Pre-orders are now open for Apple’s newest slab of perfectly cut metal, the Mac Studio. The prices range from ‘wow, that’s a lot’ to ‘you can get a small car for that’. Unveiled at the company’s ‘Peek Performance’ event last month, it is a fatter, more powerful Mac Mini and sports either an M1 Max or the new M1 Ultra chip (which is just two M1 Max chips stuck together).
At the time of publication, we’d only managed to find two outlets offering pre-orders for the Mac Studio: Shop and Ship and Macnificent. The iStore and Incredible Connection are both missing listings for the Mac Studio, for the present. We’re sure they’ll be along shortly.
With great power comes a great power bill
The cheapest Mac Studio ships with an M1 Max chip with only 32GB of unified memory and a 512GB SSD will set you back R38,000 or just over R3,500/m. This one only comes with a measly 10-core CPU and 24-core GPU. That definitely won’t be sufficient enough for menial tasks like browsing the web or rendering FHD video. And that storage? You can get phones with more these days. We need to go bigger.
If you want to get your hands on Apple’s M1 Ultra goodness, that starts at R76,000 or close to R7,000/m. For that sum, you get the M1 Ultra chip with double the CPU and GPU core count, 64GB of memory, and 1TB of SSD storage. Things are starting to look a bit better. But if you’re comfortable spending that much money on a Mac, why not cough up just a little extra.
If money is kind of an inconvenience to you, you might as well go for the big boi. The fully specced out Mac Studio gets you 20 CPU cores, 64 GPU cores, 128GB of unified memory, and 8TB of SSD storage. All for only R160,000 or R14,900/m. For twelve months. But you’re also special-ordering the device, meaning they’re going to be few and far between. That’s fine. Product exclusivity and all that.
What is that in starving children?
Now, we know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking ‘how many starving children could I feed with that money instead?’ because you’re an exemplary person. Well not to worry, we’ve done the math.
According to the Peninsula School Feeding Association (PSFA), the cost of feeding a child has recently increased to R2.50 per child per day or R62 to feed a child for a month. That’s about R750 per kid per month. Instead of the cheapest Mac Studio, you could feed two classes of 30 kids each for a whole year. The fully-specced, M1 Ultra-laden Mac Studio could feed one kid for 355.5 years. Well, the child won’t be eating the Studio, but you get the idea. Why are we telling you this? To save you some shipping. And to feed kids of course. Here’s how.
You buy two Mac Studio M1 Ultras for R320,000. This will qualify you for free shipping because you’re buying two or more items. Then you return one of them because having two is silly. Now you’ve got a fancy new Mac Studio and R160,079 left over — because you didn’t have to pay for shipping.
All that’s left for you to do is head on over to the PSFA website and decide if you want to feed one kid for the rest of their life or them and all their friends for a few years. It’s really quite simple, actually.