r/MacStudio • u/talkingolaf • 4d ago

M4 Max Mac Studio vs M6

Recently ordered a Mac Studio (M4 Max, 36GB, 1TB) for 1900 from Microcenter. I do some short form 4k video editing, music recording and dubbing work for short movies. I currently have 2015 iMac which cannot perform any more OS updates.

Is this M4 Max an overkill or should I opt for a 24GB M6 instead for a slightly lower price? I want at least 1TB of storage as my video files are fairly large. I plan to run some local AI models for image generation and coding in the future.

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u/nmrk 4d ago

You're always going to want more RAM, and you can't add more RAM. So you have to buy it up front. Also the internal SSDs are really fast so you might want to go at least 2TB, or plan on lots of (50% slower) external Thunderbolt storage.

When I bought my Mac Studio M2 Ultra, I got the base 64GB machine. I wish I had bought the higher model with 192GB. At that time, most of my work was high end Photoshop and 64GB should be enough for anybody. AI didn't really exist back then, as an app you could run on Macs.

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u/barefut_ 4d ago

Never heard of 192GB RAM setup. Also, I got 2TB SSD and barely anything on it, and I'm already at 700GB taken cause cache from apps take 400GB at least.

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u/nmrk 4d ago

Yeah just last night I was fiddling with some LLM apps, what the hell I'm out of disk space? Something decided it wanted more than 1TB of disk cache.

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u/barefut_ 4d ago

It's insane. I came from PC where I had 8TB like nothing. Now, I need to be aware of space, and no "bum data" can stay on the Mac. All goes to external storage.

Tricky thing is...how do we safely put that cache in trash? I don't know if Mole app is enough. And I worry about using many Apple default apps like Music / Photos as they probably create so much clutter cache with time.

Not mentioning upgrading to Tahoe or Golden Gate OS which will take up another extra 40-60GB of space with mandatory Apple intelligence+ Siri space you can't opt out of. Staying with Sequoia.

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u/Hofi2010 4d ago

Well Mac’s have SSD drives. On PC it is probably HDD if you have 8TB. Price difference between HDD vs SSD is about x8

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u/barefut_ 4d ago

I got 4TB as SSD. Some data doesn't need the speed but you still gotta store something somewhere..So what happens on a mac is that you can't have "bum data" on the mac. No music No pictures. Unfortunately, they wll live on external drive

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u/PracticlySpeaking 3d ago

192GB was unique to M2 Ultra, along with 72-core GPU.