I’m not a laptop fan, but with the juice these things have, I’d get a nice big monitor and use that with the lappy. Then I’d have a computer I could take with as well. WHICH has me interested in 13” or 14” as I’ll use it with a monitor most of the time. 
mmmm yes 
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I don’t get the mac pro update, it’s identical to studio ultra, why on earth would anyone pay extra $3k just to have the exact spec in a much larger case?
so yeah, ok, it has PCIe slots and extra usb ports, but geeez, $3k? I mean, at least throw 512gb ram in there or something…
I’m glad they don’t discontinue the studio line, it’s just the perfect thing, tower power in a small footprint.
Well it’s not the exact same. The Pro comes standard with the M2 Ultra, while the Studio comes standard with the M2 Max. If you upgrade the Studio to the Ultra, it is $4,999.
Edit, yes, it looks like the lower tier Studio Ultra is $3,999.
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iirc the previous mac pro with intel xeon and shitload of cores was coming upgradeable to something like 760gb ram, which makes sense, you get a tower packed with huge numbers of raw power, now it’s the same exact spec you can get on the studio but the tower costs $3k, I just don’t get it… even for heavy duties the studio is a beast of power efficiency and it’s cool as a cucumber, there’s no apparent advantage of putting the same spec in a much larger box. if the box was specced higher to ludicrous amounts of raw power - cool, but it’s the same config.
Edit: ha! it was upgradeable to 1.5tb of ram, now it’s up to 192gb
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Wow… rack-mount and PCIe…
Maybe you are allowed to put your own SSDs in the tower? Could be worth $3k… to Apple 
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In a wrestling match the Pro would win on size alone. And it can skate around on wheels. Boom, there’s your $3,000.
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you could do that in the intel mac pro, and the funny thing is that the intel one had 8 slots while the new one has 7 but one of them comes pre-occupied with apple i/o, so you only get 6 slots.
it’s not bad, but it’s hardly an upgrade for the mac pro line.
But you can’t add internal drives to a Studio. Even using external drives with a Studio has limitations. (See my extended rant elsewhere here)
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When you clear all the hype around these glasses, they’re kind of… meh.
The presentation was very underwhelming because all we saw were basically a flat, floating web browser interface, placed inside that “spatial AR realm”. This is not high tech, it’s snake oil merchantry. It’s a signature Gavin Belson Signature situation IMO.
Apple Watch update seems cool though. Some of the apps were really dated, it’s nice that we will get a reskin.
I also expected a bit more for the iPad, especially after Apple released their Pro software a few weeks ago. I guess iPad is still the underdog.
yeah the trails and topo maps is great addition, I think they might killed WorkOutDoors though with the offline maps addition. maybe for some the OSM will still be advantage over apple maps but it looks like apple maps are pushing the trails so not sure if anyone would buy the app…
That was one of my thoughts too. I still remember the iPhone and iPad announcements. Both had people questioning the “whys” behind it and both had many proclaiming “we don’t need that” for various reasons.
I don’t need that headset but by the end of the video I was talking positively to my other half about use cases and were the tech will be by gen 2 or 3.
Still find it creepy that it basically builds a 3D version of you for FaceTime calls though 
I bought an M2 Pro Mini a few months ago, and have recently been comparing the performance with the M2 Max chip, in anticipation of the release of the new M2 Max Studio.
My non scientific conclusion is that unless you’re doing high res video work, then it would be very difficult to notice any real world performance gains with audio production work between the two chips.
I’ll wait for the M3 Max in a year or so before I consider upgrading again.
The M2 Pro is ridiculously quick as it is.
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It has extra PCIE lanes, and afterburner card slots etc., so you’ll be able to give it massive additional grunt for graphics/video work.
The Pro has absolutely no benefit over the Studio for possibly 99% of audio production work.
Still a nice looking machine though 
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that’s extra $3k just for the option to upgrade, and while everything you’ve described is valid point for a very specific line of work, it’s still lacking the most crucial component - ram.
I know a guy who is enterprise consultant, he owns these monster mac pros because he needs to have the enterprise environment running at his office, he has ~30 vm’s with windows/linux and some of them require ~32gb ram. so yeah, apple give designers/video editors option to upgrade storage/gpu power, but for others professionals it looks like a downgrade in some crucial points.
I would go further and say that studio has no benefit over mini m2 for audio production 
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Agree with you 100%.
It is strange about the lack of RAM, but perhaps using the PCIE lanes with RAID NVME cards would allow a user to expand the RAM into the xx TB spectrum. I’m sure you already know this, but MacOS can use the SSD for RAM duties when the SoC RAM hits the ceiling. With DDR5 NVME modules in RAID, you can hit pretty high bandwidth - although I don’t think it will compete with SoC RAM in terms of latency and data throughput speeds.
Perhaps Apple are developing special RAM expansion cards….? They will be limited to the PCIE lane speeds though, so doesn’t seem to make sense.
And yes, Mac Mini’s rule for music production! Studio is slightly overkill.
Also worth noting that the full spec Mac Silicon Pro is c.£40k cheaper than the Intel version - so that £40k might be needed for all the extra modules you’re gonna need!
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With the direction Apple are taking now even more openly it seems like they want to “curate” the shit out of all data you provide with every OS release a little more. The omnipresence of it is really frightening if you start thinking about it. It’s not augmentation of the mind – it’s the opening of the final episode of the degradation of human intelligence. And all that just because it’s so damn easy to have so called AI finish sentences you mistyped in a “better” way.
And of course they are very talented in framing it just so nicely… Ars Technica – Apple avoiding AI …
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Something to consider is the core count and how they’d be used for your music. The Pros have 6 or 8 performance cores and the standard chips have have 4. To be fair, from what I’ve heard, people are seeing high performance on more or less any model of M chip, especially compared to Intel. I have an M1 and I run unfrozen Ableton sessions with 40-50 tracks with plugins everywere and I’d say 50-60% CPU use is the norm. If I had 6 cores I could push for more, but for a hobbyist that seemed overkill.
From what I read, heavily sample based workflows rely on RAM, and other workflows may rely more on a good CPU. Interestingly even Logic (but also Ableton) do not make full use of the single core processors in the new chips yet. The thing with the MBA is there’s no fan. So when you get into heavier processing (which I assume my description of a 40-50 tracks session would represent) the benchmarks show that the Macbook Air will slow down a touch. Again though, the performance tests seem to suggest the difference between a fanless and a fan machine is fairly minimal but I’d want to research that a bit more tbh.
And I guess if I were in your shoes (heck, even in my own shoes!) I’d be tempted for my next machine to be a MBP. The main reason being that if you add more RAM and storage to a MBA, you are very quickly at the price of a MBP, which comes with all the extra ports, CPU power and whatnot.
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I’m very happy with my M1 MacBook Pro from early last year, just like the new Air form factor, it would be great for writing, not so much studio work or coding, conversely the Beatles got a lot done with 8 tracks, we should be able to too
currently my Intel Mac Mini is holding down studio duties
I’m a VR enthusiast eagerly waiting for tech that I can use in my day job as a developer, where ever I happen to be physically (either home, office or abroad in my case). It must be comfortable enough for wearing 4+ hours without a break with screens good enough for reading small text without eye-strain. Vision Pro might be it, but hard to tell.
In a studio as screens for the DAW might be convenient, too. As many screens for plugins, etc that you want, moveable to where you need them. So if you’re sitting in front of a synth not close to the DAW, you could move some screens so they hover right behind it, etc. The potential is there, if the comfort is good and there is little technical “hassle” involved…