Mac Studio 2025
Apple (Hacker News):
Mac Studio with M4 Max is up to 3.5x faster than Mac Studio with M1 Max, and is up to 6.1x faster than the most powerful Intel-based 27-inch iMac.
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Mac Studio with M3 Ultra pushes demanding workflows to a whole new level. It delivers nearly 2x faster performance than M4 Max in workloads that take advantage of high CPU and GPU core counts, and massive amounts of unified memory. Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is up to 2.6x faster than Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, and up to 6.4x faster than the 16-core Intel Xeon W-based Mac Pro.
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Mac Studio with M3 Ultra starts with 96GB of unified memory, which can be configured up to 512GB — the most unified memory ever in a personal computer — and up to 16TB of ultrafast SSD storage, so content and data can be kept locally.
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The new Mac Studio features Thunderbolt 5 ports that deliver transfer speeds up to 120 Gb/s, up to 3x faster than the prior generation, enabling faster external storage, expansion chassis, and powerful hub solutions. For those who rely on PCIe expansion cards for their workflows, Thunderbolt 5 allows users to connect an external expansion chassis with higher bandwidth and lower latency. And with M3 Ultra, Mac Studio now drives up to eight Pro Display XDRs at the full 6K resolution.
The only Xcode benchmark mentioned is that the Mac Studio with M4 Max is 2.1× faster than with M1 Max, so perhaps it doesn’t scale as well as other tasks.
This is the first Mac Studio refresh since it was updated with M2 Max and M2 Ultra chip options in June 2023.
The overall design of the Mac Studio has not changed.
It seems like a few things are going on here: first, that the development of the Ultra chip takes longer and that Apple won’t commit to shipping an Ultra chip in every chip generation. Second, that the first-generation three-nanometer chip process of Apple’s chipmaking partner, TSMC, isn’t as dead and buried as generally thought. Just this week Apple also introduced an iPad Air with an M3 processor, and of course the new iPad mini shipped with an A17 Pro processor based on the same process.
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Though the prices for the two base models remain the same at $1999 and $3999, there’s one wrinkle: more memory. The M4 Max Mac Studio starts at 36GB of RAM, up from 32GB on the same-priced M2 Max model. And the M3 Ultra Mac Studio starts at 96GB, up from 64GB on the same-priced M2 Ultra.
Previously:
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The A17/M3 generation is full of surprises, huh.
And now we have another inconsistency in Apple's lineup: just like the Mac mini could get 64 GB on the M4 Pro (MBP is limited to 48 GB), the Mac Studio is now capable of getting an M4 Max with only 512 GB of storage, whereas the MBP forces you to upgrade to 1 TB.
Interestingly, you can now get a Mac Studio with far more RAM than a top-spec Mac Pro. Just goes to show how niche a product the Mac Pro has become: you'd only buy one if you really, really need those internal expansion slots.
