Mac Studio and Studio display

 

My six-year-old i9 iMac was showing signs of wear and tear, slowing down and crashing more often, and it was becoming harder to run newer apps that were designed for Apple Silicon. I was getting really worried and decided to get a Mac Studio before I couldn’t work at all. Since it wasn’t a brand-new 27-inch iMac, which I’d been dreaming of for ages, I needed a monitor and went with the Studio Display. I’ve always thought Apple makes the best screens, and this one had features that others didn’t.

Specs:

• M4 Max chip with a 16-core neural engine
• 16-core CPU
• 40-core GPU
• 64 gig RAM
• 2 TB hard drive

This machine is a huge upgrade from my old iMac, which was already pretty powerful. With the M chip, many of my apps run much smoother. It’s super fast and completely silent—no more noisy fans! I was also surprised to find that my Huion tablet works perfectly on it, something that had become impossible on my Intel machine. I was able to update Blender to version 5, which is only available on Apple Silicon, and the workspace is a huge improvement. My first animation render was over three times faster than a similar one I did just a few days before getting the Studio.

I wanted to get a new Mac while they still offered a variety of ports, something that’s likely to change soon. I have a lot of accessories that I can’t afford to replace, and they all use USB 3 connections. This setup has two USB 3 ports, six USB-C ports (plus four on the monitor), a spot to plug in my internet connection and a card slot for my camera cards—in the front! It also has a headphone jack and the display has a camera. 

Overall, this will really take me into the future and give me the tools to tackle more complex projects, especially in 3D and 2D animation. 

le piège des pigistes

Technology has made my job and millions of others, possible. It’s become a trap for many who live off contract work like me.

One thing we have the advantage over a big company for example, is we can usually crank out projects in record time. A big department of designers/artists will almost always be slower as there are a lot more people to satisfy. As a contractor you usually only need to satisfy the clients you dealing with. The other advantage is also the trap. The technology we use to get it done so fast.

Many bigger companies wait until 3 versions and many years have past before they finally shell out a huge amount to upgrade their software or hardware, all at once. Contractors depend on those upgrades to keep ahead of the competition. More efficient software and hardware saves time and for an hourly contractor, time is literally money. So, oddly, the people with the least money buy the most expensive stuff to stay competitive while the big boys who can well afford regular upgrades do it in big chunks and are always years behind what can be done technically. Of course some places keep up to date but that’s not exactly common. On any project I work on alone, the client gets very up to date features and functions older versions didn’t have while almost every time I work with an established partner business, I have to hope I have an old version to re-install (or in some cases I have buy the old one again) and try to make up for the lack of functionality I’ve come to expect for the last 2 or 3 years. Yet they land the big and more important, stable clients. Seems unfair, and it is, but that’s the world we live in.

So if we don’t keep up, we lose our edge and if we do.. we stay poor. I often wonder if suddenly, Behemoth became one of those huge companies with 100’s of artists working for it... would I still insist on staying so up to date and would that be avoiding one trap, for another? And as tech loving geeks.. do we want to escape in the first place?