Mac hardware more official) then it will probably become a non issue for quite a few people who currently need to use Windows from a Mac.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

(including making the licensing on Mac hardware more official)

Assuming MS don't have an exclusive contract with Qualcomm over ARM windows, which is what many suggest is the reason for the hold. At the moment no company with lawyers can use this. Home users can get away with the Insider builds (using any of the free or paid virtualisation tools).

But ARM Windows still isn't binary compatible with x86 cloud (even Containers).

I know you did not recommend going for the 16GB one, but for stuff I want to do with it, I think it is best. I don't think I am going to go for a pro, 16GB of ram and 512Gb of drive, as I said before I can get a dock to put extra storage in, but you can't expand the ram

I know I have been on about going for a MAc for a while, buit I was waiting to see what new one Apple would bring out and that is what they have done.
I still not sure what to do, someone said I should get a MacBook then I could use that for for portable stuff as well, but I don't like laptops.
The thing is I don't want to spend a load of money as I may not like Mac Os and want to go back to Windows I can't see it myself, but you never know.

I like final cut, but for what I want it is too expensive, if I made a living out of it then fine. I think I will be using da Vinci, it seems like they have produced a Apple Silicon version.
I will buy the MAc version of Affinity photo as I am used to it on Windows.

A 8GB machine is fine for people who just want to browse, maybe do a little bit for video editing from their phone, do some office stuff and that sort of thing.

Thanks for the help, i think you have helped me to almost make up my mind

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I know you did not recommend going for the 16GB one, but for stuff I want to do with it, I think it is best. I don't think I am going to go for a pro, 16GB of ram and 512Gb of drive, as I said before I can get a dock to put extra storage in, but you can't expand the ram

Can you please go back and read what I wrote in my two comments. I was recommending you get the 16GB one.

And yes, Da Vinci is a great option (free version limited to max 4K 60fps video). They have consistently supported new Apple hardware just as quickly as Apple have with Final Cut (in contrast to Adobe with Premier).

The other thing to bear in mind is the Pro goes extra TB4 ports and HDMI 2.1.

A usefukl general prinicple is to buy the best machine you can afford.