Mac Studio
The Mac Studio is Apple's most powerful custom silicon-based Mac, offering extreme performance and a wide range of ports in a modular, desktop form factor. The Mac Studio starts at $1,999 and was released alongside the $1,599 Studio Display.
The Mac Studio is ideal for content creators of any level. But here’s the thing: the Mac Studio’s performance over the M1 in the Mac mini or 24-inch iMac isn’t just a marginal boost like we used to see with Intel-based Macs—it’s a serious speed improvement. Add to that an attractive mix of features, and you’ll find in Mac Studio a computer that is attractive to any power user, regardless of the kind of work they do. It’s worth the investment at all levels.
While the Mac Studio is now Apple's most powerful Mac, for an Intel-based desktop machine with an interchangeable, modular design with more ports, there is the Mac Pro, which starts at $5,999. On the other hand, if the Mac Studio is out of your price range but you still want a similar Apple silicon-based desktop Mac, there is the entry-level Mac mini, which starts at just $699.
Design And Ports
The Mac Studio looks like a Mac mini on steroids is a pretty spot-on way to describe it. It measures 7.7 inches square, the same as the Mac mini, but it’s 3.7 inches tall, nearly thrice the height of the Mac mini. When placed underneath the Studio Display, there’s about an inch’s worth of clearance.
The Mac Studio M1 Max weighs 5.9 pounds, while the M1 Ultra version weighs two pounds more due to its thermal system. On the Ultra it’s made of copper, which is better at absorbing heat than the aluminum system in the Max version. Copper is heavier than aluminum and costs more, which probably affects the Ultra’s price, which is twice that of the M1 Max Mac Studio.
Aluminum is significantly less expensive than copper, though. For the same mass, copper costs about three times as much. Like the Mac mini, there's a small power indicator dot in the front-left corner, but rather than leaving users with a completely blank face, Apple departs from the theme with a few additions. On the front of the Mac Studio, there are two USB-C ports for the M1 Max version, two Thunderbolt 4 ports for the M1 Ultra edition.
There's also an SDXC Class II card reader on the front, a component that was lost in the shift to Apple Silicon on the Mac mini. However, mounting it and the two USB-C ports of one flavor or another to face the user makes them easily accessible whenever they are needed.
Much like the Mac mini, the rest of the ports are around the back, but things have improved here as well. There's a quartet of Thunderbolt 4 ports, as well as two USB-A, a 10-gigabit Ethernet connection, HDMI, and the headphone jack. The left-hand power input of the Mac mini has been switched to a bigger connection in the middle of the Mac Studio. The power button has also made a move, shifting from the rear right to the rear left corner.
Despite the extra size at the back, the ports are all aligned to the base edge, underneath a very large perforated grille. Apple claims there are about 4,000 holes in use here, all to help with the shifting of air for its new cooling system.
Performance
When Apple announced the Mac Studio, it threw out some big claims, including that it's 50% faster than the MacBook Pro 13-inch with M1 chip, and offers 3.4 faster graphics than the most powerful iMac.
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It's also apparently 80% faster than a Mac Pro with a 28-core Intel Xeon processor and can support up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes video. These boasts refer to the capabilities of the Mac Studio with the new M1 Ultra chip, which is the model we have for review, and likely to be the model most serious creatives are tempted by.
The M1 Max chip features a 10-core CPU with eight high-performance cores and two high-efficiency cores, while the M1 Ultra chip features a 20-core CPU with 16 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores. Apple says that the M1 Max offers 2.5x faster performance than the Core i9 chip in the now-discontinued 27-inch iMac, while the M1 Ultra offers 3.8x faster CPU performance.
The M1 Ultra is, in fact, faster than the 28-core Intel Mac Pro, earning 1,798 single-core and a 12,822 multi-core result. The M1 Ultra variant pulled a similar 1,786 single-core score, as expected, but an impressive 23,778 multi-core score, and that all comes down to the 20 cores found in the M1 Ultra.
Cinebench revealed similar numbers. The M1 Max version scored 1,535 and 12,389 on the single and multi-core R23 tests respectively while the M1 Ultra earned 1,535 and 24,210 on the single and multi-core tests.
Affinity Photo now has its own benchmark that tests vector performance on the CPU and raster performance, taxing both the CPU and GPU. We looked primarily at the combined scores for CPU and the GPU. The M1 Max scored a 947 for the CPU and a 22,537 for the GPU. The M1 Ultra came in with 1,879 for the CPU and 33,668 for the GPU.
Geekbench's Compute graphics test echoed those results. When running on Metal, the Geekbench 5 Compute test scored a 60,629 on the 24-core M1 Max GPU and a 91,938 on the 48-core M1 Ultra GPU. A roughly 50 percent increase for the M1 Ultra graphics.
