Upgrading 27" iMac and NOT getting Mac Studio. The iMac still got it.

[Andrey84]

Not with those criteria. I'll be surprised if anyone can point out a product like that (even absent good, or any, built-in sound and webcam) at that price. 5K Monitors seem to be slim pickings; it's currently a 4K (and under) world for the most part.

If I went looking (and even then, I'm skeptical it could be done now), I'd anticipate one of these scenarios:

1.) Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Amazon Prime Day sales - Apple doesn't do huge mark downs but competitors do. Even then, 1/3rd price or cheaper is a tall order.

2.) Refurb or used. Not an option with reliable availability, but if you happened to know someone with an LG 5K selling it to buy an ASD, etc...

3.) Take a chance on a 'no name.' The stereotype would be a Chinese (no knock on them, they manufacture a lot of high end stuff, too) imitation product alleged to be close enough but much cheaper. I wouldn't expect the build quality.

A known brand name product meeting your criteria new ought to get a lot of discussion on Mac Rumors forum, YouTube, etc...

Thanks - this is what I thought - there are no real alternatives to Apple Studio Display.

Sound and camera are NOT a must by the way. However, 5K, 27", IPS high-quality matrix are a must.

Yes absolutely, Used and Refurbished are an option. Today I was in the Apple Store again with a friend, just cannot believe how stupid is that iMac is much thinner, has a powerful desktop Mac computer inside it and it's still cheaper than ASD, which is just a monitor.

 

[Homy]

Yes, if the result is higher, by definition it means "outperforms". I didn't know that Cinebench didn't give good results on M chips, but do you know if Rhino has been optimised for M chips yet? This is the actual application she is using for rendering and if it's not optimised either, then Cinebench provides a more real-world test.

PugetBench - I've never heard about this benchmark before. I'm not going to use a 4th benchmark in addition to the ones I know and trust: GeekBench, Cinebench and Blender. However, you are right and in other benchmarks M1 Max is doing really well. In GeekBench M1 Max is about 50% faster than than the fully loaded 2020 iMac. I'm not not sure how this translates into real rendering performance in Rhino. Geekbench is a very generic test of overall CPU speed, so I suspect it doesn't translate very well. Cinebench is a test specifically designed to test rendering performance.

Regarding M1 Max vs M2 Max - I don't see the difference being drastic on this CPU Monkey page.

I was quite careful in my text and said "comparable", I didn't say they were very close. Even if I accept that M2 Max in reality is 58% faster, like the Geekbench test suggests (8.5k vs 14.5k for multicore), then it's still a comparable system. 58% difference is not a 150% difference. However, the price of the new M2 Max setup with ASD is 154% higher. I don't think I would've saved much on a used M2 Max Studio either. The official UK Apple store says “save up to 15%” on refurbished.

Well you wrote outperforms M1 Max in bold as if those 18 points would matter much in reality so it wasn’t just by definition. Anyway it seems that it’s hard to find performance results for Rhino 8 which is native for Apple Silicon. I find this on their site which shows the boost with using Metal. Other than that I just could find a couple of threads in their forum and on Reddit.

You don’t have to worry about using PugetBench. It’s a reliable well-known benchmark tool used in reviews by video creators. It tests the performance of actual apps like Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, Lightroom and Davinci Resolve instead of generic tools like Geekbench. Puget Systems sells professional computer systems for different needs like photo, video, audio and 3D.

Finally a word of caution about CPU-Monkey. They are known for faking some results and it’s a no-name site where you can’t find the team. A better site is Notebookcheck.

 

[Zest28]

Hello,

This post is mainly for UX/graphic professionals working from home on an iMac and needing an upgrade.

Do you really need to buy the Apple Studio + Studio Display, if you're on a budget?

Wanted to share our experience and discuss.

My wife is a UX/graphic designer and she's been using 27" iMacs for 13 years. She recently started 3D-designing, rendering and making jewellery as a hobby. She has a base spec 2017 i5 iMac (upgraded to 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD) which has become too slow and needed an upgrade. She couldn't work in Adobe XD and share the screen in Zoom at the same time without a massive lag, and her rendering in Rhino was very slow. Latest OS wasn't supported either.

We decided to go for a top spec iMac 2020 instead of the Apple Studio. We got it for just £2,305 from eBay. It has the nano-glass too, which actually looks incredible. It's really fast on Sonoma and does really well in tests and outperforms M1 Max in Cinebench.

Some cost analysis is below.

