So I've had remarkable luck with my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 (24GB RAM). It has been my home studio machine for over a decade and has been as solid as a rock.

Today it crashed a couple of times, which is rarely does, and I'm thinking I really should update. It's stuck on OSX 10.11.6 and if it's starting to become unreliable it could be time to get a new machine.

I have a few issues. My main audio interface is a Metric Halo ULN-8 - still firewire. I'm aware that I can upgrade to 3d (thunderbolt), can't seem to find 3d cards for sale on the MH site though.

Another issue is that I have a lot of hard drives. In the Mac Pro I have an ssd system drive for Logic Pro, and 3 hdd drives for Logic projects, samples and backup. I also have 3 external firewire drives for archives and cloned system drives.

I have 2 plans in mind at the moment.

Plan A : Buy a base model Mac Studio and record projects on to an external USB-C or Thunderbolt SSD drive. Copy everything else to a Lacie d2 8TB drive (use this for backups too).

Plan B : Buy a used Mac Pro 5,1 - move the old 3,1 drives into it. Carry on pretty much as before, but with a later OSX.

Anyway these are my thoughts so far. Would appreciate any input you may care to offer. Many thanks.

I replaced a 2012 5,1 with an m1 mini and it’s amazing. We run HDX and I got an avid chassis for the card. The drags are that I can’t put the mini in the enclosure as the Bluetooth reception for keyboard/trackpad suffers (so it sits on top of the enclosure in the rack) and the other drag is the major amount of tethered usb devices to get all the hard drives etc connected. But it runs super swift and stable and everything is current. It was a good move.

Thanks for your reply Nathan. Good to hear you're happy going from the 5,1 to the m1 mini. Please may ask if you're running 2 monitor screens from the m1 mini? I'm in a 2 hdmi monitor situation at present and would like to transfer those across.

I upgraded my 2010 5,1 to a hex core Xeon before finally giving up on it. Replaced it two years ago with the i7 Mac Mini and couldn't have been happier. Didnt see too big of a performance jump, it was pretty similar, but I was able to update the OS and plugins and whatnot. 4 months later they released the M1 version, but glad I went with the Intel at the time.

Think nowadays just about everything I have is M1 compatible so that will be the next one. If I were you, I wouldn't hesitate to get one now if all of your software and plugins are compatible. The Mini will blow that Pro away and if you go with the Studio it should eat it alive and then some heh.

Thanks for your insight. Yes, fortunately I think most of my plugins are silicon compatible so that's a positive. Leaning toward the studio as it has plenty of i/o, and of course more processing power is always welcome. It seems I can still plug in firewire devices using adapters as well.

I agree with the other guys that upgrading your Mac Pro is a waste of time. My 2010 5.1 Quad Xeon died in March, and I had no choice but to buy a new Mac. I settled on a 2019 Mac Pro as it has PCI-e slots and
I rely on my UAD-2 PCI-e cards a lot, and did not want to
go the external PCI-e chassis route.

I have been very happy with the Mac Pro and it’s nice to not have to worry about whether certain plugins will work on it..I can still run a lot of my favorite Intel-only
plugins like Absynth 5 which I use a lot. But that is me.
Just about any Apple M1 Mac will be fine for u, and you will love not being concerned about being
stuck on an old abandoned O.S.

Grab a studio and be done for another 10 years

I recommend at least 2 backups of your most important files.

Here's a fun website about how to handle backups
http://taobackup.com/

MIOConsole v.5 will not run on Apple Silicon; you will need to upgrade to 3d to run with Apple Silicon (due to Apple dropping support for 32-bit apps). Unfortunately we are still out of stock on 3d cards, but the dam is starting to break and we hope to have them back in stock soon.

Many thanks for this bj. I was planning to use an adapter and stay firewire with my ULN-8 until I could get a 3d card. Now I know I can't do that I'll delay purchase of the Mac studio.

A quick question. Do you have to add the 3d card before you can add a Mark IV card? Or can you just jump straight to the Mark IV card?

The mkIV Analog card upgrade requires having a 3d Card; the communication structure has changed due to the new converters and the 2d card is not capable of configuring the mkIV analog card.

So, yes - you need to get the 3d Card before or simultaneously.

Many thanks bj. Good to know.

I was running Protools 10 on a MP3,1 myself for a decade. Dual boot, with OSX 10.6.8 for smooth Protools operation, and 10.13 for everything else. The 3,1 is a very capable machine and it really got new life when I added a SSD on a Sonnett PCIe expansion card (< $100); much faster boots, app launches, opening of files etc. It's weaknesses are mainly the old and slow ports.

