is the 2 000 max studio really worth over double the price compared to the m1
macbook air well today i will give you guys my honest feedback after two weeks
of use with the system depending on what
you do we're gonna go over a bunch of real world tasks and i think some of you
guys are really going to be surprised i know i was so let's go ahead and jump in
here are the specifications comparing both of these systems we have 900 bucks
compared to 2 000 so there is a big difference in performance now we do have
to cover another difference and that is the fact that this thing does have 32
gigs of ram as well as having larger ssd now if we go ahead and kick up that ssd
we add 10 gigabit ethernet which is available after i purchase my m1 mac
mini the difference is much smaller we have 1200 bucks but keep in mind if you
were able to get 32 gigs of ram on the m1 mac mini then the price difference
would be only 400 and with the studio we have four thunderbolt uh ports on the
back and then on the front we have two additional usb type-cs that are 10
gigabit per second which is nice and the sd card reader so for the extra 400
bucks you get extra ports as well and the ability to use up to five displays
instead of being limited to two now i know most people do not need more than
two displays but i will say in the real world having those extra ports in that
sd card reader in the front has been very nice whereas with the m1 mac mini i
have had to resort to buying a third-party thunderbolt dock which gives
me extra ports because this is a little bit limited once you start hooking up
your display one fast ssd you have almost no ports left over now one of you
guys know up front that that ram difference does make a difference i wish
that we could get 32 gigs with this system now for most people doing basic
tasks you are not going to notice much difference so we take a look at the
single core geekbench test here or if we take a look at speedometer 2.0
as far as the snappiness of the system they're actually really close and if
you're using regular tasks you don't need more than 16 gigs but if you're
somebody that does want to get into some video editing photo editing some other
kind of productivity if you have start opening up multiple applications or
working on longer tests that is where 16 gigs can be a limitation for you now
i've gotten around this by keeping just one app open and then it's not too bad
but you only you will know you know how many tabs you keep open how many
programs you want to open at the same time this is where the 32 gigs really
comes in and at the base 2 000 price that is included now as far as
multi-core performance we have double the cpu cores the score doesn't quite
double but it is quite close there so that is a good thing and then as far as
cinebench which maxes out the cpus you guys also see a really nice linear
scaling or close to it now with this extra performance do you get more noise
you know not really this thing is tiny you guys can see it's
kind of a joke you know how small it looks now compared to the studio which
looks quite chunky uh but the cooler that's in here it literally stays on
idle fans the whole time it is silent no matter what you throw at it but the same
thing goes for the mac studio they put in a much bigger fan in this thing two
fans actually much bigger cooler so both these systems are completely silent now
another difference is the speed of the ssds even if you get the top spec 2
terabyte model the m1 mac mini it is still limited to just under 3 000
megabytes per second whereas the max studio even in its base 512 form it is
closed twice as fast and then of course it goes up to 8 terabytes as far as
graphics you actually get three times the graphics cores and you get almost
perfect scaling and geeky benches metal test which runs about 20 to 30 different
tasks so that is pretty impressive great scaling and then as far as gaming
performance you can actually get close to three times the scaling if the
application is very well optimized or if it's more cpu limited it's about
twice the performance so that is actually decent uh if you can consider
all the other differences that you get with the m1 ultra we are not seeing
scaling anywhere near this good so the base two thousand dollar mac studio is
actually a pretty good value now let's jump into real world productivity tasks
as far as xcode for coding you would think you'd get double the scaling but
that's not true we do have a decent bump but i would say unless you're compiling
a ton of different stuff often
i would not spend the extra money because of the unified memory and the
efficiency the l1 mac mini is already super super quick jumping into logic in
our new logic pro benchmark you guys can look it up exactly what the test is
we're getting close to double the tracks but once again the mac mini is a killer
the only thing i would say to you guys is if you're using a ton of plug-ins you
might be limited by the 16 gigs with the m1 mac mini that is where the studio
comes in with its 32 gigs now as far as the photo editors we do see a pretty
good difference in a lot of applications but not all in affinity we have a good
jump in cpu but a pretty big one in gpu and the gpu is what's used most often
in lightroom as far as the exports the speeds are almost twice as fast really
good scaling and that means that if you do a lot of
exports if you're a wedding photographer you do big batches of photos man i
definitely noticed the difference and the same thing if you're doing uh
panoramas or if you do hdr if you're just doing tasks that you're sitting
there waiting man this is where this thing really
surprised me and i would absolutely go for it now as far as sliders and doing
your standard adjustment of brushes i do notice a difference but it's not as big
just because the single core performance is so close and then as far as photoshop
unfortunately we are not getting anywhere near as good scaling as
lightroom it is still not very efficient not very well optimized so for photoshop
users as long as you're not doing a ton of layers that require the extra ram i
would stick with the mini for those of you guys that are doing 3d work for
example we tested out blender we do see some nice scaling and performance so if
you're somebody that's doing constant renders
or you're working with some animations the extra graphics performance is really
useful i would definitely push all of you guys to spend the extra money for a
studio now for video editors it really depends we tested out final cut but
davinci resolve actually performs almost identically so uh for those of you guys
working with both programs here are the results for your standard h.264 projects
uh the exporting speed well you do see a difference um but it just depends on how
often you export same thing for h.265 uh what really matters is your
timeline performance now a lot of you guys a lot of youtubers out there doing
simple stuff even having some titles you know a couple different effects some
color corrections you don't see a massive difference in
timeline performance that's because if you're not maxing out the m1's gpu
you won't really see a difference this one this one will just be used at like
half the performance or maybe about a third
but once you start loading up a lot of different effects you start going into
some tougher projects that's where you start seeing a difference now for these
export times so i'm using five minute projects because especially with the
tougher ones uh they take quite a while and we see here spending hours and hours
doing these tests but because neither of these thermal throttle you could scale
this five minute project that i test to 10 minutes or 20 minutes and see if that
export time makes a difference for you once we start getting into the tougher
projects especially getting into pro res we start seeing some massive differences
because the mac studio has pro res in decoders and encoders which really
speeds it up so if you're working with prores absolutely mac studio and the
same thing goes if you're working with tougher projects raw footage or you're
stacking a lot of effects this is definitely when you need the extra gpu
performance so overall if you're working with regular 4k compressed footage and
you're doing just a few effects some titles things like that it's not a
necessity but once you start getting into different multicams with different
effects stacked up any sort of raw you definitely want the studio so i have to
say overall i was really surprised by most of these projects and how much of a
difference this makes now of course if you're looking at the base model for
6.99 that's all you can afford this is going to be an insanely good system but
once you start upgrading you start adding more storage
you start caring about the ports this is where the mac studio really comes into
its own and i think for a lot of you guys if you keep your system for three
years four years five years i would definitely spend the extra money now and
now if you can't i would also say if there's any way you can wait for about a
half a year and wait for the m2 mac mini with the new processor i would do so
because it's going to get a lot of extra benefits
it will be worth the wait but overall it's still a decent system just right
now it is starting to show its age a little bit and also some of the extra
limitations but you guys let me know your thoughts down in the comments
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max and i will see you in the next video [Music]