The Mac Studio is Apple’s final efficiency laptop, however this 12 months’s mannequin got here with a twist: It’s outfitted with both an M4 Max or an M3 Extremely processor. The latter may look like a step backward, since practically all Macs (besides the Mac Professional) at the moment are outfitted with M4 chips. Nonetheless, the M3 Extremely is certainly Apple’s best-performing processor, which makes the brand new Mac Studio its quickest laptop ever.
Whereas the M3 Extremely mannequin seems extremely succesful for inventive execs and engineers, it begins at $4,000 and goes method up from there. I’m intrigued by that mannequin primarily based on benchmarks I noticed elsewhere, in fact. Nonetheless, the M4 Max mannequin I obtained for this overview is the one which most individuals will need, as the bottom configuration is half the value. For energy customers doing duties like video enhancing or designing video games, it’s the Mac of selection, and it’s even an honest deal by Apple’s requirements.
Hardware
The Mac Studio’s design hasn’t modified because the authentic M1 Extremely model from 2022. That isn’t a foul factor because the aesthetic has aged nicely and it takes up little or no desk house. It’s concerning the dimension of two Mac Minis stacked collectively and has the identical polished aluminum case. Every little thing has a premium really feel, even the environmentally pleasant packaging and versatile energy cable.
Up entrance, there’s an SDXC card slot that helps UHS-II speeds (300 MB/s), together with a pair of 10Gbps USB-C ports (they’re Thunderbolt 5 on the M3 Extremely model). Round again, you’ll discover 4 Thunderbolt 5 ports that now supply as much as 15 GB/s throughput (capital B), triple the speeds of the 2023 Mac Studio with Thunderbolt 4. You additionally get a 10Gbps ethernet port and two USB 3.1 (Sort A) slots, together with an HDMI port and three.5mm headphone jack. All of that is sufficient to join loads of disk drives, displays and peripherals.
Inside, the M3 Extremely model is arguably overkill with as much as a 32-core CPU, eight greater than the Mac Studio M2 Extremely. The GPU comes with 80 cores, one other file for Apple Silicon, together with a 32-core Neural Engine for on-device AI and machine studying. Unified reminiscence begins at 96GB and goes up to an enormous 512GB (with as much as 819 GB/s of bandwidth) and 16TB of SSD storage. With all these gadgets maxed out, the Mac Studio prices a hair-raising $14,099.
The M4 Max mannequin is extra modest however nonetheless spectacular. The highest-end configuration comes with a 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU, over 546 GB/s of unified reminiscence bandwidth and as much as 8TB of storage. These specs align fairly intently with the MacBook Professional M4 Max however at a lower cost, by the best way. On the $1,999 base value, you get a 14-core CPU, 32-core GPU and 16-core neural engine. All M4 Max fashions begin with an honest 36GB of unified reminiscence, although my take a look at unit got here with the utmost 128GB in a $3,699 configuration.
The processor, reminiscence and storage aren’t upgradeable after buy, so that you’ll wish to select correctly when ordering. That’s a problem in itself, as Apple isn’t very versatile with the system configurations. For instance, the bottom $1,999 14-core M4 Max Mac Studio can solely be configured with 36GB of RAM. In order for you extra, you want the 16-core model which robotically bumps reminiscence as much as 48GB and provides $500 to the value.
I’d say the latter possibility is the candy spot at $2,499, netting you the sooner processor and sufficient unified reminiscence for many content material creation. Engineers and others on the lookout for much more efficiency might want the M3 Extremely model, because it permits for as much as 512GB of RAM and places two extra Thunderbolt 5 slots up entrance.
In-use: A rocketship for content material creators
The Mac Studio with M4 Max destroyed most artificial benchmarks, displaying the very best single-core Geekbench 6 CPU rating for any PC we’ve examined. It falls slightly below the Mac Studio with M2 Extremely on the multicore Geekbench 6 take a look at. It even beats the most recent Mac Studio M3 Extremely in single-core efficiency, although it’s topped by that mannequin in multicore assessments. GPU scores are equally spectacular and the ATTO disk peak throughput is the perfect we’ve seen up to now with write speeds as much as 8 GB/s.
