New apple M1 chips - who's buying?

[BlueMR2]

Apple MacBook Pro, Apple M1 Pro Chip 10-Core CPU, 16-Core GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 16 Inch in Silver

£1,699

So £100 less than a 15" Air with equivalent 16gb ram and 512gb.

You get 2 years cover from Costco, however it's in the £1,400's for a 15" Air with 8gb/512gb from Costco.

[MikeHo]

ujio said:

Thanks guys.. I will probably take a look at a Windows laptop then, or look into the Parallels.

I'm not an Apple fanboy at all, but the fact that the Macbook Air has lasted 10 years and hasn't really slowed down with viruses is remarkable, all Windows laptops I've used in comparison barely last 3 years... was thinking the M1 chip would probably be stonking for Windows!

I use Parallels too when i need to do some Windows stuff. It really is superb, but not sure you would want to use it full time for everything.

Running on MacBook Pro M1 Pro 32GB ram Windows 11 vm boots up in 5 seconds or so !!!! Means i can swap in and out of it very easily when i need to.

[steveatesh]

Saw an advert yesterday that Argos are knocking out the M1 Mac Studio for £1500….. bargain.

[Magnum 475]

steveatesh said:

Saw an advert yesterday that Argos are knocking out the M1 Mac Studio for £1500….. bargain.

Do not tell me things like this. I must not buy another new Mac

[Teppic]

steveatesh said:

Saw an advert yesterday that Argos are knocking out the M1 Mac Studio for £1500….. bargain.

'tis true. Although it's not in stock anywhere.

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/1958508?clickSR=sl...

Edited by Teppic on Friday 23 June 16:15

[theboss]

Is it in stock anywhere? No delivery to my postcode.

[megaphone]

theboss said:

Is it in stock anywhere? No delivery to my postcode.

No stock for me. Even at £1500 it's a bit OTT for my needs, Am looking at a Mac Mini, if anyone has any deals they see.

Edited by megaphone on Friday 23 June 12:29

[mmm-five]

Well, the new entry-level M2 Max Studio (8+4cpu / 30gpu) is about 15% faster than the entry-level M1 Max Studio (8+2cpu / 24gpu) on single core, or 20% on multi-core.

The M2 Max has 2 extra (efficiency) cores and a 15% frequency boost (3.2GHz to 3.68GHz), so I can see where that extra performance has come from.

For comparison, a M2 Pro Mac Mini (8+4cpu / 19gpu) is only 5% slower than the entry-level M2 Studio Max, or 10% faster than an entry-level M1 Mac Studio Max - but configured on Apple.com would cost £1699.

All based on CPU performance only of course...if you need more GPU cores, the Studios will give you more of an edge.

[Lee Jones Jnr]

Teppic said:

'tis true. Although it's not in stock anywhere.

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/1958508?clickSR=sl...

Edited by Teppic on Friday 23 June 16:15

I haven’t got any either, I’m selling them for £100

[ajprice]

Lee Jones Jnr said:

Teppic said:

'tis true. Although it's not in stock anywhere.

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/1958508?clickSR=sl...

Edited by Teppic on Friday 23 June 16:15

I haven’t got any either, I’m selling them for £100

What's red and invisible? No tomatoes.

[sutoka]

Teppic said:

steveatesh said:

Saw an advert yesterday that Argos are knocking out the M1 Mac Studio for £1500….. bargain.

'tis true. Although it's not in stock anywhere.

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/1958508?clickSR=sl...

Edited by Teppic on Friday 23 June 16:15

Typical Argos tactic, it'll be back in stock next week at about £2k.

They did this when part of HRG and they still do it as part of Sainburys.

[ajprice]

sutoka said:

Typical Argos tactic, it'll be back in stock next week at about £2k.

They did this when part of HRG and they still do it as part of Sainburys.

I got my monitor from Argos as a clearance item, it was £400 from £600 full price. By the time it was the weekend and I was free to get it the nearest available went from local to 20 miles away to 50 miles away to out of stock. A week or so later it was in stock again still at the clearance price and I got one from the local store. So there is a chance they'll get more clearance price stock.

[sutoka]

ajprice said:

sutoka said:

Typical Argos tactic, it'll be back in stock next week at about £2k.

They did this when part of HRG and they still do it as part of Sainburys.

I got my monitor from Argos as a clearance item, it was £400 from £600 full price. By the time it was the weekend and I was free to get it the nearest available went from local to 20 miles away to 50 miles away to out of stock. A week or so later it was in stock again still at the clearance price and I got one from the local store. So there is a chance they'll get more clearance price stock.

True that they do manage to secure more stock but in the time I worked in the warehouse if the product had sold out in stores sometimes if there was less than a 100 in the warehouse they wouldn't dispatch them, it was an absolutely terrible way to run a business. We are talking high value items here not something of £10-£20

[ajprice]

Interesting MKBHD video on the M2 Mac Pro. As Apple Silicon is system on a chip, including the graphics, putting a PCI graphics card in an M2 Pro won't do anything. The PCI slots are for port expansion cards, storage cards etc. So for 90% of Pro Mac desktop buyers, get the Mac Studio and maybe a dock, save a chunk of money.

