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The Ultra is an Ugly sandwich box

The solution to appearance is not to upgrade the enclosure, but downgrade your desk.

I have an old desk with a cubby for a tower built in. My Studio is going to fit right into that cubby and will be a huge improvement on the wastebasket which is in there now.
 
When I first saw the studio I did chuckle a little. It looks like someone just made the Mac mini fatter for sure. But if the performance is there then who cares I suppose. Makes you feel like you have an ultra Mac mini.
 
I like the design of the Mac Studio. There is no problem with that. But I deeply regret it’s not upgradeable.
 
The more I look at the Max Studio’s front side case and it is really hurt my eyes to see SDXC card slot as a another “notch”.

Again you can use TB4 to access external card reader for the SDXC card.
 
now i see it said:
Obviously a lot of deep thought went into this design
Click to expand...
I think you'll find that it's spelt Deep Thought:
1647181376233.png
 
profcutter said:
Too bad it doesn’t have a PCI slot or two…
Click to expand...
Just what leads you to believe that they will ever have PCI slots? It's a lot of work to do the drivers and none of it is done in production form yet, not even eGPU's. I think they've totally ditched expansion in anything other than the Mac Pro, and I'm not sure we'll see it in an AS Mac Pro either. I hope to be wrong on that, but I wouldn't bet a nickel on it right now.
 
Let's be clear, the Macstudio Ultra is a great piece of engineering - performance wise, just what I wanted. Delivery looks to be a bit slow (end of April - 64 core /128gb / 4 TB), but ports and size is great.
But - Had it come as the Trashcan shape, it would have been better. Or even, standard silver for M1Max, and Black for the Ultra.
The next step for Apple is to double the single core speed.
And to build a stand to get it above the desktop.
Then give me a 43" 4k display to match - there's no replacement for screen real estate.
I'm going to keep my trashcan on my desk, and hide the Studio under the desk. That way I can get work done, but still have a great looking Mac!
 
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profcutter said:
Too bad it doesn’t have a PCI slot or two…
Click to expand...

Looking at the "x-ray" shots showing the airflow path of the Mac Studio, it is apparent there is zero space for any add-in PCIe cards...

bobcomer said:
Just what leads you to believe that they will ever have PCI slots? It's a lot of work to do the drivers and none of it is done in production form yet, not even eGPU's. I think they've totally ditched expansion in anything other than the Mac Pro, and I'm not sure we'll see it in an AS Mac Pro either. I hope to be wrong on that, but I wouldn't bet a nickel on it right now.
Click to expand...

PCIe is not just for GPUs...

As far as we know, one of the major defining theme of the entire Apple silicon thing is that the GPU in integrated into the SoC...

So no GPUs in any PCIe slots, but there are other things plenty of Mac Pro users, well, use...

Audio DSP cards, RAID controller cards, networking cards, etc. ...
 
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MacWorld78 said:
The more I look at the Max Studio’s front side case and it is really hurt my eyes to see SDXC card slot as a another “notch”.

Again you can use TB4 to access external card reader for the SDXC card.
Click to expand...
I love the internal SDXC reader. The Mac Mini should have one too.
 
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bobcomer said:
Just what leads you to believe that they will ever have PCI slots? It's a lot of work to do the drivers and none of it is done in production form yet, not even eGPU's. I think they've totally ditched expansion in anything other than the Mac Pro, and I'm not sure we'll see it in an AS Mac Pro either. I hope to be wrong on that, but I wouldn't bet a nickel on it right now.
Click to expand...
That would be a disappointment. The criticism of the 6,1 Mac Pro was that it didn't have any slots. Thankfully that was rectified in the 7,1. I hope they don't make the same mistake with the AS version of the Mac Pro.
 
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ravinder08 said:
I think this a great direction Apple are now taking they are putting function first opposed to the super thin Johnny Ive designs, where cooling was an issue and they suffered from a serious lack of ports. I am more interested in having a computer that doesn’t over heat and has enough ports so I don’t have to use dongles.
Click to expand...

Cooling was never an issue with the cylinder MP, it’s just that it was not sufficient for hardware that came afterwards. The Studio clearly inherits the cooling system DNA from the cylinder. In every regard, it’s the 2013 MP spiritual successor, it’s just less modular and has a more practical shape.
 
leman said:
Cooling was never an issue with the cylinder MP, it’s just that it was not sufficient for hardware that came afterwards. The Studio clearly inherits the cooling system DNA from the cylinder. In every regard, it’s the 2013 MP spiritual successor, it’s just less modular and has a more practical shape.
Click to expand...
Opinions on the cooling vary- there was a repair program on certain video configs, and there were rather a lot of reports of failures.
 
StuAff said:
Opinions on the cooling vary- there was a repair program on certain video configs, and there were rather a lot of reports of failures.
Click to expand...
Yeah, my bottom of the line 6,1 never seemed to suffer from heat soak. It wasn’t very fast either. It seems the Dual D700 configs had heat-related problems pretty reliably, and the D500s as well, just not to the same extent.
 
I don't mind how it looks but I also don't find it particularly inspiring.

I think my issue with the design is that it just looks to much just like a plain box but I have no ideas how to make it look better at this form factor while retaining an "apple look."

I would have loved if it came in multiple colours, I would have liked a green, red or purple colour. I really like the 24" iMacs colours and before the event I was hoping a 27" colourful iMac with an M1 Max chip would be announced.
 
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With a design like this, I think it all comes down to the finishing of the aluminum and it’s construction. If it has a nice sheen to it and feels like it’s made from one block of metal, it’ll look beautiful in real life as light bounces off it.
 
Case looks fine. Only ugly thing I see is the non-standard mickey mouse power cable that if you misplace you're SOL vs standard power cable that you probably already have plenty of spares of.
 
mi7chy said:
Case looks fine. Only ugly thing I see is the non-standard mickey mouse power cable that if you misplace you're SOL vs standard power cable that you probably already have plenty of spares of.
Click to expand...
Non-standard? $9 in white.

www.amazon.com

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As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
leman said:
Cooling was never an issue with the cylinder MP, it’s just that it was not sufficient for hardware that came afterwards. The Studio clearly inherits the cooling system DNA from the cylinder. In every regard, it’s the 2013 MP spiritual successor, it’s just less modular and has a more practical shape.
Click to expand...
Sort of. The MP used a thermal core and a singular fan. The Mac studio lacks a thermal core, has two fans, and a large heatsink as well.
 
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