The problem for me with the M3 Max MBP is the noise, from what I've seen in the reviews. So it's not an easy choice between a quiet but obsolete M2 Studio and a noisy M3 Max in the MBP. I really hope Gurman is wrong and I can order an M4 Studio next month. Else, not sure what to get (I may consider a PC)
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mac studio: which M3 Max features are worth waiting for?
- Thread starter monoduster
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Ah bummer.. Already obsolete. My Studio M2 Max was delivered a couple weeks ago to replace my MBP M1 Max. eh.. does what I need it to do. All goodl.
We just bought 30 for our lab rotation. They’ll perform about as well as our brand new Xeon workstations but cost a little less.just one report here, feel free to google yourself tons of more:
TSMC’s 3nm yield rate reportedly just 55% · TechNode
TSMC is struggling with its new 3nm process, with the semiconductor giant's yield rate reportedly far below the standard expected.technode.com
55% yield is so bad, even if Apple would want to stay on N3B, TSMC would say, hell no it costs us tons of money.
Yeah they got better from that 55% but still not into number regions which makes it viable to produce this.
You got me wrong, this isnt about sales.
Apple still cares about the reputation in the creative space.
And that is something you cant buy.
And about sales of Mac Studio, again there is jsut nearly no reason from hardware specs to buy a Mac Studio even right now, the M3 Max is as fast as a M2 Ultra! Just in very very small use cases the more GPUs in the ultra play a role. But if that is worth the extra price from M3 Max Macbook Pro to M2 Ultra... i have doubts. I cant see anyone really buying that thing anymore.
I'd like one with a thunderbolt 5 port. Less need to buy stupidly expensive Apple internal storage. But I don't think Apple will prove that yet ...
What noise? I have one since launch and I have to REALLY push it hard and for extended periods, maxing out all of the CPU cores, to hear anything. What are you planning to do with it?
Uhhh. Not at all. I have both and the M3 Max is nice but nowhere near as fast the the M2 Ultra.just one report here, feel free to google yourself tons of more:
TSMC’s 3nm yield rate reportedly just 55% · TechNode
TSMC is struggling with its new 3nm process, with the semiconductor giant's yield rate reportedly far below the standard expected.
55% yield is so bad, even if Apple would want to stay on N3B, TSMC would say, hell no it costs us tons of money.
Yeah they got better from that 55% but still not into number regions which makes it viable to produce this.
You got me wrong, this isnt about sales.
Apple still cares about the reputation in the creative space.
And that is something you cant buy.
And about sales of Mac Studio, again there is jsut nearly no reason from hardware specs to buy a Mac Studio even right now, the M3 Max is as fast as a M2 Ultra! Just in very very small use cases the more GPUs in the ultra play a role. But if that is worth the extra price from M3 Max Macbook Pro to M2 Ultra... i have doubts. I cant see anyone really buying that thing anymore.
Multiple reviews and users have reported the fan running quite loud (I know, it's subjective) when pushing it. Now not sure if it's only the 14" and/or the 16", and both 16 CPU/40 GPU and 14/30.
Will mainly do some Lightroom and Final Cut editing. I'm also considering playing at x-plane.
As i wrote (not sure if in this or other thread), depends on the specific task. If the app benefits from multi core and more GPUs, then M2 Ultra is still faster. Also, if the M3 Max is in a Macbook Pro, if you dont change the setting to high performance the thermal throttling is different from Mac Studio adding an additional gap between the two.
I recently got a M3 Max MBP 16", and the reviews are correct about the noise under load. It does get loud, but it does seem to spin the fans back down aggressively as well, so if it only peaks under load for a couple minutes, the noise only lasts for a couple minutes.
I, too, hope Gurman is wrong again on Studio timing. I could definitely use one, an M4 Studio would be a day 1 purchase for me right now. He was sticking to his "no M2 Studio ever, M3 will release at WWDC 2024" prediction right up until the last week before WWDC last year when the M2s released. So hopefully it's M4 Studios at WWDC or sometime this summer. 🤞
In regular day to day use it's impossible to notice any difference between my M2 Ultra and M3 Max. When I push the machine hard in tasks like Lightroom, Photoshop, etc. then the Ultra just beats the M3 Max hands down. You buy both of these machines for GPU and core-intensive tasks; if not you can just go with an M3 Pro. Where the use matters, the M2 Ultra still crushes the M3 Max.
