Now you could argue that the M1 Max would have been sufficient for a 2D-Artist like me. The main reason I ordered so early on, was because I expected delivery delays because of either lockdowns or a huge demand - and both was true and even I had to wait for around 6 weeks - but it was really worth it, the M1 Ultra is a beast! On the third week of April, it finally arrived. On March 9 I ordered the Studio as M1-Ultra with 20 CPU-cores, 48 GPU Cores and 2 TB internal SSD. An expensive excuse to get a 32' display, I know )Īnd actually I'm not the apple-keynote person, but since my iMac was crumbling down, I hoped for a replacement that was powerful enough to do all the work I might dream of. That's when I realized at the March 8 event this year, the Mac Studio is exactly what I needed. While this solution worked to some degree, I found my limits in Photoshop very fast (with just 8 gigs of RAM) and dropping files from one computer and organizing files around different devices wasn't as easy.

So the interim solution was to use an inexpensive M1 Mac Mini that I already had for some Photoshop painting and doing all the rest of the work on the recovered iMac, such as printing jobs, emails and small renderings. And no I didn't want to get my hands dirty, replacing an SSD on a 7 years old iMac. That means no dedicated port that passes through the speeds of an external NVME-SSD to get the old thing to be as speedy as the internal thing. The clean desktop not even an iMac allows forĮspecially since the late 2015 iMacs did not have the 3.2 gen USB-C yet at that time, only Thunderbolt 2.

But, it wasn't quite the same and not up to speed as before. When my maxed out late 2015 - 4,0 GHz iMac died on me last year, it was possible to recover the dead internal drive from a time machine backup and use it with an external SSD.

As some of you know, I'm a digital artist, but also into workplace ergonomy, which means I'm always trying to optimize my workspace to be more productive and healthy.

Mac mini zbrush