So, Apple did surprise us after all today with their WWDC23 keynote. And with that in mind, I immediately went to finally replace my Intel based Mac Mini with a full blown Mac Studio. Here are the details:
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M2 Ultra mit 24‑Core CPU, 76‑Core GPU und 32‑Core Neural Engine.
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192 GB RAM (bah, I wanted 256G or 512G).
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4 TB SSD.
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6 Thunderbolt 4 (2 front, 4 back)
- SDXC card reader (ancient...I use CFexpress but what ever).
- 10G Ethernet (noooooo, where is 25G)
- HDMI (where is Display Port, well, Thunderbolt does that).
Why a new Mac?
Well, LLVM does kind of work on Intel Macs but late versions only fully support Arm--M-based--Apple machines. It is of course possible to go with Apple's Xcode which uses LLVM but that still does not come with LLVMs clib.
Why not M1 Mac?
Those have no good HEVC support compared to M2s.
Why not M2 Mac Mini?
My old Intel Mac Mini has 64GB RAM, so why would I downgrade?
Why not M2 Mac Pro?
Costs more, about 25%. Their advantage is 2x 10G Ethernet over 1x for the Mac Studio and 8 Thunderbolt connectors as opposed to 6. Plus 6 usable PCIe slots. But for storage I can use any decent external storage, and I don't need DSP or SDI cards. So only 25G, 100G or 400G Ethernet cards would be a reason. But after selling our house in Sydney I have no use for such in the foreseeable time.
And now for the fun...
look at that price!
But seriously... Only about two weeks of waiting!