My stories usually come with a bit of history and this one is no exception. If you just want to want to know what the best Mac I have ever used is, I will save you a few minutes. It is the Mac Studio Pro. There were no grand tests performed, but the Mac Studio Pro can claim the title as the best Mac ever because it just works like a Mac should.
My history with Apple products goes back to the Apple II+ which I got as a gift from my mother in the summer of 1982. By the fall of 1982 I was selling Apples. I became Apple sales manager at the Texas Instruments VAR where I purchased my Apple, one of the first Apple II+ computers in the province. I helped them open stores through New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. We had five stores by early 1984, and by the fall of 1984, as the company turned their focus to IBM, I went to work for Apple in their first wave of direct employees in Canada. I got my first own-a-Mac shortly after that. An own-a-Mac was a deeply discounted Mac. Due to some quirky internal rules when I took a new job in Columbia, Maryland with Apple, I got a new own-a-Mac, this time it was a Mac II with a 40 meg hard drive. I was estactic. Own-a-Macs were supposed to be once in a lifetime pricing.
Before the Mac II, my original own-a-Mac got an internal hard drive from the Hyperdrive people who happened to be working from Halifax where my Apple office was until 1987. I think that I traded the upgraded original Mac for a SE30 which was a dynamite little computer. Sometime after we moved to Roanoke, Virginia, the Mac IIcx became one of my favorite Macs. I upgraded it to a Mac IIci and then with one last upgrade it became the Quadra 700. That Quadra 700 rode around in the back seat of my car for years. It was a perfect demo machine with an added video capture card. I upgraded the hard drive every time I upgraded the processor.
Another favorite along the way Mac was the PowerMac 7100. It was a workhorse and the first non-Motorola processor that I felt good about in those early days of the PowerPC. My PowerMac 7100 eventually got turned into a headless, stealth Linux server for my Apple office in Reston, Virginia. The PowerMac 8600 was also a great computer. After purchasing the 8600, it became my home office desktop computer for six years until 2004 when I went through the Apple window. It was solid computer but during its residence, I could not resist an amazing deal on a lovely blue Mac G3. It is perhaps the only computer that I regret scrapping. It was the ultimate connectivity machine with the ability to read about any device. I think it was the last Mac to have a SCSI interface. I did have a dalliance with a G4 cube that I got to use in my home office up in Reston, but it rebooted every time I forgot and put something on top of it.
The winter of 2004 after my defenestration from Apple, I bought a Dual G5 Mac. It died last spring (2023) after nineteen years of service but its hard drives live on in external cases. The Dual G5 still has a place in my office. It has the best case ever built for a Mac or any computer. It was a very good computer but it seemed to weigh a ton.
Other than saying the Titanium G3 laptop was the best Apple laptop in memory, I going to ignore Apple laptops since I went without one for nearly a decade between 2010 and 2020. None can touch my Mac Studio Pro anyway.
My office currently has a 2010, I5 iMac, a 2012 I5 MacMini, a 2021 M1 MacMini, and my M1 Max Mac Studio Pro with 32GBs of ram and a 1TB SSD. I use a 2020 I5 MacBook Pro as my personal laptop. Among all those Macs, the Mac Studio Pro is my work machine and the best one in the office.
The list of things that I do on my Mac Studio covers everything from web design and photography to spreadsheets. I use Pages, Word, and Nisus Writer Pro for word processing. I have the full suite of Adobe photo products and all of Microsoft's Office products. Then there is Pixelmator Pro, RapidWeaver, Coda2 and other great software that I have been using for years. The only thing I cannot run on the Mac Studio is ArcGIS Pro. I run that on my I7 Lenovo laptop running Windows 11. I also have an old Lenovo I5 running Ubuntu Linux just in case I run into a wall.
The experiences that I have had with Macs has not always been positive but I have tended to live on the bleeding edge. What I can say is that compared to a lot of Macs that I have used, the Mac Studio has been rock solid. Even my M1 Mac Mini has had its share of teething problems but nothing like the iMac that I still have. It was once called my iLemon. A heart transplant of a SSD has kept it going. It is now the oldest functioning desktop in my office at thirteen years of service.
Take it from one who has seen a lot of Macs, you will be happy with your Mac Studio Pro.
