@Ben Szymanski
These machines don't seem to run nearly as cool as reviewers make them out to be, but they run much cooler in comparison, and make what we had before seem like stone age tech.
@Ben Szymanski
I am stunned by how much less power they use, and how much less heat they output versus Intel counterparts.
@Ben Szymanski
The Apple Silicon machines actually are that impressive. It would be so hard to go back to Intel at this point.
@Ben Szymanski
Simple fact - if anything happens to your machine's logic board, the internal drive goes with it.
@Ben Szymanski
For storage, I recommend getting a 256 GB or 512 GB internal drive, skipping the 1 TB and 2 TB upgrades, and instead buying a good external drive (with an SSD in it).
@Ben Szymanski
The M1 Mac mini is certainly useful, but the iMac comes with everything you need out of the box. And the Mac studio is just a tad bit too expensive and overkill for most (see which chip to buy above). The Mac Pro is still on Intel.
@Ben Szymanski
At the end of the Intel Mac-era, the only desktop I would recommend would have been the Mac mini. At this point in time, I can only recommend the M1 iMac.
@Ben Szymanski
The clock speed isn't any faster in the Pro/Max/Ultra chips, so those upgrades feel like a waste to me. Or put it another way, the M1/M2 chips are really great because they aren't artificially hobbled to create product differentiation.
@Ben Szymanski
Unless you need multi-monitor support, or are rendering massive videos, you should buy the cheapest chip possible, which seems to be the baseline M1/M2 processors.
@Ben Szymanski
What is the optimal Mac configuration in 2022? It's quite flipped from what it used to be IMO.
Laptops are my new primary choices, and should include active cooling and at least 16 GB of RAM (preferably 24 GB RAM if that's in your budget).
@Ben Szymanski
The fact that the clockspeed on the Pro/Max/Ultra chips isn't any faster than the baseline chip means that unless you have highly parallel workloads, you should be targeting the cheapest Mac that suits your needs.
@Ben Szymanski
If you can manage to get your hands on an iPad running iOS 6 or earlier, you can really see the difference in terms of the kinds of applications the iPad was supposed to be running.