To buy a massively overprice Mac Studio … or build an absolute beast of a machine with top specs for the same price and forget about macs (or do a hackintosh) 🤔
Discussion
Either way... don't do Hackintosh... down that road lies pain. :-)
😉 I can deal with a bit of pain
Mac Studio is wild, I feel like it would be constant pressure to use all its power. You might find you spend your days trying to re-route satellites instead of stacking zi sats.
Do you have one? What are your plans thoughts on it?
The "cheap" one. It's amazing, fast but the most it gets tested is by having 700 simultaneous chrome tabs open while running apple TV, spotify and 20 terminal windows.
The main advanage is I can sit it (the box) in a draw out of the way and the whole set up looks super clean.
Did you go with a studio display?
hackintosh will never reach optimization. either buy that mac, or build the new machine using windows or linux
Top specs machine+linux best performance, free software, if you need macos you can try to virtualize it on demand
Don't do a hackintosh. Way too unstable and a pain to plan and configure. Stay with Apple's hardware if you want MacOS. From a productivity standpoint I don't think there is anything better.
I use an 14" Macbook Pro M2 Max for work, it runs like a dream.
A custom PC if you're into gaming or have an application that strictly needs dedicated graphics. Otherwise you're stuck with Windows 🤮 or Linux which is great, but depends on what you want to do with it.
What do you plan on running on the new hardware?
Not much, basic design, very occasional game. I just want a beast ya know … 😂
But much smoother flow on Mac and I love the displays even though they take an arm and a leg for them 😭 😭
If your flow is vital with a Mac, go for it!
Otherwise, build a beast.
No Hackintosh advised.
Ultimate flow def with Mac. I have a windows PC that was top specs about 4 years ago and it’s still decent but far from “beast” and I never use it 😢
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do you get everything in SW also on linux? if the answer is no = 🍎🖥️⌨️
Go with mac
Man, you’ve got great power available coming from ARM architecture…
Use half of the money to build a decent PC and the other half to stack sats.
Arm macs are beasts and far ahead of comparable or even best windows laptops, using fewer energy while giving more
I think I’ll go for m2 max studio with 64gb ram upgrade and 1tb 😔 sad because hdds so pricey by Apple. Should be able to afford 4tb at normal prices! It seems there’s not a whole lot of difference between max and ultra unless you do a ton of video editing.
Get a 4TB Samsung external SSD, tape it to the studio, put your mass data on it. Works like a charm and is cheap.
I haven't had >512GB internal on Macs for years.
Yes not a big difference for a typical designer workflow, what do you need this much memory for? I think I have 1tb and never looked at how much I have left lol
Future proofing and tons and tons of figma files open
External storage you’ve mentioned is a great idea also, I bought one earlier for some video editing too
The problem with modern silicon Macs is that storage is soldered (not user upgradeable), if your nand chip dies you have to buy a new Mac. With hackintoshed machine it is easy with storage upgrades- add storage as much you like and, for example, u don’t have to pay $800 for 2TB Apple’s pricetag. I have stable hackintosh on Gigabyte Z490 Vision D. No complaints there. Performance wise, Silicon Mac chips of course are light years ahead.. but always rethink/consider if you really need that extra performance..
