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Apple Hardware Purchasing Advice


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It's time for me to replace my Late 2012 iMac with a new M1 machine. But I could use some guidance on the minimum specs if I want to happily run the Affinity Suite and it's updates over the next three to five years. Assume pushing the Affinity Suite apps as hard as possible.

Would a 24" M1 iMac (8-core CPU, 8-core GPU) with 16 GB of RAM offer enough of a performance ceiling for 3-5 years, or should I think instead about an entry level spec Mac Studio (10-core CPU, 24-core GPU) with 32 GB of RAM?

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@Mark Oehlschlager  If you haven't looked at this topic you might be interested.  My iMac 24" has the specs you are considering and, although I might not be considered as "pushing the Suite apps as hard as possible," I have no trouble at all having all three open at the same time and flipping from one to another.   It always comes down to money.  There will be people who say that more RAM is vital, and it probably is if one has an unlimited budget.  But that Mac Studio apparently "starts" at around $5,000.00.  (Edit:  wrong.  Starts at around $3,600 including a display.)  I might add that I am keeping Big Sur and not upgrading to Monterey, as the interface with the Affinity apps is excellent right where I am.


24" iMAC Apple M1 chip, 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, 16 GB unified memory, 1 TB SSD storage, Ventura 13.6.  Photo, Publisher, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.3.
MacBook Pro 13" 2020, Apple M1 chip, 16GB unified memory, 256GB  SSD storage
,  Ventura 13.6.   Publisher, Photo, Designer 1.10.5, and 2.1.1.  
 iPad Pro 12.9 2020 (4th Gen. IOS 16.6.1); Apple pencil.  
Wired and bluetooth mice and keyboards.9_9

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@jmwellborn Thanks. 

The Mac Studio that I would consider would cost $2,000, plus the Studio Display at $1,600, for a total bill of $3,600 + tax. Compare that to my 24" iMac config at $1,900 + tax.

As you say, it comes down to money, and I'd like to spend just what I must, not more. Certainly the Mac Studio machines with the M1 Ultra chips would be overkill, right?

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Bang for buck I'd go for the 24" iMac and with the money saved get a second screen and a pizza 😁

Having said that, If something is earning you more than it cost then it's not a loss, it's an asset, you could also consider the studio display as an investment because if you go to buy another studio in a few or 4 years time you only have to buy the Mac studio not the screen, but tech can change quickly in the space of a few years so I'd still go for the iMac.

 

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
B| (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum)

Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions

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15 hours ago, Mark Oehlschlager said:

The Mac Studio that I would consider would cost $2,000, plus the Studio Display at $1,600, for a total bill of $3,600 + tax. Compare that to my 24" iMac config at $1,900 + tax.

As you say, it comes down to money, and I'd like to spend just what I must, not more. Certainly the Mac Studio machines with the M1 Ultra chips would be overkill, right?

Well it's always a matter of what one really needs and also the realistic price factor here. The overall problem with the Apple M1 hardware architecture is, that in order to get more RAM you've always to buy more CPU/GPU cores too even you may not need those! - In sum Apple needs to scale to four SoCs to support more than 128GB of RAM. But a user who only needs a lot of RAM therefore always has to buy expensive, probably by him/her unused, CPU and GPU cores/performance.

So if you personally think you don't need more than 16GB RAM and also not more than the initial M1 chip performance for the next three years, and you want to keep the costs to be lower here, then the 24" iMac is a way to go.

15 hours ago, jmwellborn said:

... My iMac 24" has the specs you are considering and, although I might not be considered as "pushing the Suite apps as hard as possible," I have no trouble at all having all three open at the same time and flipping from one to another.

That's a synthetic benchmark and nothing where huge data sets have to be loaded and worked with, so the amount of hardware RAM isn't that essiential for such sort of benchmarks. There are other benchmarks like https://bapco.com/ etc. which more realistic perform application suites. - Further the amount of RAM you will need in three years for the OS and apps will always increase (OS & apps get thicker and thicker but not leaner over time)!

15 hours ago, jmwellborn said:

It always comes down to money.  There will be people who say that more RAM is vital, and it probably is if one has an unlimited budget.

Of course it's finally what counts available money & budget, but (and this is a big BUT) the fault lies with Apple with their M1 SoC architecture (you want more/max RAM then you have to buy the most expensive SoC top system) and their pricing politics.

