I think it is important to compare comparable things.
> If you want to add an RTX3070, 256GB of RAM, and an 8TB SSD, you can go ahead, it will still be over a thousand dollars cheaper than the corresponding Mac Studio.
If you want something comparable to a Mac Studio you would need to add those things. I'm glad you managed to agree to that. A thousand dollar delta on a $4000 computer is nothing to sneeze at, however yours is a parts list and a Mac Studio is a complete product.
> Lastly, I don't see how this is any kind of loyalty to a corporation.
It read as if you were carrying water for Intel.
> It's simply pointing out the truth that the computer in question is just very expensive if you care about performance.
People care about all kinds of things. Obviously if you have no software to run that would benefit from the combination of hardware the Mac Studio offers you would be better off with something else. Horse for courses.
If you enjoy spending time assembling hardware that's great too.
> There's nothing wrong about acknowledging it's an extremely niche product that is almost never justifiable on performance grounds.
>If you want something comparable to a Mac Studio you would need to add those things. I'm glad you managed to agree to that. A thousand dollar delta on a $4000 computer is nothing to sneeze at, however yours is a parts list and a Mac Studio is a complete product.
There is no corresponding product at that price. The 4000$ Mac Studio 7TB less RAM, half of the memory, and a fraction of the GPU performance. The Mac you're describing costs 8000$ dollars, and were comparing it to a 2500-3000$ dollar computer.
It's not a 1000$ dollar delta on a 4000$ computer, it's a 2000+$ delta on a 4000$ computer and a 5000$ delta on an 8000$ computer.
> It read as if you were carrying water for Intel.
I honestly can't see how that came across. Someone asked for the spec out of a 12900K computer because comparing the price of a CPU to that if a full computer is unfair, so I gave it. I personally wouldn't buy a 12900K myself, it's ridiculously overkill and on everything except the highest of single core performance Intel is currently a worse proposition than AMD.
> People care about all kinds of things. Obviously if you have no software to run that would benefit from the combination of hardware the Mac Studio offers you would be better off with something else. Horse for courses.
Sure, but the point I'm trying to make is that there is a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of use-cases where there is a genuine performance advantage. The original assertion that the 12900K (or in half of the use cases, a Threadripper) is superior in performance is generally accurate for the 80% of people that run single threaded or lightly threaded workloads on the CPU, and for the 10% of people that only care about multi threaded workloads a Threadripper is better. For the 10% of people that run a particular mix of both, half of them have the GPU of the M1 Ultra as a deal-breaker. Obviously it's all dependent on the particular use case, it's just that those are much rarer than most think on the performance front. There are other valid reasons besides performance of course.
> If you enjoy spending time assembling hardware that's great too.
You don't have to - pre-assembled computers are generally cheaper than building them yourself these days. The reason I have given a parts list is because that's the fairest way to compare various configurations without listing off 20 different SKUs.
> If you want to add an RTX3070, 256GB of RAM, and an 8TB SSD, you can go ahead, it will still be over a thousand dollars cheaper than the corresponding Mac Studio.
If you want something comparable to a Mac Studio you would need to add those things. I'm glad you managed to agree to that. A thousand dollar delta on a $4000 computer is nothing to sneeze at, however yours is a parts list and a Mac Studio is a complete product.
> Lastly, I don't see how this is any kind of loyalty to a corporation.
It read as if you were carrying water for Intel.
> It's simply pointing out the truth that the computer in question is just very expensive if you care about performance.
People care about all kinds of things. Obviously if you have no software to run that would benefit from the combination of hardware the Mac Studio offers you would be better off with something else. Horse for courses.
If you enjoy spending time assembling hardware that's great too.
> There's nothing wrong about acknowledging it's an extremely niche product that is almost never justifiable on performance grounds.
Sure.