My experience of a Studio Max, upgrading from an 11 y/o i7 iMac

[FriendlyMackle]

Picking up on this rather late sorry, but figured I'd give it a few weeks of experience before I came back with my comments. Have to say, for many in-app activities, I don't find this new machine massively faster than my 2011 i7 quad-core iMac with a 250GB Samsung SSD and 16GB RAM, and which, without wanting to sound condescending, was almost certainly faster than your 2014 MBP and definitely your 2012 Mac Mini (so your experience of migrating to an M1 is going to be different to mine).

Bouncing Logic projects laden with a dozen virtual synths and effects takes roughly the same time as my iMac, even when using only Logic-native plugins which have all been optimised for M1. It's probably a bit faster, but not so much where I've said oh wow holly s___ look at that, how did I survive before this.

Loading WAV files into iZotope RX6 and running my usual workflow of Loudness normalise to -10dB LUFS with a peak of -0.2dB takes roughly the same time as it did on the iMac, though fair enough this is an Intel app being loaded through Rosetta. Again, it probably is a bit faster, but not so much where it's clearly noticeable without a timer.

Credit where credit is due, I have noticed an improvement of roughly 10-15% when rendering simple videos with a few titles and wipes through iMovie (I have no need for FCP).

Was it worth it? Definitely: I'm now running a supported system with enough spec-overhead to hopefully give me ten years of life from it, same as I got from my 2011 i7 iMac when I purchased it. But, gotta be honest, looking at my workflows, very little speed-wise has yet totally blown me away compared to what I was used to, other than how fast the machine boots and how fast it loads apps and saves files, all of which can be explained by the approx 10x faster R/W compared to the SSD in my i7 iMac. If anything, I have even more respect for my 11 y/o iMac than I had before, which was obviously such a total beast, irrespective of benchmarks that would suggest it would be completely annihilated by an M1 iPad.

I’m running a 2013 iMac i7 quad-core 27” with 24GB RAM and 10.13 High Sierra. I’ve been waiting for 2-ish years now wanting to update to Apple Silicon and a newer system. I was hoping to get another all-in-one iMac with the larger screen (and the smaller iMacs never come with the more powerful options).
Now that it seems like it will likely be at least 1-2 more years before we see a larger iMac (if they do release one), I’m thinking I may have to either get a Studio or a laptop + monitor (probably the latest Apple display). I‘ll admit that iMacs have many shortcomings (and in the event of a problem, the monitor and ‘computer’ are tightly integrated, making repairs involved)—my 27” screen has had dust trails for several years now, you can easily see the fan air pathways under the screen—but I do reallly like the simplicity of the AIO.
Thanks for sharing your experience of this Studio. And, your setup is gorgeous. I’m not a musician, but I do really like seeing the equipment and processes involved in modern music creation.

 

[headlessmike]

My thoughts about the Studio fans...

I can't hear my Studio Max's fans running unless I put my best ear within 6" of the casing. So it's pretty accurate to say the sound is not a distraction for me. My 20 y/o sons, whom, as you would expect, have much better hearing than me, say they can faintly hear the fans when sat 18" from the computer at the regular seating position in my room, but that the sound is not a distraction.

What does worry me however is the fact the fans are constantly running. With my iMac, I didn't generally ever turn it off: not even at night. Only if I was going to be away from it for several days. I enabled all the power-saving options to put the HDD and screen to sleep after a certain time of inactivity, then I just left it.

But after day 1 of owning the Studio, I have started shutting it down at the end of every night and only powering it on when I come back from work the day after. My reasoning is there's a finite number of times those fans are going to rotate, and I don't see the point in unnecessarily shortening the time it takes for that limit to be reached, during hours when I'm not using the machine. Having the fans running constantly, needlessly recirculating cold air, seems totally at odds with Apple's power-efficiency sales-pitches. For the first time in 11 years of Mac ownership it seems likely I'll download some kind of fan-control and override the automatic settings completely.