[Magnum 475]

ajprice said:

Interesting MKBHD video on the M2 Mac Pro. As Apple Silicon is system on a chip, including the graphics, putting a PCI graphics card in an M2 Pro won't do anything. The PCI slots are for port expansion cards, storage cards etc. So for 90% of Pro Mac desktop buyers, get the Mac Studio and maybe a dock, save a chunk of money.

Exactly. Mac Pro is becoming ever more Niche. I thought after Mac Studio launched that Apple might just quietly drop the Pro from the lineup - I can see sales volumes being very low for this machine. I'm sitting here with a pair of M1 MacBook Pros (one for work, one for me), and I've never managed to get the fans on with either of them, and they seem to cope with every workload I throw at them (4k video, 36MP raw photo edits) without any sign of load.

You're going to need to be a serious power-user to even think about buying the new Pro.

[sutoka]

Ended up sending the 15' MacBook Air M2 back to Amazon. Nothing wrong with it but I've always had a MacBook Pro and the one from work just felt more solid and those extra cores certainly make a difference on Final Cut and Adobe CS

So I ended up buying a 16' MacBook Pro M1 Pro with 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM off eBay, Like new condition the seller bought it off Apple Refurb store in September 2022 for £2200 and it's still under AppleCare. I paid £1450 which I thought was a fair price given an M2 Pro in the same spec is near £3k now.

Here it is with my trusty 10 year old Retina which is still going strong albeit a bit slow when pushed.

[megaphone]

megaphone said:

theboss said:

Is it in stock anywhere? No delivery to my postcode.

No stock for me. Even at £1500 it's a bit OTT for my needs, Am looking at a Mac Mini, if anyone has any deals they see.

Edited by megaphone on Friday 23 June 12:29

After a bit of deliberation and waiting for stock, I have taken delivery of a M2 Mac Mini, wow it is quick! Just running general tasks at the moment and transferring over from my MB Air.

I went for a 512GB SSD, 8G RAM. £712.00 from the refurb store, so saved a few £. I was contemplating a 16G ram version, but an extra £200 was difficult to justify, and I can't see me ever needing the extra ram for my work.

Any recommendations for a docking stand? I'm looking at the Satechi one with the extra SSD connection, any others I should be looking at?

https://satechi.net/products/stand-hub-for-mac-min...

[mikef]

megaphone said:

Any recommendations for a docking stand? I'm looking at the Satechi one with the extra SSD connection, any others I should be looking at?

https://satechi.net/products/stand-hub-for-mac-min...

i had the Satechi SSD stand with my M1 Mini

While it worked OK, the downsides to the stand were

• it takes up a valuable high-speed Thunderbolt 4 socket for low-speed expansion
• the SSD is M2 SATA, so very low speed (600 MB/s) compared to your internal NVMe SSD (OK for Time Machine but not so good for video editing)
• more than once I lost a micro-SD card inside the slot and had to disassemble the stand to recover it

On my replacement M2 Mini Pro, I’ve replaced the stand with

• an OWC Express 4M2 external storage module, which takes up to 4 NVMe SSDs of up to 4TB each at a high-ish speed (2800 MB/s). It has a Thunderbolt-out port, so not losing any connectivity
• Sandisk Pro card reader for reading high-speed front-facing SD / CF cards

Together, these give me all I need and a huge improvement over the Satechi dock

The M2 Mini is super, isn’t it? I hardly turn my Mac Pro on these days

[ajprice]

mikef said:

megaphone said:

Any recommendations for a docking stand? I'm looking at the Satechi one with the extra SSD connection, any others I should be looking at?

https://satechi.net/products/stand-hub-for-mac-min...

i had the Satechi SSD stand with my M1 Mini

While it worked OK, the downsides to the stand were

• it takes up a valuable high-speed Thunderbolt 4 socket for low-speed expansion
• the SSD is M2 SATA, so very low speed (600 MB/s) compared to your internal NVMe SSD (OK for Time Machine but not so good for video editing)
• more than once I lost a micro-SD card inside the slot and had to disassemble the stand to recover it

On my replacement M2 Mini Pro, I’ve replaced the stand with

• an OWC Express 4M2 external storage module, which takes up to 4 NVMe SSDs of up to 4TB each at a high-ish speed (2800 MB/s). It has a Thunderbolt-out port, so not losing any connectivity
• Sandisk Pro card reader for reading high-speed front-facing SD / CF cards

Together, these give me all I need and a huge improvement over the Satechi dock

The M2 Mini is super, isn’t it? I hardly turn my Mac Pro on these days

For a £300+ box in place of a sub £100 dock I'd hope it would be everything you need . I'm looking for a similar thing to megaphone, and/or a box that can connect multiple things (my Mac mini, my iPad pro, sometimes the work MBP) to a single monitor by USB-C ( Huawei Mate 28 ). I've got a bit lost in the tech speak of docks, hubs, switches etc for which thing I need and most search results are for boxes to connect one machine to multiple monitors, the opposite of what I'm after.

[mikef]

ajprice said:

connect multiple things (my Mac mini, my iPad pro, sometimes the work MBP) to a single monitor by USB-C ( Huawei Mate 28 ).

Easiest way may be to use USB-C to HDMI and USB-C to (mini-)DP cables as well as USB-C (for whatever needs charging) and switch via the montior