Costco Members: New Mac Studio Desktop: Apple M1 Max Chip, 32 GB RAM, 512GB SSD Expired

Not a good deal. This price is the same as the 32 GB Mac Mini M2 Pro, which has better or the same specs in almost every area as this Mac Studio.

As mentioned the M2 Pro CPUs are faster than the M1 Max's. But also the Wi-Fi is better (6e on the Mini vs. 6 on the Studio) and so is the the Bluetooth (5.3 on the Mini vs. 5.0 on the Studio).

The only reason to get this deal is if you don't care about CPU performance as much as you care about GPU. The Mac Studio M1 Max's GPU performance is better in benchmarks (likely due to the M1 Max's 12 GPU cores vs. the M2 Pro's 10). The only other differences between the two machines is the Studio has 2 additional USB-C ports and an SD card reader on the front.

Not really, Microsoft and most Linux distros beat Apple easily on supporting older hardware. Apple is all over the board on how long they support their macs some get dropped quickly, some as soon as 3 years. The average appears to be around 8ish years before Apple won't update them anymore which isnt great compared to either windows or Linux. Microsoft actively updates all of my computers from 2013 and looking at their support docs they plan to do so until 2025, 4 years longer than Apple's average. Windows 8 just barely ended support 2 weeks ago, it came out in 2012. It's a guess when apple will drop support while Microsoft clearly defines how long it will support it's products.

On the phone side, apple is unparalleled, on the computer side they are not a leader at all. 8 years used to be a lot but computers and even phones now days last much longer than before. If you upgrade more often than 8 years you'll probably be fine but I have quite a few friends and family using computers over 8 years old.

You can look here and see the Mac os compatibility with older macs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS

You'll notice macos 13 doesn't officially support anything older than 2017. Which isn't that old. It's also not the same year for every Mac either, some are supported longer than others.

Apple only recently started releasing security updates for older os versions and even with that they only go two years back and they don't support it the same as their current version. You can read more about that here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2...-of-macos/

If you want a really detailed article on Mac os updates and how long you'll get them you can read one here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2...a-problem/

Tldr: don't expect more than 8 years of updates and that isn't class leading at all.

You've also omitted some key advantages of the Studio. First, the M1 Max chip has roughly doubly the memory bandwidth of the M2 Pro. This is significant for RAM-intensive tasks, like 3D animation and high resolution film & video editing. And for that customer base, those extra front ports are important--they're constantly taking raw footage in and processing it.

Second, you omitted that the Studio comes with a 10Gb Ethernet port, which again matters when you are moving enormous video files around a LAN (the better WifFi on the M2 Pro doesn't come close to those speeds!). That option is an additional $100 more, and added 2 weeks of additional lead time on a BTO the M2 Pro Mini. So your price comparison ("the price is the same") is actually off by $100 for this Studio, which is cheaper than a comparably equipped (32GB/512GB/10GbE) M2 Pro Mini.

Finally, Apple does tend to support its professional machines (like the Studio) longer than its consumer (ie M2 Mini) and "pro-sumer" lines (which is where I'd place the M2 Pro Mini). When you've got a customer base that can and will spend up to $56K for video editing machines (the old Intel Mac Pro), you support those companies. I'm curious to see how the next iterations of the Studio and Pro product lines roll out over the rest of the year.

While I'd agree that these machines are roughly comparable in many ways IMO, there's no question that if you are a professional video editor or film animator the Studio is the better machine. For the rest of us schlubs though... it's mostly a wash in terms of performance for the price. There are plusses and minuses.

So I don't agree that this is a "not a good deal", even though I'm slightly inclined to go with the M2 Pro mainly because it is a bit more power efficient, plus the form factor (other than no front ports), and the slightly newer processor. In my use case, the 32GB RAM and the better RAM bandwidth would probably matter mostly when running virtual machines. But as I want at least 1TB fast SSD storage (external TB4 enclosures with NVME4 SSDs capable of comparable speeds to the internal SSD actually cost even more than Apple's expensive pricing!), I'll probably end up with a BTO of one or the other at an even higher price point.

But at this price the Studio is worth a look and is a tempting alternative. Too bad Citibank & Costco stopped offering the 4-year extended warranty protection plan last week though, or that might have tipped the scales in favor of the Studio for me.