Bringing the M4 Max and M3 Ultra to the new Mac Studio, makes this $2,000 to +$14,000 computer Apple’s most powerful yet.

Announced the same week as M3 and M4 updates came to the iPad Air and MacBook Air respectively, Apple continue bringing the new generations of chips to their devices, with the latest update to the Mac Studio. Previously available with M2 Max and M2 Ultra, the Mac Studio now comes with either an M4 Max or M3 Ultra. We saw the M4 Max debut last year when it launched in the top-end MacBook Pro, however the M3 Ultra is a new chip, comprised of fusing two M3 Max chips, as with previous Ultra chips. This confusingly makes the M4 Max (short for ‘maximum’ 🤔) the lower-spec and M3 Ultra the top-spec.

Image Credit: Apple

The new Mac Studio is the most powerful Mac we’ve ever made. A complete game-changer for pros around the world — powering both home and pro studios — Mac Studio sits in a class of its own, offering a staggering amount of performance in a compact, quiet design that fits beautifully on your desk. With this new Mac Studio, we’re delivering even more extreme performance with M4 Max and M3 Ultra, support for half a terabyte of unified memory, up to 16TB of superfast storage, and Thunderbolt 5 connectivity. Mac Studio truly is the ultimate pro desktop.

John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, Apple

When specced out with an M3 Ultra, the Mac Studio has an up to 32-core CPU, the most CPU cores ever in a Mac, up to 80-core GPU, more than any Apple silicon chip, a 32-core Neural Engine, designed to run on-device AI models, up to 512GB of memory, the most memory ever in a personal computer, and up to 16TB of SSD storage for a maximum price of $14,099.

The M4 Max is up to 3.5x faster than the Mac Studio with M1 Max and up to 6.1x faster than the most powerful Intel-based 27-inch iMac. The M3 Ultra has nearly 2x faster performance than M4 Max, up to 2.6x faster than Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and up to 6.4x faster than the Intel Xeon W-based Mac Pro

Unsurprisingly both configurations of the Mac Studio are being targeted at professional creatives, such as 3D designers, video editors, photographers, developers, engineers and AI workloads. For everyone else looking for a all-in-one Mac desktop, the Mac mini starts at just $599 and comes with a perfectly capable M4 or M4 Pro chip.

Beyond chips, the I/O has been upgraded from Thunderbolt 4 to Thunderbolt 5. There are six USB-C ports on both the M4 Max and M3 Ultra. Four of these ports on the back of the M4 Max support Thunderbolt 5, while the front two ports are regular USB-C. On the M3 Ultra all front and back ports are Thunderbolt 5. Thunderbolt 5 supports transfer speeds up to 120 Gb/s, which is up to 3x faster than the prior generation. The rest of the I/O is the same, including 10Gb Ethernet, USB-A, HDMI, headphone jack and SDXC. Mac Studio with M3 Ultra now supports up to eight 6K displays or four 8K displays.

Image Credit: Apple

Everything else about the Mac Studio is the same as the prior generation, including the design, audio support, wireless connectivity and MacOS Sequoia with Apple Intelligence.

Mac Studio with M4 Max starts at $1,999, and comes with a 14-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 36GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. Mac Studio with M3 Ultra starts at $3,999, and comes with 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 96GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. You can pre-order the Mac Studio today and it will be available from Wednesday, March 12.