are my expectations too high
has my view of apple and their products shifted
because everyone's noticing something poor jonathan horst i feel
like he's gotten so much more cynical about apples since he started working i
really think so what
have i changed or has apple
look at the settings page like it's just insane how small the buttons are
people who sit near me at the office note that i moan a lot sometimes about
things that are trivial and sometimes about things that are not
in my recent videos i spent a lot of time complaining about the input cable
placement on two otherwise beautifully designed displays i've complained about
the iphone se's aged form factor and increased price and i've questioned why
the latest ipads need an m1 though that's been answered in its own annoying
way oh and then there are all the policy choices
the scrappy underdog days of apple are long over and what we're left with is
such a big and powerful company decisions they make impact billions of
people and so with power that immense they basically become a political
institution that means people are rightly frustrated about things like
developer relations repair restrictions heck even updates
i don't view having a little bit of skepticism as a bad thing in tech
journalism one has to be a curmudgeon whizbang marketers are very good at
conjuring up excitement for their latest products and it's very easy to be swept
up in it all i know this and i try very hard not to
be but i don't know sometimes i worry that my healthy skepticism might transform
into malignant cynicism and who wants to watch that guy wouldn't you rather watch
someone who's ecstatic about what they're covering
and yet here i am with a brand new
kitted out mac studio yet i have more criticism than i was expecting which is
why i haven't done a video on it yet we ordered a fully rammed up m1 ultra model
alongside a base m1 max model for Anthony to compare both sides of the
performance spectrum which you can check out over at LTT that m1 ultra model however because it
was custom took months to arrive
so when i sat behind this m1 max model and did some of my own testing i
realized that it performs just as well as an equivalent macbook pro the m1 max is amazing in a
laptop but on a desktop the expectations are a little different you're plugged
into a wall and the enclosure is bigger so you can cool more efficiency isn't as
beneficial i mean i should concede that this
hardware efficiency is actually really beneficial out here in the beach i mean
we're running this off battery so i couldn't really wax poetic about
the performance so what else is there to talk about
the mac studio takes on the form of a much taller mac mini it's a nice if not
dated design and in a funny irony apple now has the hardware efficiency to do
the radical designs they did in the past and yet this is what we got
something based on a computer that was always meant to be cheap which this
is not you know Mac Address doesn't have a
website wait eddie how did Linus media group make their website squarespace
really wait are they sponsoring this video yep oh
well then i should probably get started which will be easy with squarespace's
all-in-one platform they have tons of mobile supporting templates for
everything we need now and third-party extensions that can help expand our site
with other platforms we might need in the future and andy just told me that if
you head to squarespace.com Mac Address you can get 10 off your first purchase
i should do that and then there's the framing that
apple launched the mac studio with on the website and in the presentation they
compared the mac studio to a fully specced imac in a mid-range mac pro and
yes when you price out an m1 max apple studio with a display keyboard and mouse
it comes out to the exact same price as a fully equipped 2020 imac at 3 900
the m1 ultra model on the other hand looks less like a mac pro and more like
a successor to the long discontinued imac pro because look
both come out to six thousand dollars
so where's the mid-range desktop you can get an m1 in a mac mini or imac or you
can get an m1 max or ultra for that matter in this the m1 pro which is a
good balance isn't available if you need more CPU power you have to
jump up to the m1 max then and that might have more GPU power than you
otherwise need to say nothing of the jump to the m1 ultra
so my response to the mac studio is that it's a decent but confused computer
offering only a smattering of value for a select group of professionals who are
probably still better off waiting for the apps they rely on to better support
apple's new architecture if you buy a fully spec 2020 imac you don't have to
feel bad see i really had high expectations for
the mac studio and while others were really enthusiastic about it i for some
reason was unimpressed i think they wanted to make a 27-inch imac but for
some reason they couldn't so we were left with these in their compromises
there's that cynicism again i think i need to take some time to appreciate
some of the great things apple has done much of which during the pandemic
i love that the iphone 13 mini exists no one else makes a phone this capable and
this small i still love how personal and colorful the imac is making it a
statement piece for the home i love the silent performance of the macbook air i
love their track pads i love their overall build quality and reliability i
love seeing the return and inclusion of important io and i do like that apple
listens albeit very stubbornly i mean we did get the mac pro in 2019 we avoided a
bad user interface design in safari last year and we could now repair our devices
at home i'm not gonna list the caveats i'm not
gonna list the caveats
across the caveats we are going to begin the transition
from the power pc to Intel processors
architecture transitions are hard and really annoying apples going through
their third there's bound to be growing pains in more powerful and demanding
applications like the ones the mac studio is designed for they are
amplified and harder to fix so criticism can sound and feel cynical
but i still have hope as the hardware engineers slip into their iterative
update cadence the hard work they put into chip efficiency will be taken
advantage by developers and the designers will be able to express
themselves better they've already done it with the imac and the macbook pro we
just need a little bit of patience i also have hope that as real political
institutions recognize the power apple has they'll create finding policies
that'll help the tech industry flourish with innovation like it did in the more
competitive days criticism and cynicism aren't the same
thing but too much criticism can be a bad thing because you can forget to
recognize really great accomplishments
i at the very least want to remain balanced enthused and excited for what's
to come now on the other hand i won't be changing my tune about
facebook or uber don't even get me started on those
thanks for listening to this therapy i mean Mac Address now if you like the mac
studio give this video a like and if you're excited about what's to come then
you must subscribe now i'm curious in the comments where the weirdest place
you've set up a desktop computer is because this is great