A comparable setup with Mac Studio, M2 Max, 96GB unified memory and 2TB SSD, which is her minimum storage requirement, would’ve set her back £3,699 for the box and £2,149 for the Studio Display, so £5,848 in total. This means she made a total saving of £3,534.

A maxed-out Mac Mini would've been £2,699, however the max RAM is 32GB and it's shared with the video card. She always uses multiple large applications at the same time (Adobe XD, Photoshop, Rhino) plus many other ones (Miro, Zoom, Notion, Mail, etc.) and has roughly 30 tabs in the browser, so I think 32GB this would've been limiting. Right now, as a random test, memory usage is 45GB.

This 2020 iMac will very likely support the upcoming 2024 Mac OS too. Maintenance support is about 3 years, so the machine will be officially supported until late 2027. After that, she can get a new Studio Display with a used Mac Studio with M3 Ultra, which will cost at least 30% less than when released in summer next year. There is always OpenCore Legacy Patcher as well.

Overall, I'm very happy with the decision. Let's see how it will play out over the next 3 years.

Such a shame they stopped making new 27" iMacs. It's an incredible machine and actually a great value for money

Some photos are attached.

View attachment 2323636

View attachment 2323637

View attachment 2323638

On ebay (since we are talking about uses prices), you can find:
- M1 Max Studio = $1000.
- Apple Studio Display = $1400

So for the same price, you could have had the Apple Studio Display + M1 Max Studio. And according to Geekbench, the M1 Max Mac Studio is 50% faster than your iMac for the same money.

So to me it doesn't make sense at all, especially since it is an end-of-life product as it is based on Intel.

 

[Andrey84]

On ebay (since we are talking about uses prices), you can find:
- M1 Max Studio = $1000.
- Apple Studio Display = $1400

So for the same price, you could have had the Apple Studio Display + M1 Max Studio. And according to Geekbench, the M1 Max Mac Studio is 50% faster than your iMac for the same money.

So to me it doesn't make sense at all, especially since it is an end-of-life product as it is based on Intel.

I live in the UK. We’ve got nothing like the offers you mentioned on eBay.

If it were possible to get ASD + MS for any kind of similar money, we would’ve absolutely gone for it.

With 2TB disk, 64GB RAM, which is not ideal, as now she has 128GB and her actual usage yesterday was 65GB, plus the adjustable stand and nano-coating, we are looking AT LEAST at £4k for a fully used M1 Max setup, if we are lucky. The iMac was £2,3k.

 

[xraydoc]

My daughter has an 2020 27" iMac with a 10-core i9 processor, 64GB of RAM, the 5700XT GPU option and a 2TB SSD. She's a creative for an advertising agency and she has no problems with her machine. She has a (company-provided) 14" M1 Pro MacBook Pro and an Apple Studio Display at the office, but when she works from home, she's on her iMac most of the time and is able to complete all her Photoshop, Illustrator and Final Cut work.

Hello,

This post is mainly for UX/graphic professionals working from home on an iMac and needing an upgrade.

Do you really need to buy the Apple Studio + Studio Display, if you're on a budget?

Wanted to share our experience and discuss.

My wife is a UX/graphic designer and she's been using 27" iMacs for 13 years. She recently started 3D-designing, rendering and making jewellery as a hobby. She has a base spec 2017 i5 iMac (upgraded to 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD) which has become too slow and needed an upgrade. She couldn't work in Adobe XD and share the screen in Zoom at the same time without a massive lag, and her rendering in Rhino was very slow. Latest OS wasn't supported either.

We decided to go for a top spec iMac 2020 instead of the Apple Studio. We got it for just £2,305 from eBay. It has the nano-glass too, which actually looks incredible. It's really fast on Sonoma and does really well in tests and outperforms M1 Max in Cinebench.

Some cost analysis is below.

A comparable setup with Mac Studio, M2 Max, 96GB unified memory and 2TB SSD, which is her minimum storage requirement, would’ve set her back £3,699 for the box and £2,149 for the Studio Display, so £5,848 in total. This means she made a total saving of £3,534 compared to new.

I live in the UK and a used M1 Max Studio 64GB/2TB goes for around £2,200 and ASD with adjustable stand a nano-coating is around £1,700, so still even on used the total saving is around £1,500. Plus she gets 128GB of memory instead of 64.

A maxed-out Mac Mini would've been £2,699, however the max RAM is 32GB and it's shared with the video card. She always uses multiple large applications at the same time (Adobe XD, Photoshop, Rhino) plus many other ones (Miro, Zoom, Notion, Mail, etc.) and has roughly 30 tabs in the browser, so I think 32GB this would've been limiting. Right now, as a random test, memory usage is 45GB.

