M2…
I really like Apple stuff. Well built, nice and macOS is my favorite OS. I bought a MBP13 the day they came out and I am really happy with it.
But sometimes I need a lot of processing power. And after looking at Mac Studio prices, I decided to go for a PC. I just can’t justify the bang/buck ratio. While on the laptop I extensively use macOS features (and Hazel, and KBM, …) on a “workstation” I just spend a lot of time in an application. Premiere, Photoshop, QGIS,…no difference in usage depending on the OS.
My rationale:
Geekbench 5 Multicore:
My M1 MBP Pro: 7286
A Mac Studio (M1 Max, 10 Cores): 12328
My PC (6+4 Cores): 10344
My M1 is a pretty solid machine. Moving to a M1 Max would give me +70% MC computing power. Moving to the PC gave me +43%. I got a i5-12600, which is a very cheap CPU. My PC: €1100. A Mac Studio (M1 Max): €2299. With the half the price difference I could have gotten an i9 and closed the performance gap.
Geekbench Singlecore:
My M1 MBP Pro: 1587
A Mac Studio (M1 Max): 1745
My PC: 1805
I improved SC performance comparable moving to M1 Max.
Geekbench OpenCL:
My M1: 19380 (the reason I was looking for more “umph”)
M1 Max: 56581
M1 Ultra: 76040
My PC: 98683
And this is the ona that made me decide against Apple. GPU performance became essential. Premiere uses it a lot, Photoshop does the heavy lifting on the GPU, a lot of data analysis is done with GPU support. A €1100 PC is completely destroying anything Apple out there. An bear in mind, the M1 Ultra starts at €4599…and has -22% OpenCL performance than vanilla PC hardware.
I have been an Apple user since the Apple II. With the move to M1 I wrote a lot of posts applauding it. But in the back of my head I was expecting M2/M3. Whatever with superior performance. Sme kind of “SoC but proper GPU”. Or whatever. For anybody working a lot with A/V, €4599 get you PCs that are beyond anything Apple has to offer in terms of GPU performance.
For my PC I bought stuff on the cheaper end of “good”. Nothing special. For very little money I can upgrade. 32GB of DDR5 memory go for €206. Upgrading 32GB on the Mac Studio €460. And after clicking through all the upgrades, I have a subpar machine. A RTX3090 graphics card with 24GB of memory goes for €1500. Which is insane, unless I look at the price differences PC/Apple to get less performace. I could have bought an i9 and a RTX3090 (OpenCL performance: 204921) for roughly half the price of a M1 Ultra Studio…and get 170% more GPU performace.
I still think Apple makes the “best” hardware. In termy of build quality, battery life, etc. I am tying this on my 10th (?) Apple laptop. I own my 5th (?) iPhone. My 3rd iPad. Had Apple desktops. And will stay with them for a long time and move on to another MBP/iPhone/iPad generation when the time comes. But in terms of computing performace…that door has closed for me.
Downside of the PC: looks like crap compared to a Mac Studio. 
I really hope “power users” (as in “need a lot of computing power”, not “fiddle with everything”) get something again. Like the real Mac Pro.