I'm now very happy with my M1 Mac Mini, but I still have the MP sitting under my desk, connected both to one of my displays and my DAC, so I can fire it up when I need to. You might want to do that in a transition phase. In case something doesn't work out. You might also have stuff on the MP that you don't on the M1.

I strongly advice you to get current with the new apple silicon macs. You lose some things, like the ability to run x86 code, and you will need to find new software for some things, but they are super.

Get a new mac, keep the old one at least for a while, and you'll be set for the future!

I had Macs stop working twice. That sucks especially if you have only one computer in the house.
When I upgrade, I always keep the previous computer (if it is not broken).

This x100. Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re doing a tightrope walk on the trailing edge from day one. Use this opportunity to get on the front side of the technology curve for a while.

Any processing power comes at a price.
If you still use only 50% or less of a computer's power after 2 years, you paid too much, because you could have paid a lot less, buy a new computer after 2 years with more power (which you still don't need) and would most likely pay less overall for the 2 computers.

Buy a computer that turns out to be underpowered soon: Frustrating.
Buy computer much more powerful than needed: You pay extra for something you don't need and might keep using it longer than you would like. You also risk of it stopping to work. This is very common especially with Macs. where one morning, it might not turn on because a part is dead and you can't replace it.

Buying a Mac for 10 years means overspending and in the later years (if it still works) you can't just update the OS, can't install many new plugins, be limited with interfaces etc.

The problem is estimating how much power you will actually be using until you will replacing it.
That is hard to foresee. Also the importance of the price depends on the personal financial situation. If you have a lot of money, just buy the maximum. But this is not the situation for most people.

I personally target 2 to 4 years use.

I'm trying to imagine what it would feel like to be frustrated because my CPU is too fast and I could have saved some money by buying a less powerful one. This is quite foreign to my experience. If my mixes were hitting 50% on the CPU meter I'd just say "yay! I can bring my buffer size down a bit!".

But anyway, the reasons for recommending a Studio as opposed to a Mac Pro 5,1 for a late 2022 purchase have nothing to do with power and everything to do with staving off obsolescence. Buy something new, and you put yourself in the luxurious position of knowing that you have many years of use ahead before you are forced to replace it because it won't work with new software anymore. Whether that's actually more cost-effective in pure $ terms than buying near-obsolete machines and turning them over every few years, I don't know. But replacing your computer has costs of its own, in terms of drudgery and headaches. I'd rather go through that particular ordeal as seldom as I can get away with.

I've been using Macs for nearly 30 years and have never had this experience. The only time a Mac died on me was 100% my fault--a MBP that I spilled some liquid into and fried the MB. Every other Mac I've had ran flawlessly until I finally replaced it because of looming compatibility issues, and/or because I was ready to move up to a newer and more powerful CPU.

I didn't write about frustration because of spending more than necessary.
The more likely scenario in that case is that one is more or less content with the situation, and relaxed because of having unused power.

But it is nevertheless a disadvantage when you have less money for other things because it is invested into something that is not used (the surplus CPU power, or SSD space, or RAM).

However, the question really is how much of the CPU power you are using. You touch that in your next point:

When you are using 50% of the CPU power on day one, then I would assume you will be using 90% to 100% in 2 years.

But if you use 10% or 20%, then you may not get to more than 50% in 2 years.

I agree with that. I was more thinking about a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra versus a Mac with M1 Pro, M1 Max or even standard M1 or M2.


I had 4 Macs in the last 10 years. 2 stopped working without any accidents causing it (iMac with faulty GPU, overheated most likely, Mac mini just dead one morning). I sold one MacBook Air after using it for 3 hours (it was still healthy at the time, as one would expect). The current Mac mini has a kernel panic 2-3 times per week.
Due to my experience, I don't want to bet on a Mac running for 10 years and I sleep better with still having warranty.

This guy recommends skipping the Mac mini and getting a Mac Studio instead because for the software he uses, it saves him time.

A side aspect regarding price: The Mac Studio has more ports. That can save you 400 USD for a Hub.

So there you have it. I personally will be getting a new Mac mini.
For other people, the Mac Studio can make more sense.

I've been in the DAW world since the late nineties. When the multicore processors entered the stage, it was quite evident that it didn't do much for realtime DAW performance. For heavy number-crunching duties - more cores = better.

So, from early on we were always told that we should look at single-core perfomance when judging CPUs for realtime audio performance.

Geekbench Mac Benchmark Chart

Notice the considerable jump from intel to M1, and the relatively small increase in power from M1 to M2.

That's why I'm not sad about being on my M1, and not having spent 2-4 times more on a M2 mac. It'll do me fine until the next generation of chips comes around; the 3nm M3!