Loud is relative though; it's still nothing like the Intel MBP's and nowhere near the jet engine roar the Intel Windows laptop I have to use for some 3D rendering software. Not even close. And in 9 months or so I've had my M3 Max I could probably count on my hands the number of times I've heard the fans ramp. Usually it's when I'm doing something like importing a few thousand photos and asking LR to render 1:1 previews or exporting thousands of full-resolution previews. In those cases it will spin up but its still not loud by any reasonable comparison. Most people aren't putting their MBP under that kind of stress continuously anyway. It's an edge case.
Reviewers love to push machines so they can make clickbait claims and titles in all caps. Real practical use almost always ends up to be an entirely different story. BTW, one of the reasons I used to render 1:1 previews in Lightroom is that browsing the library was slow as it rendered them in real time. That's no longer the case with how fast the M3 Max is overall, so I never render those previews any more--it renders full previews of 51-megapixel files almost instantly.
I will agree with you that I hope Gurman is wrong and I think logically his claim makes no sense. I can see an M4 Studio at WWDC and I really hope there is one. When I do my large batch edits is when that power is nice--but even there the fans will spin up on the M2 Ultra and make a faint whisper too.
Definitely, and environmental factors matter as well. The fan noise sounds extremely loud when I'm in a quiet office. When I'm at home with more background noise, I walk 6 feet away and can barely hear it at all.
I did run a sustained process about 2 hours of 97% GPU usage from a single application that caused it to have those fans spinning continuously at top speed. But most of the time it's peaks and valleys. It's comparable to or a little louder than the 2017 MBP, which I had previously in terms of noise level at top fan speed, but it takes longer to ramp up to that, and it slows the fans down far more quickly afterward.
And yes, I'm guessing if fan noise is a major concern to anyone, an Intel Windows machine is probably not going to be the best option to pursue.
Except for hardware raytracing, meshes and dynamic cache which the M3 Max can do and M2 Ultra can't do and which one wants when doing 3D and game engine tasks.
Right, but what common day to day hardware takes advantage of this? Unfortunately not much yet as it's so new. If you need that on MacOS then definitely it would be better.
Some. But it's more about the future. Usually hardware is the driving marker for longevity and support. Most chips are end-of-lifed because they are missing crucial architectural features. For example, a ton of games don't run on M1 because it lacks a lot of these components.
Having AV1 hardware decoding, ray tracing and other features means a great deal to the future of that chip. So yeah, those are 100% worth waiting for even if you don't use them today. Processors have had H264 hardware decoding for like 15 years and it's still one of the most stable and reliable codecs out there with regards to mass adoption. Only now have we started shifting to HEVC. And AV1 will likely take decades to supplant it.
That wasn't the question or point though. Great, I agree with you. I was addressing the claim that the M3 Max is as faster or faster than an M2 Ultra, which is not the case. Of course in the future there will be advantages, but at that point we'll also no doubt an M4 Ultra, etc. Right now, for most tasks my point remains that the M2 Ultra is still going to be the fastest AS setup you can get.
It is the case (M3 Max more powerful than M2 Ultra) when it comes to single core power and most programs utilize exactly this, not multicore.
The later is mostly used in video editing/VFX, software encoding (in case of M2 Ultra also hardware encoding as it has double the media engines), 3D modeling and so on.
Partially also Photoshop/Lightroom uses multicore, but performance gains are more fellable with higher single core as gains with more cores are not that huge.
Anyway, in a week we will know.
If no M4 Ultra i would go probably with a refurbished M2 Ultra for my tasks.
I had a M1 studio. I upgraded it to the M2 Ultra when it came out last June. I know the upgraded machine is very much faster than the older one but TBH with you for my workloads I can hardly tell the difference. Even the older one worked well with 4K video editing in FCP for example. Sio I am going to skip the upgrade this time and wait for a few years.
Well for 4K (depending on codec) even a Max is enough.
But if you deal with raw 8.3k 60fps like me... you love every bit of processing power as the media engines wont support you much.