Anyone else disappointed by the Mac Studio?

[lcubed]

Well that's great!! Hey I was surprised honestly but yeah Davinci 18 will not run, Davinci 17 takes literally 5 minutes just to open and strangely my Editor Keyboard wouldn't type on the login page yesterday until I had unplugged and replugged a couple times. I'm still unable to open 'Sharing' in preferences and I can only hard shutdown because the Apple menu won't logout, restart or shutdown the system.

Strange, annoying and increasingly common problems keep cropping up since Catalina (That update bricked my company's protools workstation for 6 months).

I'm sure packing it up and sending it to Apple is a solution but after spending 6k on a device I expect it to be plug and play. . . guess not . . . at least it had a really cool, custom designed box. . .

I want to love Apple products, I really do but their prices keep rising and their quality assurance keeps plummeting.

how did you migrate your applications, etc to your studio?
did you install the universal versions of your desired programs after migration?

i had to redo my migration and deselect some network settings et al when i migrated from your old, old high sierra to monterey. some of those old settings really screwed up keychain and file permissions. took me and apple support (with lots of log files) about a week to figure that out.

 

[StudioMacs]

Well that's great!! Hey I was surprised honestly but yeah Davinci 18 will not run, Davinci 17 takes literally 5 minutes just to open and strangely my Editor Keyboard wouldn't type on the login page yesterday until I had unplugged and replugged a couple times. I'm still unable to open 'Sharing' in preferences and I can only hard shutdown because the Apple menu won't logout, restart or shutdown the system.

Strange, annoying and increasingly common problems keep cropping up since Catalina (That update bricked my company's protools workstation for 6 months).

I'm sure packing it up and sending it to Apple is a solution but after spending 6k on a device I expect it to be plug and play. . . guess not . . . at least it had a really cool, custom designed box. . .

I want to love Apple products, I really do but their prices keep rising and their quality assurance keeps plummeting.

To add to lcubed's reply, I had several problems after using migration assistant, so I went into system preferences and chose the menu option to erase all content and settings giving me a clean Mac to start from. I decided it would be better to not migrate a user account that went back to Sierra (at least).

iCloud sync brings in a number of things like email accounts, so aside from manually importing my music library (from an iTunes version) all I had to do was a fresh install of my apps and plugins.

 

[R3k]

Design could be more interesting yes. Disappointed? No. Quite subtle and un-obtrusive under my desk. Easy to stack external storage on top of.

 

[F-Train]

Well that's great!! Hey I was surprised honestly but yeah Davinci 18 will not run, Davinci 17 takes literally 5 minutes just to open

As should be clear from the screen capture in my post above (#248), DaVinci 18 is running on my Mac Studio. I just timed it. It took 12 seconds to open, and I have a good number of plugins. That's for the application opening on its own, not with a current project.

 

[Sharky II]

Not the specs or price. The specs for the Mac Studio are great value for the price (except the 512GB storage...) The price itself is perfectly reasonable. These Macs will easily last 10 years, so long as there is no failure of components.

No, what I'm disappointed by is the design. Frankly I think it looks very ugly, just as bad as the renders predicted, if not worse. A height-stretched Mac Mini has none of the elegance of the Mac Mini form factor, and is rather ridiculous.

I'm disappointed because Apple had a real chance to showcase a bold new design, like the M1 iMac, but instead they played it very, very safe, because of "pros hate colour" or "pros hate risktaking" or whatever.

This could've been a chance to do something like the G4 Cube – heck, I bet enthusiasts are already planning to mod a Mac Studio into a G4 case. To quote Steve Jobs, Apple could've had the power and the sex. They've got the power now... just not the beautiful design they once pioneered.

Who knows where Apple design language will go in future, but what I'm seeing now is just Jony Ive-style aluminium chassis, minus Ive-style thin design. I'm not asking Macs to be ultra-thin, I'm asking them to be cool. Cool like the Cube, iMac G4 and iPod. Today, Apple's design team seems only capable of creating products that look like an iOS app. They're not pushing the boundaries anymore.

