A Week with the New Mac Studio M1 Ultra and Studio Display

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Great article, thanks. Was the speed of the MBP 16" Max measured off internal SSD storage or external?
I'm leaning towards a stop-gap base Studio Max and hedging $3-4k savings to trade it for the Mac Pro M2 down the road.

Off the SSD, but I think we now know that a the performance of each chip is going to roughly the same in each Mac. 

Good article, I went from loving my Mac Pro to hating it by the time I was done reading.

The display is going to be stretch for my wallet, what LG option were you looking at?

Great article. Please could you give me a link to the LG display you mention in the article as I'd like to take a look at it? Thanks

I ordered a maxed-out M1 Ultra a few hours after it became available. Estimated delivery is in May, though my M1 Max shipped weeks sooner than Apple had predicted, so who knows.

I also ordered a Studio Display. If price isn't a significant factor, would you recommend canceling the display and substituting in its stead a Pro Display XDR?

Or even just keeping my current monitor setup. Realistically, I have no issues with 2 x Dell U3818DW, and I wonder if I'll miss the extra real estate.

It's also made us think not to trust any third-party review that is using media external to the Mac Studio! Things will only go as fast as the slowest pipe and that's now external storage as we can't see many editors with SSD RAIDS running at 7GB/s.

Regarding external media, you might be right but I'm not sure that write speed is the reason. I just rendered and exported an 80GB video using ProRes 422 on a maxed-out M1 Max MBP. Per iStat, disk write speed during the export peaked at under 400MB/s. Perhaps latency explains it?

Thanks for the excellent review! I ordered the base Ultra (which I guess isn't exactly basic) with 64GB unified memory / 4TB SSD storage. That still topped $6,000CAN.
I've been losing sleep since, hoping I made the right decision.
I'll be editing some 8K video (from the Nikon Z9) -- not extremely complex timelines but want to make sure I've future-proofed; this will hopefully last me for the next few years. The last 2 years I'ver been mostly using a specced out 2020 Intel MacBook, which struggles and takes forever to render.

Very nice, now, Mac Pro please. Let's get the party started.

Thanks for a great review.

My personal thinking:

Is Apple Studio Max good enough if working with long formats in the future?

4K ProRes RAW and 60-90 minutes time-lines will probably not reside on an internal SSD.

With ProRes RAW, you get HDR, so is the Studio Display a good option?

Two monitor set-up, Is a 16” MacBook Pro a better option?