Apple just unveiled its latest Mac Studio desktop PC, promising improved performance Previous models Thanks to the long-awaited M3 Ultra, the company has by far the highest-performance processor. The new machine is primarily aimed at content creators, so on faster chips it offers the latest high-speed SSD storage, Thunderbolt 5 technology and updated neuroengines.
This is a new Mac Studio, and it’s a new Mac studio, as the last one was released at WWDC 2023 about two years ago. As before, you can think of it as a “Mac Mini Pro”, a bigger, more powerful version Apple’s budget desktop. Like the last two models, it comes in two configurations, with an M3 Ultra or M4 Max chip, and looks the same as the previous M2 model.
According to Apple, the M4 Max version is targeted at “video editors, colorists, developers, engineers, photographers and creative experts.” To do this, it has a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU, ranging from 36GB to 128GB of RAM, four Thunderbolt 5 ports, a 15 GB/s throughput (three times the speed of the model) and a unified memory bandwidth of over 500 GB/s. It also includes two USB-A ports (maximum 5GB/s), an HDMI port, 10GB Ethernet and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
All of this makes it 3.5 times faster than the original Mac Studio M1 Max. Apple notes that using the M4 Max chip, the latest Mac Studio is the first in Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, allowing features such as hardware-accelerated mesh rendering and a second-generation ray tracing engine to enhance content creation and gaming. For AI processing, it offers three times faster than the M1 Max version.
The M3 Ultra Model greatly improves ANTE with a 32-core CPU and 24 performance cores, “50% higher than any previous super chip and the most CPU cores ever seen in Mac.” Meanwhile, the GPU packs up to 80 cores, another record from Apple Silicon, and a 32-core neural engine for device AI and machine learning. It also supports from 96GB to a record 512GB unified memory, as well as up to 16TB of SSD storage.
You might be wondering why every other Mac (including the brand new MacBook Air) had some sort of M4 processor when Apple just released the M3 Ultra Chip. The answer is that designing and building Ultra processors is obviously not easy, as they effectively masturbate two chips together using Apple’s “Ultrafusion” bridge technology. Despite the lack of the name “M4”, the M3 Ultra is still twice as fast as the best M4 Max processor under taxed workloads, while the MAC Ultra M1 is 2.5 times faster.
Considering its power, the Mac Studio with the M4 Max chip starts at a reasonable price of $1,999, with 32GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra is another story, though, doubles it to a $3,999 base with 96GB of unified memory (once-time 64GB) and 1TB of storage. Now, orders are open and shipping settings will begin on March 12.
