The Apple Mac Studio has always packed a ton of power into a very diminutive block of what feels a lot like solid aluminum. It’s designed to look like it’s floating in air, and the majority of its ports are in the back and out of the way. There’s simply no other desktop machine that takes up so little space and, frankly, looks so great on your desk.
The new model maintains all the best characteristics that makes it one of the best desktops while dramatically increasing the power. The previous generation hadn’t yet received the faster GPU and Neural Engine performance, and that’s now on tap. It’s more expensive than ever, but if you need it, then it looks like it will deliver.
Release date and price
The new Mac Studio was announced on March 5, 2025, and will be available starting on March 12, 2025. That’s earlier than many predictions, and very soon after its announcement.
You can get into a Mac Studio for as little as $1,999. That includes an M4 Max chipset with 14 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores, 36GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. That’s a jump up from the previous generation, which had an M2 Max chipset with 12 CPU cores and 30 GPU cores, and 32GB of RAM. You can upgrade to a faster M4 Max chipset with 16 CPU cores and 40 CPU cores for an additional $300, which also includes an upgrade to 48GB. The faster chipset also unlock 64GB ($200) and 128GB ($1,000) options. Storage with this chipset can go up to a whopping 8TB, which adds $2,400 to the price. That puts the M4 Max model high-end at $5,899.
Power users can now select the new M3 Ultra chipset, with a base configuration powered by 28 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores, with a Neural Engine that doubles the Neural Engine cores to 32. That comes with 96GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for $3,999. The maximum ram with that chipset is 256GB ($1,600), there’s also a 16TB storage option ($4,600). Max out that model and you’ll spend $8,599.
The monster Mac Studio uses an M3 Ultra with 32 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores, and also starts with 96GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, priced at a staggering $5,499. This model can accept up to a remarkable 512GB of RAM ($4,000) and 16GB of storage. Full configured, it comes in at a staggering $14,099.
New Mac Studio design
The Mac Studio’s design hasn’t changed, and that’s okay. It remains a mini floating monolith that’s just 7.7 inches wide and 3.7 inches tall, and it weighs a very dense 6.1 (M4 Max) or 8.0 pounds (M3 Ultra). It’s the same silver color with a fan intake that props it up so that it looks like its floating in mid-air, with two Thunderbolt ports and a full-size SD card reader on front and the rest of the ports hidden away on the back. In our review, we called it a “floating block of pure industrial design,” and that hasn’t changed.
One of the more impressive features of the Mac Studio that also hasn’t changed is the cooling system. In our review, we noted that no matter how hard the Mac Studio was working, it remains almost completely silent. We’re looking forward to seeing if the new Mac Studio, which packs in even more performance, will be as amazingly quiet.
New Mac Studio power
The biggest news is the upgrade in power. The previous generation was built around the M2 Max and M2 Ultra chipsets, the latter being essentially two M2 Max chips fused together. It was an exceedingly fast little desktop, holding its place as the fastest Mac you can buy (even rivaling the more expandable Mac Pro) until the M4 Max chipset arrived. The previous model’s biggest weaknesses were an older Neural Engine that wasn’t nearly as powerful as modern versions, and the GPU cores lacked the enhancements brought by the M3 chipset.
The M4 Max is a massive step up over the M2 Max. We’re in the process of benchmarking it right now, and the bottom line is that in the MacBook Pro 16, the 16-core CPU/32-core GPU M4 Max makes for the fasted laptop we’ve tested. In fact, in the Pugetbench Premiere Pro benchmark, the MacBook Pro 16 M4 Max is the second-fasted machine we’ve tested, with only the Corsair One 500i desktop with a desktop-class Core i9 CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU beating it.
The M4 Max comes in two versions, with 14 or 16 CPU cores and 32 or 40 GPU cores. The Neural Engine is the same 16-core version that powers all M4 chipsets. It has all of the GPU enhancements that arrived with the M3, including hardware ray tracing support, mesh shading, and the Dynamic Caching that legitimately speeds up GPU utilization by optimizing memory. That makes the M4 Max a lot more capable for gaming, and overall, the new Mac Studio base model will be a phenomenally fast machine.
The M3 Ultra uses Apple’s UltraFusion architecture to link two M3 Max chipsets together. That’s a change from the M2 Ultra that maintained all the speed of the M2 Max, only basically doubled. The M3 Max is also a fast chipset, but the M4 Max is around 25% faster in single-core and multi-core performance. Thus, the M3 Ultra won’t provide double the performance of the M4 Max, although it’s available in two versions with either 28 or 32 CPU cores and 64 or 80 GPU cores. Notably, the Neural Engine now sports 32 cores, meaning it will provide twice the performance for optimization AI tasks as more arrive. That would include running AI models on-device.
Another advantage of the M3 Ultra over the M4 Max is access to 256GB and 512GB memory options. That either twice or four times the 128GB limit of the M4 Max model, which will help the M3 Ultra churn through demanding tasks a lot more quickly even if the chipset itself isn’t literally twice as fast. You can also configure twice the storage, at 16TB versus 8TB.
We’ll wait for our review to characterize the Mac Studio’s performance. Apple claims 2.6x the performance of the M1 Ultra and 2x the performance of the M2 Ultra. If that pans out, the Mac Studio will be the fastest PC we’ve tested for a variety of productivity and creativity tasks. Gaming performance is more of a question, but the MacBook Pro 16 M4 Max is looking like a solid gaming machine — as far as Mac gaming goes, that is.
New Mac Studio ports
The ports remain the same, for the most part, with either two USB-C (M4 Max) or two Thunderbolt (M3 Ultra) ports on front, along with a full-size SD card reader. There are four Thunderbolt ports, two USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a 10Gb Ethernet port around back, where you’ll also find the 3.5mm audio jack and the power button.
The biggest upgrade is the switch to Thunderbolt 5, which in the Mac Studio incorporates a custom-designed controller directly on-chip. Speed has been increased from 40 Gb/s to 120 Gb/s, providing tremendous speed for accessing external storage and docks.
New Mac Studio display support
External display support remains almost the same at five monitors, albeit with better performance with the M3 Ultra. The M4 Max supports four displays with 6K resolution at 60Hz via Thunderbolt 5 and another 4K display at 144Hz (up from 60Hz) via HDMI. Or, you can connect two displays at 6K and 60Hz and one 8K at 60Hz or 4K at 240Hz via HDMI.
With the M3 Ultra, you can connection up to eight displays at 4K and 144Hz or 6K at 60Hz. Or, you can connect four displays at up to 8K at 60Hz or 4K at up to 240Hz. That’s a significant upgrade over the M2 Ultra model and provides unparalleled external display support, especially in such a small machine.
Oddly, wireless connectivity remains a step behind at Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Most new machines come with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.
Same Mac Studio design, brand new performance
To summarize, everything that was great about the previous generation Mac Studio remains just as great today. It’s tiny, attractive, and packs in a ton of power with the ability to connect a remarkable number of external displays and accessories.
Now, everything is just faster. The base model with the M4 Max will certainly be fast enough for the majority of power users, but the M3 Ultra version — while not twice as fast on paper — will ramp things up for professionals who need to shave every second off of demanding processes.