I think it looks a lot better in person… I really like it. The choice of black for the Apple logo really makes it feel a bit more premium/serious.

 

[DRDR]

I got an unstable machine when migrating from Mac Pro 6,1 using migration wizard. After a clean install everything was fine.

 

[TTYS0]

The Studio was the first Mac I didn't use Migration Assistant on in over a decade. It wasn't that big of a deal to get things installed and configured, and it helped that I could have a bazillion things going on at once without any lag.

As far as the topic goes, I've been using the Studio for a few days now, and I'm not disappointed in the slightest. Any irritations I've run across have nothing to do with the Studio itself, and are just the usual annoyances with macOS, regardless of the hardware. I do have Rosetta2 installed, since I use a handful of Intel only apps, but that too was a seamless process. The only way I can tell an Intel app is by actively looking in Activity Monitor, as they just run like they would anywhere else.

The novelty wore off after a day or so, and the hardware has now just faded into the background. Since everything is fast, and the Studio is now mounted under my desk, it's just invisible. It's also nice that it does all that while using a fraction of the power that my i7 iMac did.

 

[theluggage]

I think it looks a lot better in person… I really like it. The choice of black for the Apple logo really makes it feel a bit more premium/serious.

It is a bit of a big featureless lump - I've never had an Intel Mac Mini and didn't realise how much the footprint had increased from the G4 Mini until I put the G4 and Studio side by side. Still, the G4 relied on a whacking great external power brick...

(Yes, that's a G4 mini, not a leak of the almost-certainly-coming M2 mini with acrylic lid to let the WiFi in )

...but then, we've seen "courageous" desktop design with the Mac Pro Trashcan (looked great - turned out to be a design dead-end), which may be why Apple's gone rather boring with the Studio. Also, there are already several docks/drive enclosures designed to "stack" with the Mini, which the Studio can benefit from. There's a lot to be said for simple and functional.

Main practical gripe is that the power button should be on the front, and is very fiddly to find by touch. Longer-term concern is whether the thermal design is up to snuff - it's pulling air in through a rather restrictive grille, then the air has to do a 90-degree turn to get out of the back panel, so there's no natural 'convective' flow which may be why - even with a huge heat sink - the fan has to run continually.

, because of "pros hate colour" or "pros hate risktaking" or whatever.

Well, yeah - colourful systems look great when paired with co-ordinated keyboards, mice, displays etc. but it's a modular system that you don't have to pair with the official peripherals. Black, white or silver/grey go with everything,

Then, Macs get used by a lot of graphics people who are trying to accurately judge colours on-screen, so they really don't want brightly coloured stuff in their field of vision throwing off your mental white balance.

This could've been a chance to do something like the G4 Cube

Which was a famous form-over-function flop - not just because of price/performance but because the case started cracking up. Apart from that, the Studio is "something like the G4 Cube" - except it's low enough to tuck in under a display, whereas the Cube wasn't.

However, Apple do seem to be struggling to find a direction for future design, or to find a consistent design language across the range. So we have joined-up-thinking failures like one team dreaming up white bezels on the iMac while another team came up with the MacBook notch - you can think what you like about either of those by itself, but white bezels + notch = totally foreseeable disaster (black is black, so you can make a dark notch vanish against a black bezel, you can't make a glowing notch vanish against a light-coloured bezel). So the MBA can't follow the iMac design language. Then, again with the M1 iMac you've got the whole magnetic connector, ethernet-in-the-power supply thing - which hasn't been picked up by either the Studio or the Studio display. The 2019 Mac Pro "Steampunk" design language seems to be a dead end, too...

...and, although I joked about it above, if the Mythical M2 Mini does turn out to have a new look, modelling the brand new Studio on the outgoing Mini is a strange decision...

 

[southerndude39]

Definitely not disappointed. I love it!