Apple’s 2025 Mac Studio reviewed: a compact powerhouse

The design hasn’t changed, but the chip sure has. In the 2025 Mac Studio, there’s power to spare for those who need it.

Laptops may well dominate the world of computers, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs one. Some people work on their desk, almost chained to it, while others require more power than even the best portable can provide.

If either of those sounds like you, there’s a good chance you fit into one of the niches connected to a class of computer known as a “workstation”.

Not quite your everyday standard laptop, a workstation is built for more intensive tasks. It’s the sort of computer used for heavy data analysis, for 3D design and rendering, for sound engineering, and might even be used for development. The heavier the need, the more likely you’re going to end up in the “workstation” category, and it’s an area Apple has been working in for ages.

The Mac Pro desktop has more or less been Apple’s answer to the workstation for ages, but all of that changed back in 2022 when the maker of the Mac unveiled the Mac Studio. Somewhere between a desktop and the Mac Mini, this un-upgradeable desktop brought Mac Pro power to a smaller size, lowering the price alongside.

Three years on, we’re at version three, and Apple is giving the hardware an even bigger boost with a choice of either the M4 Max or the even bigger M3 Ultra. Is it the absolute best workhorse you can find?

Design

More of a spec upgrade than anything else, the 2025 Mac Studio looks the spitting image of what it looked like three years ago upon release.

Don’t expect any design changes, because the 2025 edition is the same double-size Mac Mini from way back before the Mini’s most recent revamp where it was, you know, miniature.

Rather, this is an aluminium unibody box with two ports on the front and an SD card reader, and several on the back, plus a large exhaust port for all the hardware inside.

It’s sleek, it’s shiny, and unlike the four colours of the MacBook Air range, it only comes in one: silver, with a black Apple on top.

Basically a compact and backpack-friendly edition of the Mac Pro, not to mention one that has been upgraded, the Mac Studio is a compact powerhouse, which is basically the point.

Features

Inside this compact powerhouse, you’re really paying attention to the chip, because that’s what has changed hands. Not really much else, except for say the ports, which have seen a slight upgrade, as well.

You have a choice of two major models, each with variations based on how many CPU and GPU cores they have, opting for either the M4 Max or the M3 Ultra. The M4 Max acts like a single chip, while the M3 Ultra acts like two connected chips, and even offers support for both more memory and more memory bandwidth.

On the M4 Max, you can configure up to a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, and up to 128GB RAM, while the M3 Ultra supports up to a 32-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and up to 512GB RAM.

Our review model is definitely on the heftier side, covering the 32-core CPU, 80-core GPU, and with 256GB RAM, an amount equalling that of the base storage on the MacBook Air.

As for storage, there’s a minimum of 512GB in the Mac Studio, but you can flex that to 16TB of solid-state storage if you so choose.

Unlike most computers, you’ll find plenty of ports to choose from in this Mac.

The front sees two USB-C ports with support for Thunderbolt 5 on the M3 Ultra, plus an SDXC card slot. Meanwhile the back shows four Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports regardless of the model you go for, a 10Gb ethernet port, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port for the display, and a 3.5mm headset jack, plus the power cable and power button.

Wireless connections are covered in a similar way to the MacBook Pro models, with 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

There’s also a built-in speaker, all encased in a computer measuring 19.7cm by 19.7cm — it’s a softened square — at 9.5cm thick and weighing around the 3.64kg mark. It’s a desktop and you’re not moving it, so that probably won’t matter.

In-use

Like the Mac Mini, the Mac Studio is very much a BYO sort of computer in that you’ll need to bring your own keyboard, bring your own mouse, and also bring your own monitor.

You don’t need to bring an Apple-made screen — we plugged the Mac Studio into a Dell ultra-wide over HDMI and all was fine — but it would probably match the design aesthetics of the Studio Display better if you have one of those, too.

However, it’s definitely much easier to set the Mac Studio with an Apple keyboard and mouse, so that’s what we used with our M3 Ultra Mac Studio review unit.

From there, it’s just macOS 15.3 out of the box, and using the Mac for what you need it for.

Performance

And what you need it for will vary dramatically, truth be told. There is so much grunt in this generation of Mac Studio, it’s pretty much declaring itself as the Mac for those who need power, as opposed to a computer for everyone.

If you need a Mac for everyone, consider the M4 MacBook Air. If you need a Mac with a little more power, you’ll want to look at the MacBook Pro with M4 Pro.

But if you need a Mac with immense power, the M3 Ultra Mac Studio could be where you need to be.

An aside: we’ve not yet tested the M4 Max edition of the Mac Studio, and it could perform as well. We really don’t know. Going on benchmarks alone, however, this thing is nuts. It is insanely powerful, putting to shame every other Mac we’ve ever had in for review.

The performance being that much better should really come as no surprise. There are billions of transistors linking two M3 Max chips together in the M3 Ultra, making it just that much more amazing.

We’re half expecting an M4 Ultra to do the same with the M4 Max later in the year, likely for a new version of the Mac Pro. If or when that eventually happens, the M4 Ultra will be even more of a beast than this M3 variation on the theme.

But right now… phwwoooarr, this is insane. The power levels are off the charts, and it puts every Windows PC we’ve ever reviewed to shame, as well.

In many ways, Apple has created the Mac equivalent of something Aladdin‘s Genie says when you first meet him: “phenomenal cosmic powers, itty bitty living space”. And just like the Genie, it’s ready to go about granting wishes by delivering on capabilities.

Even pushing the 2025 edition of the Apple Mac Studio against its predecessors, there’s a clear note to just how much of a bump the M3 Ultra chip is against what we’ve previously found.

So how do we test this bump?

