My early Christmas computer present! - Forums

Topic starter

Dec 22, 2023

Recently bought the Mac Studio M2 Ultra, 64 GB memory, 2 TB SSD, 24 core CPU, 60 core GPU. Sonoma 14.1.2 (yeah I'm blessed to be able to afford the $4,400 for the computer and the $1,454 for the Apple Studio 27" display. I purchased from B&H using their credit card which refunds the full sales tax.)

I use APP for integration and Pixinsight for processing. APP has an Apple silicon version, Pix does not. Both work perfectly. This thing is a beast and a half! I recently stacked 300+ subs from my 6200MC; each sub 122 MBs. The Mac did not struggle but did get hot…I put my lens dust blower fan on it 😂. Normal use this thing does not get hot, stays cool. All and all I am so impressed by the speed of this beast of a computer. -john

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wsg

Dec 22, 2023

John are you saying you can't use Pixinsight on you Mac?

Francesco Meschia

Dec 22, 2023 · Edited: Dec 22, 2023

You can, he’s just saying it’s not optimized for Apple silicon (yet). Still, it runs quite fast on Mx Macs.

wsg

Dec 22, 2023

Right, PI can't be expected to be instantaneously usable with every hardware iteration. My M1 runs everything I use for AP flawlessly, if I update properly.

scott

John Favalessa

Topic starter

Dec 22, 2023

John are you saying you can't use Pixinsight on you Mac?

Works perfectly I believe runs through Rosetta . They just haven't made a version of Pix that is native to Apple silicon.

Todd Charlson

Dec 22, 2023 · Edited: Jun 5, 2024

I also bought an early Christmas present. I replaced my 2018 15" 2.9 GHz 6-Core Intel Core I9 32 GB 1Tb MacBook Pro with the 16" M3 Max MacBook Pro.

Apple M3 Max chip with 16‑core CPU, 40‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine
16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display²
2TB SSD storage
64GB unified memory

I certainly isn't as fast as your Mac Studio M2 Ultra. I haven't had a desktop computer for close to 2 decades.
CS
Todd

Vincent Goetz

Dec 22, 2023 · Edited: Dec 22, 2023

I also just bought the Mac Studio, along with a C14 to accompany my C11. And I have just built an observatory.

looking forward to 2024

Richard Francis

Jun 5, 2024

I have a whole fleet of Macs running my systems. In the observatory are 3 Mac Minis of various ages – the newest is an M2. There's also a rack-mounted Windows-10 machine which I had to buy to host the software for the Also Mini-Cyclope seeing monitor – no macOS version available. For almost 5 years I had to run TheSkyX on Windows because my camera at the time (FLI Kepler 4040) had no Mac-native driver. Windows has absolutely nothing to recommend it I'm afraid and I was pleased, with the next camera (Moravian C5A-100M) that I could switch back to macOS.

Since then I've transitioned to KStars/Ekos on macOS and that offers all the functionality that TSX lacks. Except it crashes from time to time. Apparently it's rock-solid on Linux.

Back in the house I'm running PixInsight on a PowerBook M1max and it runs very well, and there's an old wine-cooler style Mac Pro on the other desk.

I use Screen Sharing to check progress in the observatory and also to interact with Ekos as necessary (such as at 4am when I don't really want to walk the 100m or so, braving wild boars on the way)

It all works great !

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MaksPower

Feb 27, 2026

I have a Studio M3 Max and a M3 MacBook Air… using APP for stacking and Pixinshight mainly for BlurX and DenoiseX. The Studio M3 is also my daily drive for work, beats the crap out of the office-issued Dull.

Also using the MacBook to run ASIAir and SkySafari at the scope.

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