Apple Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) first look: a weekend with an $8,000 powerhouse

Apple’s new top tier Mac Studio, powered by the M3 Ultra chip, contains so much computing horsepower that it’s never going to be on the radar of most tech enthusiasts — let alone your average consumer. It starts at $3,999, but if you upgrade every spec to the best on offer (including an astonishing 512GB of unified memory), you land at a mind-boggling $14,099.

As the price makes clear, the Mac Studio is not a computer for the everyman. It’s a workstation for those who already have an idea of just how it’ll make their lives easier and more productive. If that’s you, the investment could pay for itself in relatively short order with faster exports and more completed projects. Time is money, after all. And this thing does scream. As just one example, it’s the first Mac to break the one minute barrier on our long-running 4K export test in Premiere Pro.

Even so, I’d steer the vast majority of people shopping for a desktop Mac to the M4 Mac Mini, and if you need some extra wallop, the M4 Pro version of that machine has never broken a sweat during my photography workflows. Videographers and those doing resource-intensive 3D work could be better served with the M4 Max edition of the new Studio; check out our MacBook Pro review for a sense of that chip’s blistering performance. It also comes at a far more conventional $1,999 entry price.

But even if I’m not the target market for the “Ultra” Studio, I still really wanted to get my hands on one after Apple introduced it last week alongside a new MacBook Air and faster iPad Air. Who wouldn’t want to kick the tires on a computer like this? Apple sent me a Mac Studio that, as configured, sells for $8,099. It’s the higher-spec M3 Ultra with a 32-core CPU and 80-core GPU; you get a 32-core neural engine regardless. It’s also equipped with 4TB of storage and 256GB of unified memory — half the maximum amount I mentioned earlier.

Those are impressive specs, but it’s important to note that there are objective benefits to choosing the M4 Max Mac Studio model. It outpaces the M3 Ultra in single-core performance, which is the most critical element in making most everyday apps feel “fast.” The day-to-day user experience is super responsive in both cases, which has been true of all recent Apple Silicon products. You don’t have to spend anywhere close to this much money for a dependable, speedy Mac.

Aside from substantial multi-core gains, stepping up to the Ultra tier nets you some I/O advantages as well. The two frontside ports offer Thunderbolt 5 connectivity and, theoretically, data transfer speeds of up to 120Gb/s on the M3 Ultra Studio. If you opt for the Max, you just get a pair of regular 10Gb/s USB 3 ports up front. The rear of the Studio includes four Thunderbolt 5 ports no matter which chip you choose, so it’s mainly a question of whether you require peak performance out of every available port. If your work calls for an abundance of external displays, it’s also worth knowing that the Ultra Studio supports up to eight displays, whereas the M4 Max model tops out at five.

Around back you’ll also find two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, 10-gigabit ethernet, and a 3.5mm audio jack. On the Mac Mini, the 3.5mm jack is up front, which is more convenient for headphones, but less so if you’re plugging in full-time speakers that aren’t going anywhere. Like the MacBook Pro, the Studio features a UHS-II SDXC card reader, which is something I constantly miss on the Mini. If money were no object, would I upgrade for an SD card slot? It’s not out of the question.

There remains a noticeable weight difference between the M4 Max (6.1 pounds) and M3 Ultra Studio (8 pounds); the latter tacks on nearly two extra pounds since it has a larger cooling module inside, which is made from copper compared to the Max’s aluminum heatsink.

Like its predecessors, the 2025 Mac Studio delivers breakneck performance while running “shockingly quiet,” as my former colleague Monica Chin wrote two years ago. That remains just as true today as it was then. In a few days of testing, this thing has laughed at my Lightroom edits, made quick work of Adobe’s AI noise reduction and other effects, and I’ve never so much as heard any fan noise.

The M3 Ultra chip is overkill for many. If you need this level of power, you already know exactly how you’ll get the most from it. It’s for visual effects artists and animators. It’s for professionals doing ambitious audio and video production work. Are you regularly crunching big medical datasets? Maybe you can use all those cores and memory to their fullest potential. And as AI development continues to flourish, the kitted out configurations with 256GB or 512GB of memory could prove appealing to anyone interested in running sophisticated LLM models locally on their machine.

I’ve only had our Mac Studio review unit for a few days, so for now I’m providing the usual benchmarks and setting it up for some of these LLM test cases to gauge what it’s capable of. In the weeks ahead, I’ll also be looking to friends and experts in other fields that can fully appreciate the Studio’s capabilities to see what they think of its performance. If you’ve got ideas or tests you’d like to see us run through, feel free to share them in the comments.

Photography by Chris Welch / The Verge
_{Shot with the Nikon Z6III}