Mac Studio vs. Macbook Pro

[themarqueeyears]

Thanks everyone for your replies and personal experiences.

I’m torn between a new Mac Studio M2 Ultra (stock) £4K and a new Scan 3XS system with an Intel 24 core i9 13th gen 64 GB ram and 10TB internal SSD’s for £3K.

So there’s £1K price difference and with the Mac I’ll get a 1TB internal ssd and with the Scan system I’ll get 5 drives totalling 10TB.

On the face of it for Cubase and large libraries the Scan workstation is looking to be better value for money, plus my current RME digital connectivity is PCIe as is my UAD2 card.

So it’s going to be a bigger bill to change back to running a Mac but equally I do like the Apple environment.

Tough call.

Don't do it! I went back to PC a few years ago and it was an absolute nightmare. Good performing in parts but so many little niggles and driver issues. Windows is still an awful OS even now.

I replaced my massive beefy PC with a MacBook Pro 16 M1 Pro and external SSD. It absolutely destroys the PC for performance while being completely portable, has the best screen I've ever seen and, now plugin manufacturers have made almost everything Apple Silicon native, just works.

I'd also ditch the UAD2 card. Good plugins for their time but running on absolutely archaic DSP chips.

Which DAW do you use on your Mac?

Thanks

[johnny h]

Ableton, Bitwig, Reaper, Renoise

[tea for two]

I'm shopping for Mac devices and I'm down to the Macbook Pro vs. Studio. By
Also, is M2 worth it? If it's only graphics related I don't care because I'm only doing music.

Benchmarks from maxtech utube channel : pro and max M2 there's approx 16-20% CPU performance increase over M1 pro and max. It's the GPU performance of M2 that's quite a jump up from M1.

Having your cake and eating it lol as it were would be indoors running monitors from mbook pro, thereafter taking mbook pro with you.
I enjoy making music on the go without being bogged down indoors.

::

I’m torn between a new Mac Studio M2 Ultra (stock) £4K and a new Scan 3XS system with an Intel 24 core i9 13th gen 64 GB ram and 10TB internal SSD’s for £3K.

On the face of it for Cubase and large libraries the Scan workstation is looking to be better value for money, plus my current RME digital connectivity is PCIe as is my UAD2 card.

So it’s going to be a bigger bill to change back to running a Mac but equally I do like the Apple environment.

Tough call.

Would have to go Mac Pro tower for pcie, starts at £7199 m2 ultra, or getting one of those pcie external enclosures to run through usbC thunderbolt4 then a mac studio m2 ultra.

Wind11 can still use plenty older hardware software from around 2decades earlier it's one of the best things abooot wind.
Mac i still keep a 2010 mbook pro to run snow leopard 10.6 for one of my fave audio hardware and software from around 2007 both of which runs fine on my wind11 pc.
There's also wind touchscreens which I dig a lot. My current wind pc is 24inch touchscreen AMD.
If only apple made it possible for osx to run external touchscreen monitors.

AppSili performance wipes the floor with intel i9 including Xeon specifically for the programs AppSili is made for according to various benchmarks online,
whilst AppSili draws a lot less wattage approx 1/3 of intel high power draw wattage.
Another is the more quietness of AppSili lineup macs compared to intel machines under heavy load.

[johnny h]

Please do not spend the extra 4000 to run a UAD card! Ancient technology that even UAD themselves have finally given up on.

[ore_terra]

They’re even releasing their own plugins native only…

I posted this already: with my MBP 16 M1 Pro I can track with more native plugins as inserts monitoring through Cubase with no [noticeable] latency than I could with the 2 Apollos (8 chips) that I had.

[tea for two]

Please do not spend the extra 4000 to run a UAD card!

^^ This.
There's a few utubers that are saying they are numpties for purchasing £7K Pro tower M2 ultra.
They purchased it for the sake of their utube channel also to run some tests.

[BigRedX]

For me the big advantage of the MacPro would be the fact that could have all my storage on internal devices that weren't the system drive. I'm not a big fan of external drives that are in use permanently, especially since modern connectors (USB or Thunderbolt) don't appear to robust enough for any kind of usage that might involve moving the Mac or the external storage units (deliberately or accidentally). However, right now, I don't think that feature is worth paying an extra £4k over the Mac Studio for.

I bought an M2 Mac Mini when they first came out to use with a USB multi-disk enclosure as a file server. However I simply couldn't get it to work reliably, as the external drives kept going to sleep and disconnecting from the client Macs, despite having the Mac Mini configured for the drives not to sleep. As a result I'm using an ancient MacPro 3,1 bought second hand as a server.

[tea for two]

After I got my 2019 iMac 6cores i5 3.0GHz just this week.
I looked in a little on the
2019 i9-9980HK 8cores 2.4Ghz macbook pro 16inch :
104 instances of this 2022 Logic Pro benchmark test
https://music-prod.com/logic-pro-benchmarks/
2021 M1 8cores 32GB RAM mbp 14inch :
143 instances.
M1 M2 pro and max for mbp has more cores of course which gives more instances.
M1 8cores air 16GB RAM : 110 instances.
M1 8cores mbp 13 inch 16GB RAM : 106 instance.
M2 8cores air 8GB RAM : 82 instances.
(RAM appears to have a bearing on this Logic benchmark).

Considering for approx £550 used 2019 i9-9980HK 8cores 2.4Ghz mbp 15inch with 16GB RAM 512GB ssd can be picked up.
It's a pretty decent deal compared to approx £1.1K used M1 8cores mbp 14 inch with 16GB RAM 512GB ssd.
A difference of 39 instances of this 2022 Logic Pro benchmark test.
Both mbp screens are LED although M1 mbp screen is 1600nits max, whereas 2019 i9 mbp screen is 500nits.
Better ports on M1 mbp.
More fan noise more heat more power consumption on i9-9980HK mbp.
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macb ... specs.html
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macb ... specs.html
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macb ... specs.html

::

My 2019 imac 6cores i5-8500 gets just 66 instances
of this Logic Pro benchmark test which is plenty for me to run my projects smoothly.
So 104 instances on this approx £550 used 2019 i9-9980k 16GB 512GB mpb is nothing to sniff at.
It's close enuff to approx £800 used M1 8cores air 16GB RAM 512GB ssd : 110 instances;
approx £900 used M1 8cores mbp 13 inch 16GB RAM 512GB ssd : 106 instances.

[johnny h]

I bought an M2 Mac Mini when they first came out to use with a USB multi-disk enclosure as a file server. However I simply couldn't get it to work reliably, as the external drives kept going to sleep and disconnecting from the client Macs, despite having the Mac Mini configured for the drives not to sleep. As a result I'm using an ancient MacPro 3,1 bought second hand as a server.

Then get a better one.

A good thunderbolt 4 dock doesn't disconnect and works much faster than an ancient Mac Pro 3,1. It also doesn't cost 4 grand.

With a Studio and a drive enclosure you can quite easily carry them around if you need. A Mac Pro is seriously heavy and bulky.

[tea for two]

Somewhat off tangent.
Mac Studio being used to help design Prosthetics for animals, Prosthetics to be 3D printed.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sdFtMRko2GU
Seen at 3mins52seconds.