I’m pretty sure that the fans constantly run in any Mac from the last 15 years (except for those that don’t have fans). It’s just that the fans are so quiet that they are nearly inaudible unless under load. On my MacBook Pro the fans run continuously at around 2000 RPM but I cannot hear them under normal use. The same is true for the Mac minis and iMacs I’ve used. The last Mac that I owned that actually shut off the fan was my iBook G4. You couldn’t miss that fan when it was running.

 

[mr_roboto]

I’m pretty sure that the fans constantly run in any Mac from the last 15 years (except for those that don’t have fans). It’s just that the fans are so quiet that they are nearly inaudible unless under load. On my MacBook Pro the fans run continuously at around 2000 RPM but I cannot hear them under normal use. The same is true for the Mac minis and iMacs I’ve used. The last Mac that I owned that actually shut off the fan was my iBook G4. You couldn’t miss that fan when it was running.

You're right in that this was true, but M1 portables have changed the rules. I run a fan monitor program just to watch what's going on, and under idle to moderate loads this 16" M1 Max doesn't turn its fans on at all. They read as 0 RPM, and this doesn't seem to be misreporting as there is no noise emitted by the fans, not even if I put the bottom surface of the computer right up to my ear.

 

[headlessmike]

You're right in that this was true, but M1 portables have changed the rules. I run a fan monitor program just to watch what's going on, and under idle to moderate loads this 16" M1 Max doesn't turn its fans on at all. They read as 0 RPM, and this doesn't seem to be misreporting as there is no noise emitted by the fans, not even if I put the bottom surface of the computer right up to my ear.

Thanks for the correction. I'm still stuck with my Intel Macs and haven't yet experienced the fan-less bliss of an M1 Mac. But my main point was that I wouldn't worry about the longevity of the fan since the fans in OP's iMac were likely running at all times as well.

 

[Kaikidan]

You might as well compare the Studio to an Etch-&-Sketch as an 11 year old, worn out Mac running High Sierra. I just got a MacBook Air M1 with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Same thing, it makes my old 2012 Mac mini and 2014 MacBook Pro 15" look like antiques, but almost any new computer would too.

I am impressed with the MacBook Air M1, and Monterey is a quantum leap from the High Sierra and Mojave my old relics run, but the new Safari blows chunks and iCloud is a huge piece of poop now. The problem with iCloud is iCloud, not Monterey. iCloud is messing up syncing across all of my devices including an iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPad mini 5, iPad Air 2020, and the Macs. Apple has morons for developers these days. I wish they would forgo the WWDC for at least two years and instead concentrate on cleaning up their OSes. Their hardware is great, but the OSes are terrible.

Got so done with iCloud that it was the final nail in the coffin for me to start hosting my own nextcloud instance, 2Tb of cloud storage (expandable if I buy a bigger drive), safely backed-up in case of disk failure, synced between ipad/mac/iphone and free of charge besides the electrical/internet bill. Now I'm just waiting for plex to stop trying to implement stupid functions nobody wants and instead do a plexamp apple watch app like people keep asking for ages to completelly abandon apple music too.

 

[jasnw]

I’m pretty sure that the fans constantly run in any Mac from the last 15 years (except for those that don’t have fans). It’s just that the fans are so quiet that they are nearly inaudible unless under load.

I doubted this, but just installed Macs Fan Control on my 2011 27" iMac and was somewhat surprised to see that all three listed fans (ODD, HDD, and CPU) were all running around 1000 RPM. I never hear these fans except for the rare occasion when I'm pushing the CPU.

 

[mr_roboto]

Thanks for the correction. I'm still stuck with my Intel Macs and haven't yet experienced the fan-less bliss of an M1 Mac. But my main point was that I wouldn't worry about the longevity of the fan since the fans in OP's iMac were likely running at all times as well.

Definitely, just wanted to relate that M1 laptops have changed things.

I'm not a real mechanical engineering expert but I think there's a chance that stop/start can be harder on fans in some circumstances. On the other hand, I know there are some bearing types which should not care about running continuously for years, such as the fluid dynamic bearings commonly used in high quality quiet fans. No physical contact between bearing surfaces means near-zero wear.