By early April I’d received the Mac Studio (M1 Max, 10/24 cores, 32 GB Ram, 2TB SSD) and the Studio Display.
I used Migration Assistant to move from my 2017 iMac 27" to the new system. The process went smoothly. There was one frustrating point of confusion with my legacy Apple Mouse, Magic Keyboard & Trackpad being recognized by Bluetooth on the iMac and the Mac Studio. The work-around when switching back and forth between the 2 systems was to connect the systems with lightning cables to the Kybd, and Trackpad.
This new system is a nice, though subtle improvement over the iMac.
Mainly I use the system for Adobe LR and Photoshop with LR being my main focus. Normal LR uses are not significantly different than they were on my iMac but image file import/ export is quicker. (I don’t do many panos, HDR combos, or focus stacking.) The system is overall smoother and boots far more quickly than did the iMac. I haven’t seen any beachballs.
The system is dead quiet unless I turn my hearing aids WAY up.
I"ve loaded up Lightroom, Photoshop, Bridge, Excell, a bunch of Safari instances, and the Apple Shortcuts app and haven’t seen memory pressure greater than 20%.
None of the temp sensors via the iStat app are greater than 40 C. Total Power I’ve seen is < 12 Watts.
The Studio Display’s visual quality is pretty much akin to the iMac, the speakers are very good but not as good as my Audio Engine A2’s. The Studio Display camera is substandard. The overall design quality is excellent.
Between the ports on the Mac Studio and the Studio Display I’ve now got ports up the Wazoo!
After a week’s experience transitioning from the iMac and using the Mac Studio + Studio Display system I’m pleased.
This is a bit surprising to me, given the improvements in the M processor. I have similar use cases, so maybe I just got a bit less in a hurry to move from my own 2017 iMac.
I’ve read somewhere that LR doesn’t take as much advantage of the multiple cores. The assertion is that there isn’t a big difference when LR runs on an intel processor as contrasted with the m1 Max. Not sure about this but certainly I’ve not seen any dramatic improvements when I run LR on my Mac Studio.
I rationalized moving to the Mac Studio as I wanted to get whatever value I could for my iMac as that value seems to be declining rapidly and reasonably given the overall improvements seen with Apple’s silicon.
I use DxO PhotoLab for my photo processing. Their demoniac/denoise algorithms are beasts, but very good. As my workflow was generally to export a whole bunch of images in one go after tweaking them all, I’d just set it running and go do something else.
Then they added support for the M1 Neural Engine.
I still go off and leave it if I have a lot of images, but wow it made a huge difference. If I only have 10 images I will just sit and wait. I’d wager the M1 Max would chew through them at an impressive rate. But hey, I used to put up with it on an Intel Mac mini so I can’t justify anything M1 Max at this stage.
Another point about bring-up of the Mac Studio + Studio Display:
The Studio Display does not show up on the list of one’s Apple devices.
Apple tech support explains that the display is classified as an accessory and, as such, does not have a device id.
I was confused by this.
It took a senior tech support advisor to fully articulate this.
Don’t be like me and think that this USD $1600 device should be listed among one’s devices.
