Workstation-needing, AI LLM-loving, and content-creating Mac users can now choose between a meatier M4 Max edition of the Mac Studio, or a Mac Pro-beating M3 Ultra. Our wallet is trembling.
Laptops may well dominate the working world, but if you rely on heavy apps that are harder on memory and chip architecture, you probably sit at your desk staring at a desktop, or at least the screen sitting next to one.
Yes, desktops still exist, but for many of us, they’re not as necessary.
Desktops are now the domain of specific types of users, usually the sort that have heavier demands at work or for special projects.
Big content creation needs such as filmmaking and video editing, large programs that need more grunt to compile, 3D work and CAD for architecture, music making with heaps upon heaps of sound banks, and these days, compiling gigantic large-language models for the ever-growing world of artificial intelligence.
If you need a desktop these days, there’s probably a good reason why: laptops just won’t cut it. Even with the high-end architecture found in many pro-grade workstation laptops, there are some reasons to consider a desktop over a laptop.
It’s much the same in PCs, too: gaming desktops tend to offer more grunt than their laptop counterparts, giving folks there a reason to consider a bigger machine at their desks, too.
Back over in Mac world, Apple is this week offering up something new for those content-creating, AI-making, sound-engineering, and app- and game-making developers who need more grunt than even the MacBook Pro with M4 Pro or M4 Max can offer, with a desktop designed to do more. And a new chip designed to do even more.
It’s been a couple years since we checked out the Mac Studio, and a couple years since Apple updated the thing, but now it’s happening: the Mac Studio is getting a bump, and what a bump it is.
Practically the company’s most powerful Mac yet, this year’s Mac Studio gets a choice of either the M4 Max or a new chip, the M3 Ultra, each of which is a little different and boasts support for as much as 512GB of RAM. Not storage, but RAM: half a terabyte of memory. Yikes.
For the M4 Max option, there’s up to 16-cores of CPU power and up to 40-cores of GPU, boasting more performance than the M1 Max Mac Studio from a few years ago, up to 3.5 times faster in total. The M4 Max Mac Studio starts at 36GB RAM and includes two ProRes accelerators, meaning if you’re a video editor, you can work with a little more.
Priced from $3499 depending on the model you get, the only other major change here is the support for Thunderbolt 5, though the USB-C port stays the same, offering support for up to five displays at once for this system.
There’s also the option for a more meaty and more costly Mac Studio thanks to a new chip: the M3 Ultra, and this is where Apple is likely getting its most powerful Mac ever vibe.
Kind of like the superhero edition of a processor, it takes two M3 Max chips and links them together over 10,000 connections, providing a total of 184 billion transistors working together for a staggering new piece of hardware. The chip includes up to 32-cores of CPU power and up to 80-cores of graphics power, depending on how much you spend. It all starts with a minimum of 96GB RAM, six times the starting RAM of the MacBook Air.
In general, there’s M3 Ultra is up to twice the performance of the M2 Ultra, and includes twice the AI processing capacity of Apple’s other chips, boasting a 32-core Neural Engine. In short, if you’re building AI and LLMs, this is probably a chip to consider, and manages a grand total of eight displays at once.
By comparison, the starting price of the M3 Ultra Mac Studio is double that of the M4 Max edition. The chip is different, sure, but so is the starting memory and storage.
Starting at $6999, the 28-core CPU and 60-core GPU M3 Ultra Mac Studio will come with 96GB RAM and 1TB SSD.
Depending on how deep your wallet is, you can definitely push it. At its biggest and most costly extremes, the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with a 32-core CPU, 80-core GPU, 512GB RAM, and 16TB SSD will cost $22,149 when it launches shortly. That’s a sizeable computer we doubt many will end up going for.
In general, though, the Mac Studio has not been a generalist’s computer, and whether spending $3K or in excess of twenty-two thousand, it will still largely stay a machine for professionals who need the guts it offers.
But if that’s you, or if your work needs that grunt, you’ll find this new generation of Mac in stores from March 12, where it’ll probably stay the most powerful Mac, at least until an M4 Ultra arrives on a revamped Mac Pro desktop either this year at WWDC or sometime next year.
