Sounds to me, as @shteeve just confirmed, that it’s you who have no idea what you’re talking about. 
Read up on what Thunderbolt is.
shteeve just wrote about a particular and quite confusing case. For example, none of these projects use denoising or animation.
It’s not just that I don’t like Windows. I have used PC. Sometimes in parallel with a Mac, and sometimes as my main machine. If someone put a gun to my head, I could do everything I do in Linux. Yes I prefer macOS, but the point is also that for me Mac and Mac programs are more efficient and comfortable. On top of that, over time I’ve found that when it comes to Blender, my clients prefer to pay for Eevee projects rather than Cycles. Of course they have no idea what tools I use. They just prefer to pay less for things that are ‘good enough’. And for Eevee, a Mac is just as good or better than a PC. So it comes out that I’m not at all less pragmatic than my “x86 pragmatic competitors”.
Please keep the conversation civil and avoid personal attacks 
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Sorry, I really try, but sometimes it is extremely difficult. I’m shutting up now.
I do that like that, my PC and Mac use my cloud server for projects, i can save on Mac and open on PC and start rendering there. Theoretical that would be possible via render server too. Only Blender made it so easy, not being depend on licenses and having render times of a few minutes on high res images using GPU rendering along a clever denoiser. I reduced my render costs with Blender, even on animation by a quarter compare to Vray.
I did the same for the last two years.
But each time I am on Windows … I think … I don’t want to be here …
So still prefer to do 99% of my daily work on my M1 16 GB Mini.
Which works still really well if Projects are reasonably sized.
And it got much better with Apps getting just native ARMsupport
like Vectorworks. Bricscad still runs reasonably on Rosetta.
It is just final rendering that lags.
I think I would be much calmer waiting for something better if I had only
just bought a full specced M1 Pro Studio after one year of M1 pure Mini.
Would have been twice the price but twice the speed an memory capability.
But of course I wait and expect something noticeably faster,
if I can afford it in any way …
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A couple of things:
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I also have an external PC set up just for rendering, and every time it’s a bit of a PITA to say the least since I need to change all of my directories. For instance I use several add-ons which require Cache folders, so all those need to be re-wired on the PC. Same for HDRI files if I want to keep things external. Not saying it’s impossible, but it does come with its own set of challenges (and pink texture maps!).
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Vray might be slower than Cycles…but it also looks a hell of a lot better all things being equal. I hope with the new Principled 2.0 shader that things will improve, but if I have any major gripes with Blender it would be that it’s much harder to get photorealistic results with Cycles than just about any other render engine out there (with the exception of Redshift…Redshift still sucks and I hate Maxon with a passion).
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Yes, the Mac Studio is great. You can do everything with it. After the Amiga, I’ve been working with the Mac and macOS for 28 years now. And still many do not understand why, especially complete Windows departments where I work.
As soon as I try to get the Mac in there, I’m almost out of the company. 
. With macOS I am still 10 times faster at the desired result. Unfortunately in big companies nobody cares about that …
But Apple hasn’t done much for macOS lately either. I thought they didn’t feel like it anymore. That’s why I was super happy when suddenly Apple supported the Blender Foundation. A miracle!
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- Vray…
The principal shader is not physical correct, but V-Ray has huge sampling problems. The images are always noisy and you have a lot flickering in animations.
I solved both problems, by building my own shader groups, adding the stuff needed. Thats was not easy and a learning process of a half year. But yes principal v2 will make it easier and better.
I had to denoise V-Ray animation an lot, so I do the same with Blender and can’t say its more. Blenders passes are much cleaner then V-Ray, so I actually have less problems.
All I can say, as an artist you always have to manipulate shading and lighting. The best thing to improve yourself here is control and performance. Modo had a fast render, but became so buggy that I switched to V-Ray, which always was slower and took a lot creativity away. With V-Ray I might lost realism, but I got back my artist input and that improved my work a lot.
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Here’s some news:
The key takeaway from the article is this sentence: “The higher-end model with the M2 Extreme chip would have been available with up to a 48-core CPU and up to a 152-core GPU, according to Gurman, but he believes that this configuration was scrapped due to cost and manufacturing complexities.”
Manufacturing complexities.
Keeping in mind that an 152-core GPU still wouldn’t be able to rival even a lower end RTX30xx when it comes to rendering, that is IMHO a substantial issue for Apple.
I fear that they have really painted themselves into a corner with their GPU strategy.
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I think this is something we have to get used to …
Meanwhile here are 2 more articles.
(iMac Pro end of 2023 at the earliest)
I am sure I could find a decent Mac Pro configuration for my
purposes. Although Mac Pros may be far from being any PC killer.
But I fear I could not afford any Mac Pro 
This is really bad news, but I still have my RTX 2080
Two years ago around this time I was totally convinced that within less than a year I’d be repurposing my Hackintosh into a Windows machine, and be running off of whatever ARM Mac that Apple would be releasing next.
Now, at the edge of 2023, I’m feeling like my Hackintosh has been the best investment for my CG work I’ve ever had and I wonder if I should be doubling up on continuing to upgrade it, instead of saving up for some mythical Apple release that might never arrive?
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Pity I never tried a Hackintosh.
AFAIK, at the time I bought my physical Linux Test Station in
build-up phase V1.0, or better my first PC after 12 years again,
there were already Hackintosh options for AMD CPUs.
But I always thought this is only half a thing and not really Apple like
behavior. But at that time I was fascinated by Microsoft Surface
devices design and still thought, from my seldom Win10 on Parallels
experience, I could switch to Windows easily.
And maybe in the back of my mind also still hoped for Apple to finally
get the hardware curve soon.
OK, it took 4 years, but M1 also made me think the good times
start now again.
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Used a hackintosh 8 years ago, worked great, but thats not possible anymore with modern GPU.
Also used Surface Book, hardware is good, but Windows is not made for that.
Its amazing, that I nearly dropped all Apple gear over the post 10 years, except iPad and MacBook. No more iPod, AppleTV, MacMini Server, Apple router, MacPro, Apple Monitor, iPhone, etc.
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Here we go!!!
Compile version is available now and an 3.5 Alpha build available in a couple of weeks.
Developers seem excited for the community to start giving feedback.
From Jeroen-Bakker:
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- Via user preferences the GPU backend can be switched.
- By default OpenGL, changing require a restart of Blender. When Metal cannot be initialized, will fallback to OpenGL
- Still requires a note that metal is experimental.
At that time I would love to see some community involvement to test and celebrate the work that has been done by Apple engineers and the Viewport team.
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At this point, I have to truly wonder if Apple would be better off sticking with Intel for the upcoming Mac Pro? If they just updated it to the latest Intel offerings, and paired it with the AMD 7900 it would likely be a hit.
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yes they should just take an M2 Max or M2 Ultra give it pcie slots with an AMD card. That way they have to develop drivers for them on ARM and perhaps they will bring back eGPU support 
I use a mac mostly but pc for rendering. As such I always use relative paths and am only occasionally caught out by the odd missing texture. Decal machine is the only addon ive struggled with as it insists on full paths… it does have a fix operator but it really is irritating!
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