Personally if I was going to be procuring machines for adobe/nuke/other creative apps, I'd go with a second hand workstation from HP, and give it loads of ram and a new GPU.
it'd be the same price as a new macbook, with less single threaded performance, but much great GPU ram and number of threads.
When it comes to portability though, thats a different issue...
There are solutions, but they are not overly compelling from a cost perspective (yet)
For a g4dn.8xlarge (32 cpus, 128 gigs of ram) plus one GPU its $1000 a month (or $355 if you're only doing 12 hours a day 5 days a week, no over night renders source: https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator)
Thats still $4k a year.
seeing as you need a remove viewing solution too, so you need a machine to host the Keyboard Video and Mouse, its still not great.
Compared to a hp z640 with 48 threads(E5-2673 V3), 128 gigs of ram plus nvidia 3070 is about $2200 - $2900 (https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/hp-z840-tower-a-configure-...)
Where the cloud is useful is if you are hiring someone for a 3 month contract, or you need to render something fast, as 100 hours on one machine costs the same as 1 hour on a 100 machines.
It's clear that M1 is a winner from independent authorities like Anandtech.
This article should not be upvoted.
If by "likely not fully optimized yet" they mean "running under x86 emulation"
And yes... it looks far more like a native ad than an actual "test".
It also doesn't mention if it's running the beta ARM version of Photoshop, so you have to assume it's running in the x86 version in emulation.
They didn't even bother to compare it to the only desktop in the M1 lineup. Or using software which is built for the M1.
If we hold two hands behind their back, we can beat them in a fair fight!
