Was the Mac mini too mini for you? Apple’s latest product (that most certainly isn’t “air,” as CEO Tim Cook suggested on Monday) is a Mac Studio now supporting the company’s most advanced chip architecture yet. Buyers have a choice of not one but two versions of the Studio, with either a M3 Ultra or a M4 Max.
Apple’s last big workstation update was in 2022, and the new Studio takes up the same footprint as the previous rendition. The big news is the M3 Ultra chip, which Apple claims is the most powerful version of its ARM-based silicon yet. Apple says M3 Ultra offers 2.6 times the performance of the same Mac Studio with the older M1 Ultra chip. Notably, the tech giant didn’t offer comparisons to the M2 Max or M2 Ultra chips from 2022. Either way, at the top end, the M3 Ultra is a 32-core CPU with a whopping 24 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. The other big news is its 80-core GPU for faster rendering performance. The system includes a 32-core neural processor made for AI tasks.
© Image: AppleThe M4 Max is a known entity, since it first arrived with the MacBook Pro in 2024. It’s a 16-core CPU (10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores) alongside a 32-core GPU. The 32-core GPU supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing that first came with M3, but it houses a smaller 16-core neural engine. The smaller Mac mini only supported up to the M4 Pro, so this is a jump in both size, price, and performance compared to last year’s desktop Mac product.
If you opt for the M3 Ultra, you’ll need to spend at least $4,000. That version starts with 96 GB of RAM and 1 TB storage. The version with M4 Max starts at $2,000 and comes with just 36 GB of RAM and a measly 512 GB of SSD storage. If you wanted all the trimmings, with the M3 Ultra chip, 16 TB of SSD storage, and 512 GB of memory, the Mac Studio would set you back $14,100. The system is available for preorder today, and it’s set to ship March 12.
Whether you opt for the more or less expensive Mac Studio, you will still get a system with four Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports along with two USB-A, a HDMI port, and a 10 GB ethernet port, alongside a handy headphone jack. That’s compared to the Mac mini, which didn’t include any USB-A ports.
This story is developing, and we will be updating this page with more information
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