This 2020 iMac will very likely support the upcoming 2024 Mac OS too. Maintenance support is about 3 years, so the machine will be officially supported until late 2027. After that, she can get a new Studio Display with a used Mac Studio with M3 Ultra, which will cost at least 30% less than when released in summer next year. There is always OpenCore Legacy Patcher as well.

Overall, I'm very happy with the decision. Let's see how it will play out over the next 3 years.

Such a shame they stopped making new 27" iMacs. It's an incredible machine and actually a great value for money

Some photos are attached.

View attachment 2323636

View attachment 2323637

View attachment 2323638

My daughter has the same machine basically - a 2020 27" iMac with a 10-core i9 processor, 64GB of RAM, the 5700XT GPU option and a 2TB SSD. She's a creative for an advertising agency and she has no problems with her machine. She has a (company-provided) 14" M1 Pro MacBook Pro and an Apple Studio Display at the office, but when she works from home, she's on her iMac most of the time and is able to complete all her Photoshop, Illustrator and Final Cut work.

 

[Andrey84]

On ebay (since we are talking about uses prices), you can find:
- M1 Max Studio = $1000.
- Apple Studio Display = $1400

So for the same price, you could have had the Apple Studio Display + M1 Max Studio. And according to Geekbench, the M1 Max Mac Studio is 50% faster than your iMac for the same money.

So to me it doesn't make sense at all, especially since it is an end-of-life product as it is based on Intel.

Another consideration is the M1 memory leak issue. I've heard this from people and read about this too. So if I want to go for an Apple Silicon system now, I need to spend weeks on eBay, spend 4 grand and then get a machine with memory leaks which needs rebooting every day. Doesn't seem like a good deal.

This thread is about M1 Pro, but there is one comment there saying it's happening on M1 Max as well

Macbook M1 Pro 2021 memory leak - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

 

[Homy]

Another consideration is the M1 memory leak issue. I've heard this from people and read about this too. So if I want to go for an Apple Silicon system now, I need to spend weeks on eBay, spend 4 grand and then get a machine with memory leaks which needs rebooting every day. Doesn't seem like a good deal.

This thread is about M1 Pro, but there is one comment there saying it's happening on M1 Max as well

Macbook M1 Pro 2021 memory leak - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

You should distinguish between Mac and macOS. The memory leak issue is old as you share a 2-year-old thread and was SW related, not HW. It occured on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs in Monterey and Ventura but has improved much in Sonoma. Some didn't experienced it at all on any macOS.

macOS 14.1.2 - Bug fixes, Changes and more

Seems the memory leak bug is fixed for me on macOS 14.1.2. I did not change any settings after the update, and now WindowServer eats about 2.35GB of memory after 1 day of regular usage, it was more than 7GB previously on my M1 MBP. (16 + 512)

forums.macrumors.com

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...n-sonoma.2406795/?post=32717692#post-32717692

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...nd.2390354/page-2?post=32392100#post-32392100

memory leak in macOS 12.6.3 Monterey - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

 

[Feek]

Another consideration is the M1 memory leak issue. I've heard this from people and read about this too. So if I want to go for an Apple Silicon system now, I need to spend weeks on eBay, spend 4 grand and then get a machine with memory leaks which needs rebooting every day. Doesn't seem like a good deal.

No, they really don't need rebooting every day.

 

[b17777]

Another consideration is the M1 memory leak issue. I've heard this from people and read about this too. So if I want to go for an Apple Silicon system now, I need to spend weeks on eBay, spend 4 grand and then get a machine with memory leaks which needs rebooting every day. Doesn't seem like a good deal.

This thread is about M1 Pro, but there is one comment there saying it's happening on M1 Max as well

Macbook M1 Pro 2021 memory leak - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

My M1 runs great, the only time I reboot it is I'm going to be away from home for a couple days or a system software
update.

 

[Andrey84]

Thanks everyone, understood regarding the memory leak being an OS issue, rather than M1 issue.

After having spent a month on these forums, another viable alternative came to light: to buy a used M1 Max Apple Studio (64GB/2TB) and to build a DIY 5K Apple Display (also, forum link). This will cost just around £500/$500 more, that will last at least 2 years longer. Another downside, apart from higher costs and having to do a lot of work yourself and the risk, is that you can't really get the nano-textured glass, which we got with the new iMac and I believe it's fantastic for eye health.