Apple (AAPL) is giving its powerful and compact Mac Studio desktop even more horsepower via its M4 Max and M3 Ultra processors. The enhanced Mac Studios are exceptionally capable systems and include more unified memory and support Thunderbolt 5 connectivity for faster data transfer speeds.
The Mac Studio is designed for 3D artists, AI developers and researchers, and musicians, meaning it’s not going to sell at the kind of volume you’d see from Apple’s MacBook Air or its MacBook Pro, but then these are meant for professionals rather than your average consumer.
Available March 12, the Mac Studio with Apple’s M4 Max starts at $1,999, while the M3 Ultra powered Studio starts at $3,999. It might sound confusing, but the M3 Ultra is the more powerful of the two chips, combining two M3 Max chips into a single package with 184 billion transistors.
The processor gets a staggering 32-core CPU and up to an 80-core GPU. It also includes a 32-core Neural Engine to power onboard AI apps. What’s more, the M3 Ultra comes with 96GB of memory, with the option to upgrade to a wild 512GB. You can also get up to 16TB of storage. To put that into perspective, 1TB is 1,000GB.
During a demonstration, an M3 Ultra-equipped Studio ran a 3D development tool on top of a 470 billion parameter LLM, which wrote code to insert 1,000 assets into the 3D scene. On top of that, the resource-intensive game “Cyberpunk 2077” was running in the background. At no point did it appear as though there was any slowdown, and the system’s fans barely registered a sound.
Overall, the M3 Ultra is some 2 times faster than the M4 Max. That’s not to say the M4 Max is a slouch. On the contrary, the chip gets a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, and 36GB of memory, which you can upgrade to 128GB. That makes the Mac Studio with the M4 Max 3.5 times faster than the Mac Studio with an M1 Max.
During a demonstration of the chip’s power, the M4 Max-equipped Mac Studio rendered video effects easily and without delay.
Like Apple’s new MacBook Air, which the company also debuted Wednesday, the Mac Studio comes with Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker’s generative AI platform. That includes text editing and summarization tools, as well as photo-editing capabilities.
It’s important to note that because the Mac Studio is a desktop rather than an all-in-one like Apple’s iMac, you’ll need to pick up a separate monitor.
The Mac Studio, while powerful, is unlikely to drive major revenue growth for Apple’s Mac segment. Most consumers want lightweight laptops rather than desktops. Still, it will almost certainly benefit the Mac business, which outperformed the company’s iPhone, iPad, and Wearables segments in terms of year-over-year growth in 2024.
