UPDATE: Mar. 5, 2025, 11:25 a.m. EST This story has been updated with additional spec details.
Apple surprise-announced a new Mac Studio featuring the M4 Max and all-new M3 Ultra chips in the middle of its "Air" week Wednesday. Set for release on March 12, the refreshed compact desktop is now available for preorder in the Apple Store starting at $1,999 for the M4 Max version and $3,999 for the M3 Ultra variant.
Billed as "the most powerful Mac ever" in Apple's press release, the new Mac Studio will supposedly deliver "a big boost in performance compared to the previous generation, and a massive leap for users coming from older Macs."
The M4 Max model has up to a 16-core CPU and up to a 40-core GPU, making it up to 3.5 times faster than the M1 Max-powered Mac Studio from late 2021 and up to 6.1 times faster than a 27-inch Intel iMac from 2020. Its 16-core Neural Engine is supposedly three times faster than its M1 Max counterpart. It comes with 32GB to 128GB of RAM and 512GB to 8TB of SSD storage, maxing out at $5,899, and it supports up to five displays. Apple recommends it for creative professionals, developers, and engineers with heavy workflows involving visuals and AI tasks.
The M3 Ultra model is geared toward users with workloads that are somehow even more demanding. With up to a 32-core CPU (including 24 performance cores), the most CPU cores Apple's even crammed into a Mac, it's up to twice as fast as the M4 Max version in certain tasks and up to 2.6 times faster than the M1 Ultra Mac Studio from 2022. That CPU is joined by up to an 80-core GPU, another record-setter, plus a 32-core Neural Engine for AI tasks and machine learning. It comes with 96GB to 512GB of RAM and 1TB to 16TB of storage, maxing out at an eye-watering $14,099. It supports up to eight 6K displays.
Both configurations' GPUs feature dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and a second-generation ray-tracing engine "for more seamless content creation and gaming," according to Apple.
On the outside, the new Mac Studio is the same silver box we've come to know, except it now has Thunderbolt 5 connectivity. There are four Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back of both configurations alongside two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, a 10Gb Ethernet port, and a headphone jack. Both models have an SDXC card slot on the front, which the M3 Ultra model pairs with two extra Thunderbolt 5 ports. The M4 Max model swaps them for two USB-C ports.
Topics Apple
