Now that the first orders for the Mac Studio and the Apple Studio Display are reaching lucky customers, the heads of both engineering sat down for an interesting interview. Nail interview where they comment on the design, features, decisions around ports, thermal design and more.
A computer born from feedback from professionals
Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunchspoke with Tom Boger, Vice President of Product Marketing for Mac and iPad, Shelly Goldberg, Senior Director of Product Design for Mac and iPad, and Xander Soren, Director of Product Marketing for Pro Apps.
According to managers, these products they began to take shape with the modular Mac Pro of 2019. The idea behind them comes from Apple’s Pro Workflows team, a team of people dedicated to “interacting with and gaining insight from professionals in fields such as design or science to better understand their work process”. It is from this feedback that Apple created the new product category.
“We look at Mac Studio a lot for what it is, a whole new line of Mac products. Which is rare. We don’t add product lines to the Mac very often,” says Tom Boger, vice president of product marketing for Mac and iPad at Mac Studio Manzana. “Our philosophy wasn’t at all to take a Mac Mini and scale it, it was ‘we know we’re working on this M1 Ultra chip and we want to bring it to users who want performance and conductivity and a modular system. And let it live right on people’s desktops so it’s right at your fingertips. And that’s what we offer.
Soren adds that one of the goals of Mac Studio is democratize power and opportunity so that professionals can take advantage of tools that help them in their fields of work.
“When it comes to business technology, things can get expensive. You need a lot of different equipment. You need a specific type of professional space to work in. In the past, you needed big teams,” says Soren. “All of this is changing a lot. And I think one of the reasons evolution has really accelerated in the last two years is because of Apple’s silicon.
At different times, such as the choice to include several ports on the front of the machine or to keep the USB-A connectors, the comments of these professionals were essential.
The number of ports available in Mac Studio is something that came out of research with their business customers, talking to them, asking them how many devices they use. The USB-A options surprised me a bit, to be honest, but Boger says his research has shown there’s still a need for legacy.
With a cooling system to match the power of the M1 Ultra
The Mac Studio was born from the Mac Pro, despite its similarity to the Mac mini. Being able to effectively cool an M1 Ultra chip with virtually no sound from the Mac was one of the biggest challenges. Even more so considering that the team was used to the Mac Pro, which has a large amount of space for fans and airflow.
It was a really fun challenge from a hardware perspective, because we’re trying to deliver a massive amount of performance like that, but we were really limited on the form factor,” says Goldberg. “Obviously if you’re going to put on your desk, you don’t want to bother yourself while you’re doing all those things. So it’s a really fun challenge from a hardware perspective, the team has done hundreds of thermal simulations for the airflow to try and figure out what the best airflow pattern is through the system to try to optimize performance and acoustics and eventually we came up with the design which we have, the bottom entry of which goes through over 2,000 machined holes which are machined at an angle [específico] which rotates when the perimeter is crossed”.
And it sounds really good
In addition to the Mac Studio, the interview also touched on the Studio Display. Boger described her as a “very accessible and very mainstream large screen for all our Mac users”. While Goldberg highlighted Spatial Audio’s capabilities and how the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro design is now coming to a desktop.
Goldberg says the studio display’s spatial sound system also uses the force-cancellation drivers they built for the 16-inch MacBook Pro, a first for a desktop sound system. These specialized drivers provide an internal opposing force that dampens unwanted vibrations, acting as a shock absorber that prevents vibrations from a speaker cone from traveling through the enclosure.
“I think it makes a big difference in sound quality because by having these opposing drivers we send all the vibrations we create into the intentional vibration that creates the sound rather than into the enclosure and sometimes jarring it. less predictable that create unwanted acoustic side effects,” says Goldberg.
The Mac offer for the office has made a more than substantial evolutionary leap with the introduction of Mac Studio and Studio Display. A combo that can replace a Mac Pro and a Pro Display XDR in many cases and bring the power of the M1 Ultra closer to all users.