Testing the built-in storage, the 512GB SSD on the M1 Max earned a 4629.7MB/s write speed and a 5180.3 MB/s read speed on the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. This was below the 1TB module in the M1 Ultra machine that earned a 5163.2 MB/s write speed and a 5226.8 MB/s read speed. The 2TB version hit 6403 MB/s write, and 6709.8 MB/sec read.
With the Mac Studio aimed at creative professionals, and using the M1 Ultra comprised of two M1 Max chips, which have already shown how good they are for creative workloads in the new MacBooks, it’s perhaps little surprise to learn that the Mac Studio is a formidable machine when it comes to video editing, coding, and 3D modeling, in particular.
When it comes to video, the Mac Studio puts in a performance that easily rivals, and sometimes surpasses, desktop PCs with discrete professional graphics cards. This is impressive enough before you even factor in the compact size of the Mac Studio. It has the graphical grunt to handle 18 streams of 8K footage on the fly (which we tried for ourselves in Premiere Pro, allowing us to view, edit and add effects without having to wait for anything to render. The smoothness of the footage, even with numerous 8K elements on the screen at once, is incredibly impressive – at one point the Mac Studio was putting through 8 billion pixels per second, and it coped admirably.
Price
The Mac Studio is available in several configuration options. Our own review unit is equipped with an M1 Max processor, with 10 CPU cores, a 32-core GPU, 64GB of memory, and a 2TB SSD for storage. All told, our test unit sells for $3,199 for the Mac Studio alone. With the included Studio Display and new black Magic Keyboard, Trackpad, and Mouse, the full package sells for $5,245, which gives you everything you need, without having to bring your own keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
There are two primary versions of the Mac Studio available, one using the M1 Max processor previously seen in the MacBook Pro, and a step-up model that uses the new M1 Ultra processor. Configurations can also be upgraded with additional GPU cores for more graphics power, larger memory options, and storage options that range from standard to huge.
The M1 Max model starts at $1,999 for the base model, with a 10-core CPU, a 24-core GPU, a 16-core neural engine, and 32GB of unified memory, all paired with 512GB of SSD storage.
You can upgrade the M1 Max to a 32-core GPU for $200 more. You can also upgrade the system memory to 64GB for an additional $400. Storage can be increased incrementally, ranging from the standard 512GB up to 8TB of SSD storage for $2,400.
The M1 Ultra models step up the basic package considerably, with a 20-core CPU and a 48-core GPU, literally doubling the M1 Max specs. With 64GB of unified memory and 1TB of SSD storage, the M1 Ultra Studio starts at $3,999. It also swaps out the Studio’s front ports from USB-C to Thunderbolt 4, giving you a grand total of six Thunderbolt 4 connections.
Again, you can increase the specs and capability of the machine by adjusting the configuration. To start, you can bump up to a 64-core GPU for an additional $1,000. You can increase the memory allotment to a whopping 128GB for an additional $800. And system storage can be increased up to 8TB for an additional $2,200. All told, the top model of the Mac Studio, with M1 Ultra, 64-core GPU, 128GB of memory, and 8TB of SSD storage rings up at $7,999.
should you buy it?
In 2020 Apple promised that it would transition its whole line of Mac computers to Apple Silicon within two years. While the Studio has some serious power, it’s not the Mac Pro many users have been dreaming of. All signs suggest that the update is still to come, with Apple teasing the existence of the machine at the same March 2022 event it used to announce the Studio.
The M1 Ultra is the most powerful piece of Apple Silicon released to date, and the most powerful Mac ever made. In terms of power, the high-end configuration will out-perform the existing Intel-powered Mac Pro in most areas. In fact, the level of performance provided by the Studio is probably overkilled for most users.
If you’re not editing multiple streams of 4K or 8K video, building 3D worlds and VR applications, or using CPU-heavy data analysis tools, then the Apple Silicon may be surplus to requirements (even the M1 Max version). You could save some money with a Mac mini or iMac instead. With this in mind, there’s something to be said about buying a machine that’s more powerful than what you currently need but that you may grow into or keep for a long time. This is particularly true when it comes to RAM and storage.
If you’re looking at the Mac Studio and wishing it could do more, the Mac Pro update that’s due out in a few months is probably worth waiting for. Or you could try your luck building a high-end Windows PC, provided you can get your hands on a CPU and GPU.
However, if you don’t need the kind of performance on offer here – and many people simply won’t – then you’d be better off buying something more affordable, such as the Mac mini. If you’re looking for something to work on while you travel, a laptop, such as the 14-inch MacBook Pro, may also be a better bet.
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