------------------------------------------

Apple Silicon based hardware (Apple M1), here the used M1 type, aka if M1 ... Pro ... Max ... Ultra, dictates the possible, maximal usable shared RAM memory!

Apple M1  (8 - 16 GB max RAM)
Apple M1 Pro  (16 - 32 GB max RAM)
Apple M1 Max  (32 - 64 GB max RAM)
Apple M1 Ultra  (64 - 128 GB max RAM)

Mac Hardware (actually):

Mac Mini --> M1  (8 - 16 GB max RAM)

24" iMac --> M1  (8 - 16 GB max RAM)

Mac Studio --> M1 Max (32 - 64 GB max RAM)
Mac Studio --> M1 Ultra (64 - 128 GB max RAM)

13" MBA  --> M1  (8 - 16 GB max RAM)
13" MBP  --> M1  (8 - 16 GB max RAM)

14" MBP --> M1 Pro  (16 - 32 GB max RAM)
14" MBP --> M1 Max (32 - 64 GB max RAM)

16" MBP --> M1 Pro  (16 - 32 GB max RAM)
16" MBP --> M1 Max (32 - 64 GB max RAM)

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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What kind of project would it need to make use of the M1 Ultra with Affinity Suite?

How important is RAM with the M1 compared to Intel with Affinity Suite?

Advertising designer - Austria —  Photo - Publisher - Designer — CS6 d&wP — Mac Pro 5,1 (4,1 2009) 48GB 2x X5690 - RX580 - 970EVO - OS X 10.14.6 - NEC2690wuxi2 - CD20"—  iPad Pro 12.9" gen1 128 GB - Pencil

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6 minutes ago, Johannes said:

What kind of project would it need to make use of the M1 Ultra with Affinity Suite?

Probably some project which is pretty huge in size (many layers/artboards/pages etc.) which do use a bunch of computationally intensive drawing/rendering operations.

13 minutes ago, Johannes said:

How important is RAM with the M1 compared to Intel with Affinity Suite?

On M1 based platforms the RAM is shared by CPU & GPU. In contrast here on an Intel platform with a dedicated GPU, the later has it's own GPU-RAM and that one is not siphoned off from traditional main memory. - Other than that it depends on the M1 efficient use of memory here, thus how it behaves on huge data load by several processes, how often it possibly has to swap mem, etc. etc.

However, the general rule of thumb that you can never have enough RAM in reserve still applies, no matter if on an Intel or M1 based system.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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On 3/17/2022 at 7:34 PM, Mark Oehlschlager said:

Assume pushing the Affinity Suite apps as hard as possible.

Have you at any time exceeded the capacities of your 2012 iMac? Are you planning to do so in the foreseeable future?

In mid-2020 I started with the full Affinity 1.8.4 suite on a late-2014 Mac Mini with 8GB RAM and 256 GB HDD running macOS Catalina, which I bought used for 301€.

After all the hype around the M1 processor, I replaced this machine last year with the smallest (!) M1 Mac Mini — 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, macOS Big Sur —, which cost less than 600€ (and sold the old Mac Mini for 150€). The Mac Mini shares an Asus PB258Q monitor (245€ pre-owned), a Perixx keyboard and a CSL vertical mouse — both USB wired —, and a Wacom Intuos Pro S tablet with an Acer Travelmate X349 laptop running K/Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS with 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD (absolutely no issues running Gimp, Inkscape, Rawtherapee, w.h.y.).

The M1 Mac Mini is much faster than the 2014 Mac Mini: instead of dozens of seconds, cold start to login takes less than 20 seconds, the Affinity apps start in 3–5 seconds (without loading a project file), everything works absolutely smoothly. Compared to the 2017 Linux laptop I notice about double performance when compiling a non-trivial multipart C/TeX project (and compared to the 2014 Mac Mini the same terminal script runs three times faster on the M1 machine).

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6 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Other than that it depends on the M1 efficient use of memory here, thus how it behaves on huge data load by several processes, how often it possibly has to swap mem, etc. etc.

Not just how often but also how quickly it can do that. It is a bit like the difference when swapping data between RAM & a conventional HD vs a SSD. Supposedly, the M1 architectures excel at that but it remains to be seen how well that works in real world apps like Affinity.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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