Cinema and video game professionals have one thing in common with artificial intelligence researchers: their work tools are overpriced. In these circles, a $10,000 computer is practically a bargain. It is in this context that Apple is marketing these days a super-powerful desktop computer called Mac Studio, which targets professionals of this caliber.
“This new Mac fits well in a university research environment such as in AI in Montreal, or in film or post-production studios”, which there is also in the metropolis, explains Marc-André Léger. The teacher and postdoc in cybersecurity at Concordia University and Polytechnique was, in a past life, curator of the defunct Montreal Computer Museum.
The knowledge of a historian and scholar is helpful in putting the Mac Studio into context, because rarely does a new computer product come with such heavy historical, technical, and commercial baggage.
muscle
Mac enthusiast, Marc-André Léger sees the newcomer as an incursion by Apple into a niche that was until recently reserved for very niche brands such as Lambda, a sort of Ferrari of PCs unknown to the general public, but particularly popular with researchers. top academics. You don’t find a Lambda computer under $6,000; most are around $20,000.
This kind of mechanics is necessary to exploit software like TensorFlow, the reference tool for tweaking in artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, it works very well on newer Macs. The Mac Studio is more powerful than any other Mac by three or four lengths, and its graphics processor does even better. It can animate software like TensorFlow with no apparent effort. In fact, it does this without even hearing its fan start.
It’s a small feat. It is also practical in another professional context: that of sound and video production and editing. This Mac is capable of playing up to 18 video streams in 8K format simultaneously on the same monitor. Each of its streams has as many pixels as 16 full HD videos. It can mix 500 music tracks without breaking a sweat. It can simulate a mobile application on the software equivalent of 17 different devices (iPhone and iPad) at the same time.
Naturally, its retail price of $2,500 in the basic version and $5,000 in the Ultra version is too high for ordinary mortals. But that is explained: the Mac Studio is not intended for them.
Especially since it is sold alongside a new monitor, the Studio Display, which is not cheap either. At $2000, it is still three times cheaper than the Pro Display XDR launched by Apple in 2019. The Studio Display is 27 inches diagonally and has the main quality of integrating speakers, microphones and a web camera absolutely amazing quality; they quickly make people forget the need to wear a headset to participate in meetings on Teams, Zoom or elsewhere.
M1 Ultra: the unprecedented
Its main mechanical feature is its M1 Ultra processor. It’s basically the very intimate pairing of two identical M1 Max processors. The M1 Max is the processor that powers the entry-level Mac Studio. It results from this “merger” (said Apple) a processor with up to 64 cores depending on the model, which have direct access to a maximum RAM of 128 gigabytes capable of digesting data at a peak rate of 800 gigabits per second.
This same memory is also directly accessible by the graphics processor (“GPU”, in English) integrated into this system on chip (“SoC”, also in the language of Shakespeare). It’s a small technical feat hitherto unseen in the personal computing market. This is probably just the beginning: an Apple engineer teased the crowds on stage during the announcement of this novelty on March 8 by hinting that an even more muscular Mac Pro would be in the plans.
In this case, there is talk, according to rumours, of an M2 processor, which, one suspects, will add a little more power to what the Mac Studio currently offers. Meanwhile, this new model is undoubtedly a new reference in the catalog of Apple in particular, and in the niche of high-end computers in general.
Baggage
That said, the Mac Studio is something of a gamble. A risky bet if we consider the other times when the designers of the Californian firm have worked on a desktop computer separate from its own monitor.
Because it hasn’t always been a success: let’s just recall the decline of the brand in the 1990s after the explosion of its catalog by the addition of the Performa and Centris ranges… until the astonishing Mac Cube launched at the beginning of the millennium. The Cube was a design success, but a commercial and technical failure. The device was overheating, its CD player housed at the top of its cubic case was in danger of failing at any time and its software also had its shortcomings.
A baggage that does not worry Marc-André Léger: “The Mac Studio is very similar to the Cube, but Apple will probably not experience the same story again. Innovation means taking risks and, in this case, the risk remains very reasonable,” he says. After the Cube, Apple has also recovered with PowerMacs and Mac Pros which have done much better. Cheaper, the Mac Mini was then able to unite a good number of consumers, thanks above all to its very affordable retail price. However, we felt a new breathlessness in recent years through the problems experienced on the side of the Mac Pro.
This largely explains the creation of a new internal division called Apple Silicon dedicated to the development of 100% pure (apple) juice processors. It is to her that we owe the recent progress on the side of MacBooks and the brand new iPad Air presented at the same time as the Mac Studio.
Given its name, the latter does not hide its ambitions to find itself in large enough numbers on the desks of professionals in the media and digital worlds of the moment. A place of work generally referred to as a studio.