Nonetheless, one of the simplest ways to guage a machine like that is to feed it some content material creation jobs and see how rapidly it chews by way of them. Video enhancing is the sternest take a look at for many machines, so I attempted Premiere Professional and DaVinci Resolve with a mixture of 4K, 6K and 8K video (RAW and MP4) to problem it.
All of these information simply performed by way of of their native codecs with no hiccups on a 4K timeline, due to the M4 Max’s skill to decode RAW and 10-bit H.264 or H.265 information on the fly. It was nonetheless capable of deal with real-time playback of a single layer of 8K video with shade correction added and solely struggled once I tried to play two or extra 8K video tracks on the similar time. Total, it supplies a clean and glitch-free enhancing expertise that permits energy customers to get work executed rapidly.
| Geekbench 6 CPU | Geekbench 6 GPU | Cinebench 2024 | |
| Mac Studio (M4 Max, 2025) | 4,090/26,394 | 116,028 | 190/2066 | GPU 16,598 |
| Mac Studio (M2 Extremely, 2023) | 2,013/28,402 | 121,938 | N/A |
| iMac (M4, 2024) | 3,751/15,093 | 35,520 | 171/881 GPU 4,425 |
| Apple MacBook Professional 16-inch (M4 Professional, 2024) |
3,925/22,456 | 70,197 | 178/1,689 GPU 9,295 |
| Apple MacBook Professional 16-inch (M4 Max, 2024) |
4,054/25,913 | 114,112 | 181/2,042 GPU 16,490 |
| Floor Laptop computer 7 (Snapdragon X Elite, 32GB) |
2,797/14,400 | 19,963 | 123/969 |
Encoding is equally speedy. It took me one minute and 51 seconds to output a 3.5 minute timeline in 4K with the identical mixture of 4K, 6K and 8K footage utilizing the GPU. For comparability’s sake, my MacBook Professional with an M3 Professional processor took over twice as lengthy at 4 minutes and 10 seconds.
The Mac Studio confirmed the identical prowess with Lightroom Traditional and Photoshop, offering quick and fluid enhancing for even RAW photographs that had been 100MB or bigger. Word that when doing GPU- or CPU-intensive duties like video encoding, the fan will kick in and the chassis can get heat, however that didn’t occur usually. In any case, the Mac Studio’s bigger dimension and greater fan supplies higher thermal efficiency than the Mac mini.
To check the machine’s AI capabilities, I ran a 75 minute podcast by way of Apple’s Whisper transcription instrument and it took a minute and 32 seconds to transform it to textual content. The newest MacBook Professional with an M4 Professional processor took two minutes and 11 seconds for a similar job, and my MacBook Professional M3 Professional did it in three minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
On high of content material creation, I performed Baldur’s Gate III, a recreation that places reasonable calls for on a PC. The Mac Studio was as much as the duty, delivering clean gameplay at excessive settings and 1440p decision (although it was considerably restricted by the Studio Monitor’s anemic 60Hz refresh price). I once more observed that the Mac Studio received pretty scorching and the followers kicked in throughout gaming classes. Nonetheless, GPU efficiency surpassed most PCs besides these with high-end GPUs, primarily based on a fast comparability to our current assessments and GeekBench’s database. To that finish, the one factor limiting the Mac Studio as a gaming machine is the sparse selection of video games for macOS.
Do you have to purchase the Mac Studio?
Content material creators might marvel if they should splurge on the Mac Studio, or if a Mac mini will do the job. In spite of everything, you may get the Mac mini M4 Professional with 24GB of RAM for $1,399 as an alternative of the Mac Studio M4 Max and quit only a single Thunderbolt 5 port and 12GB of unified reminiscence, saving $600.
In case you repeatedly edit 4K (or increased) movies or render 3D graphics (or play video games), you’d be higher off with the Mac Studio. For much less demanding jobs, a Mac mini will probably suffice. The Mac Studio M3 Extremely is one other animal altogether, with the additional cores and better reminiscence capability aimed toward engineers or AI builders. At $4,000, it is largely overkill for everybody else. The Mac Professional additionally exists, but it surely’s so costly that it’s actually just for studios and large firms, which means the Mac Studio is now the high-end Mac for many professionals.