It's finally time to retire my 2014-era MacPro for a brand new Mac Studio.

Jan. 2014: 6-core MacPro (3.5GHz), 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, AppleCare 3yr. $4618 w/ academic discount.

Mar. 2022: 20(-ish) core M1 Ultra Mac Studio (3.2GHz?), 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD, AppleCare 3yr. $4108 w/ discount.

For my uglier CPU-bound tasks, I'll probably see 10x improvement.

Sand in the gears?

• My employer credit card maxes out at $3000 per transaction, requiring me to go through our purchasing department. (Or I could get the M1 Max instead of the M1 Ultra machine. Nope.)
• My employer really wants to buy these machines from CDW, who doesn't have Mac Studios for sale yet. There's a listing, but without any particular specs. ("Up to 128GB of unified memory" -- sure, but what do I get if I hit "add to cart"? Unspecified.)
• Every day that goes by, Apple gets further backlogged.

Also, I thought I'd mention a small thing on the spec sheet that caught my eye. It appears that the Mac Studio has a "pro" audio jack, which claims to be able to drive headphones with higher impedance. That's great. What's notable by its absence is any mention of SPDIF/Toslink digital audio output. They don't have it on any other M1 Macs, so it's probably gone here as well.

I'm using a Teac A-H01 external DAC/amp, which powers my big speakers and my nice headphones. The Teac supports crazy high bitrates, but if you want to talk to it over USB, you need a kernel driver, which they're barely supporting on x86 Macs, and which so far as I can tell is completely unsupported on M1 Macs. For now, I've got a Toslink cable that makes everything work perfectly. I'll probably have to buy a USB-Toslink dongle.

Sigh.