After a report that Apple was planning to release a new Mac Studio, the company just unveiled it. Unlike its predecessors, Cupertino is betting on a Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra and M4 Max chips. Here’s everything you need to know about Apple’s best computer.
The new Mac Studio features Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, up to 512GB of unified memory, and up to 16TB of storage, a first for Apple Silicon Macs.
“The new Mac Studio is the most powerful Mac we’ve ever made,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. “A complete game-changer for pros around the world — powering both home and pro studios — Mac Studio sits in a class of its own, offering a staggering amount of performance in a compact, quiet design that fits beautifully on your desk. With this new Mac Studio, we’re delivering even more extreme performance with M4 Max and M3 Ultra, support for half a terabyte of unified memory, up to 16TB of superfast storage, and Thunderbolt 5 connectivity. Mac Studio truly is the ultimate pro desktop.”
Apple says the new Mac Studio with M4 Max is the “perfect choice for video editors, colorists, developers, engineers, photographers, creative pros, and other users who need to blaze through intensive workflows” thanks to its 16-core CPU, an up to 40-core GPU, and over half a terabyte per second of unified memory bandwidth.
On the other hand, the M3 Ultra pushes demanding workflows as it’s nearly 2x faster performance than the M4 Max in workloads that take advantage of high CPU and GPU core counts. Apple says Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is up to 2.6x faster than Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and up to 6.4x faster than the 16-core Intel Xeon W-based Mac Pro.
With the new M3 Ultra, Mac Studio features an up to 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores, 50 percent more than any previous Ultra chip. It also offers an up to 80-core GPU, a powerful 32-core Neural Engine for on-device AI and machine learning (ML), and a high-bandwidth memory architecture that delivers over 800GB/s of unified memory bandwidth.
Mac Studio starts at $1,999 (U.S.) and $1,799 (U.S.) for education. Customers can pre-order it today and it will begin arriving to customers March 12.
