It was ready to go in a tad less than 5 seconds.) I wondered if the boot process would be longer when the Mac was fully loaded. (Parenthetically, I should say I have never seen a Mac boot up so quickly. When I plugged in the Mac Studio and the Studio Display the new Mac Studio did its usual routine with the machine asking me if I had a backup. I had already just sold my iMac, but had done 2 Time Machine backups of it before it departed. I didn't even notice that until I was moving the boxes to the garage. With typical Apple whimsy, the back of the boxes showed the back of the products. there was a pull tab and each box opened easily with no tools. As I hovered over the new arrivals with a box cutter, Apple had faked me out.

The 2 boxes from Apple arrived on the 18th, the release day. It totaled $4,798 plus tax, but that included the Studio Display (more about that later). I upped the hard drive to 2 TB to match the iMac I was getting rid of. My choice was the Studio with 64 gigs of ram, I opted to spend the additional 200 bucks on a 10 core CPU system with a 32 core GPU, and a 16 core neural engine. Another motivator was that I hated that my laptop was faster than my desktop, and I really wanted to work on a bigger screen.

I opted for very fast, as reviewers seemed to be saying the M1 Max was more than enough for a landscape photographer. It came in two versions, very fast, and very fast x 2. I had expected a 27' iMac, but instead, we got something much better: The Mac Studio. I kept wondering when a desktop M1 Mac would come along. Last year I bought the 16' model with the M1 Max chip, and loved it. Things got better with the release of laptops with the new Apple Silicon Mac Book pros. That was too much money for me, so I sat on the iMac hoping for better days. The next significant jump up was to the Mac Pro, originally the awful (in my view) trashcan Mac Pro, and when Apple thankfully ditched it they replaced it with another Intel-based Mac Pro (cheese grater) in 2019. The problem was Apple had a big hole in its lineup.

Dxo pureraw apple m1