Indecision at the intersection of Mac Studio and Mac mini
My current desktop Mac, the one I work on day in and day out in my garage/office, is an M1 Mac Studio. I’ve had it for almost three years, and it’s still great.
I know it’s great because from time to time, I end up using a M2 MacBook Air to encode a video or demux a Zoom recording or transcribe a podcast and find myself wondering exactly what is taking so long. Oh, right. It’s a base M2. The M1 Max blows it away, as it should.
But with the arrival of the M4 Macs, I’m tempted like never before. There’s now a M4 Pro-based Mac mini, and the M4 is just so much faster than the M1 that I could replace my Mac Studio with a tiny Mac mini and actually see a noticeable speed boost. One of my M4 MacBook Pro review units is an M4 Pro, and I can see just how fast it is. What’s more, I can run a bunch of benchmark tests to make myself uneasy:
There it is, in black and white. The same chip in the $1599 M4 Pro Mac mini generates a single-core CPU score that’s 73% faster than my Mac Studio and a multi-core score that’s 92% faster! Less than three years on, the pace of Apple silicon has turned my Mac Studio into something that even generates lower CPU scores than the base M4 Mac mini.
So it’s settled, then?
A GPU problem
Not quite. The 20-GPU-core M4 Pro MacBook Pro is only 8.7% faster than my 24-core M1 Max Mac Studio. One of the big benefits of the Max-class chips is that they’ve just got more GPU cores. And while I’m not much of a gamer or a 3-D graphics pro, there are several machine-learning-based tasks I frequently perform that hammer the GPU. The M4 Max in the MacBook Pro starts at 32 GPU cores and is configurable up to 40.
If I traded in my Mac Studio for a Mac mini, I’d get a big CPU boost, but only a meager 8.7% improvement on GPU. Meanwhile, if I wait until next year, I can probably get a base-model M4 Max Mac Studio that’s firmly in crossover territory with the Mac mini.
(A strange feature of the Apple silicon Mac era is that you can configure a Mac mini so that it costs more than a Mac studio. Yes, that model has more RAM and storage than the comparable Mac Studio, but it’s really close. And for a couple hundred bucks more, wouldn’t I want to hold out for a dramatic increase in GPU speed to go with those improved CPU cores?)
So it’s settled, then?
The desktop laptop
This is when I made the mistake of talking to a couple of my computer nerd friends. They suggested that since I spend a lot of time in the winter working in my house’s back bedroom (which has central heating), instead of trying to get my garage up to a workable temperature via a space heater, I might actually be better off buying an M4 Max MacBook Pro and toting it back and forth between the two spaces.
Oh, I do not want to contemplate the laptop-as-a-desktop lifestyle, mostly because I did that for years during the Intel Mac era and it wasn’t great. Using Apple silicon laptops attached to external displays and peripherals is a much, much better experience, but… do I really want to do that to myself?
Advantages: I wouldn’t have to keep making sure settings are synced properly between devices. Using the computer in the back of the house has reminded me that despite all the ways that I can now keep documents in sync across computers via cloud services, some stuff on my Mac still doesn’t sync. It wasn’t so bad when nothing at all synced because I had zero expectations. Now, I want it all to Just Work, and it doesn’t. A laptop would solve this problem—and solve it on the road, too.
But… this also means I would need to travel with a 14-inch MacBook Pro. They are great, don’t get me wrong, but I’m a refugee 11-inch MacBook Air user now accepting life with a 13-inch MacBook Air. Do I want to travel with a larger laptop? (Or, if I mostly use the iPad when I travel, does it not matter?)
I don’t have a good answer. It feels like every week for the next six or eight, I’m going to have a moment of weakness where I click around on Apple’s website, configuring stuff and looking at the final price and realizing it’s a bit high and then closing that browser window. Until the next moment of weakness.
This is what they call the tyranny of choice, right?
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