By going beyond the synthetic benchmarks and literally putting the 2025 Mac Studio through its paces, covering sound engineering in Logic Pro, rendering a 3D world with Unreal Engine, compiling an app with Xcode, and building some AI projects and compiling a large language model, as well.

Sound production

You may have heard Pickr used to have an award-winning podcast that was edited in Logic Pro. However, that wasn’t all we used Logic Pro for, and voice editing would hardly push a Mac Studio. And it didn’t; we tried.

We also used Logic Pro to build out the music for that podcast, and also for mixing the AI-engineered music in some recent articles, so we definitely have some projects we can use to test out sound production.

The memory amount and chip architecture in our M3 Ultra Mac Studio review unit are clearly going to help set us up for success: there’s simply no way we’re going to be able to push Logic Pro to its very maximums in the Mac Studio, but we tried anyway.

We loaded our Logic Pro mixes and threw in lots of tracks, attempting to flex the hardware in a way to make the hardware struggle.

It didn’t. So we shifted into something a little more intensive.

3D and game building

Instead, we grabbed the real-world system of Unreal Engine, and a world we’ve been working on for some time: a demo of walking around on Mars.

There’s dust and stone and polygons and such, and it’s usually a decent test all the same, showing that a solid 60 frames per second is easily achievable on our makeshift Mars map.

While Unreal Engine could be improved to make use of Metal and macOS better — and stop us from needing to install the Rosetta layer that interprets apps made for the Intel-based processors — there’s no sweat here. This thing just performs.

Software development

So we give it another test: software development, or rather, compile time.

Loading up the app this journalist built, Simplsaver, we’re testing how long it takes to go from code to compiled, comparing the current build between an M4 Pro MacBook Pro and the M3 Ultra Mac Studio.

A good ten seconds separates the two, giving the M3 Ultra a little bit of an edge over the M4 Pro. It’s not a staggering difference, though, and not enough to necessarily make the Mac Studio a juggernaut by comparison.

AI models and LLM use

Apple’s other focus for the Mac Studio could be AI and large-language models, simply because there is so much power here, so it may as well go to good use.

Interestingly this is the one area that didn’t feel quite as much as the heavy hitter as it should, though it could possibly have been because of where we were working.

Much of our attempts to drive training an LLM here came from Python, and while Python is capable, the MLX instructions used with Apple Silicon aren’t as widely supported as say Nvidia’s use of CUDA. That could be because MLX is still fairly new, while CUDA has been around for a while, or it could be that our coding skills aren’t quite where they need to be to take advantage of the Apple Silicon we have access to in the best way possible.

Accessing those MLX instructions to train a model, however, we did find speeds were three to four times more than what was noted in an M1 Max session, a guide we used when training our own model for use in a local environment.

It’s not thoroughly surprising when you realise what the M3 Ultra powering the 2025 Mac Studio is: two M3 Max chips linked up and designed to work together. When you compare an M3 Max against the M3 Ultra, it really lines up.

Perhaps the most positive outcome was that when the instructions and code is finally there, this beast of a system will be ready, too. It’s just that far out with raw performance. No complaints here.

Value

Bringing all this together isn’t exactly inexpensive, and there’s a pretty logical reason why: there is a lot here.

You don’t typically look for an obvious “value” when looking at a workstation, either: the CPU and graphics chip combination is usually focused on the high-end, and the hardware tends to cost that little bit more. Value-driven workstations typically sit in the category of “build it yourself”, and even then aren’t terribly economical.

So if you’re looking at the Mac Studio with an eye for value, you might just want to temper expectations.

Where Apple nails the value argument, however, is for folks who want the performance of a Mac Book Pro with high-end M4 hardware, but don’t need to go anywhere. That’s essentially what the Mac Studio caters for best: a system that can always run, always work, always process video and data and so on and so on, and always do it because unlike a laptop, it doesn’t need to be collapsed. Ever.

The Mac Studio is a total workhorse. In an era where desktops largely don’t exist, the Mac Studio is a juggernaut of power you can leave running.

What needs work?

So what could be better? Probably the media capabilities, which hardly seem as high end as everything else.

We get it: Apple is never going to be able to stuff four or six speakers into this compact powerhouse of a desktop in the way it can with a MacBook Air or Pro. Fine. But it could do a lot better than the simple speaker at the back of the device, and instead offer side speakers to at least try to deliver stereo, or even front speakers.

Much like the previous Mac Studio models, the speakers are the low point, as is the lack of a 3.5mm headset jack on the front.

The omission of a front headset jack is a strange omission, and one that feels like Apple is trying to push owners toward a pair of Apple headphones, such as the AirPods Max or even the smaller AirPods Pro.

The problem is wired sound is often faster and more reliable, with zero latency and lag. The back 3.5mm port means your headphone cable is always that little bit shorter, and not as easy to plug directly in.

If you have an external sound card, this won’t both you. A separate sound box operating through USB will give you the headphone port you need, or at the very least, a mixing desk panel you can plug into. But a front-facing headphone jack would still make more sense, as would better speakers overall.

Everything else is premium, but not the speaker or headphone jack. It’s the part of the Mac Studio Apple doesn’t seem to be thinking of, and we’re not entirely sure why.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

The thing is a meh speaker and a silly headphone jack position isn’t enough to dampen the enthusiasm for the Mac Studio. It is such a beast, it beggars belief.

It’s the computer you won’t want to give back, especially if you need it.

While the Mac Studio is clearly not for everyone, the people who know they need it will be entranced with what’s on offer: power and performance, and so much of that to go around.

The Mac Studio is a total compact powerhouse. It’s not a Mac for everyone, but rather those who know they need it. Recommended.