Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple is giving its high-end Mac Studio desktops a refresh this month, their first spec bump in almost two years. Considered on the time scale of, say, new Mac Pro updates, two years is barely any time at all. But Apple often delivers big performance increases for its Pro, Max, and Ultra chips from generation to generation, so any update—particularly one where you leapfrog two generations in a single refresh—can bring a major increase to performance that's worth waiting for.

It's the magnitude of Apple's generation-over-generation updates that makes this Studio refresh feel odd, though. The lower-end Studio gets an M4 Max processor like you'd expect—the same chip Apple sells in its high-end MacBook Pros but fit into a desktop enclosure instead of a laptop. But the top-end Studio gets an M3 Ultra instead of an M4 Ultra. That's still a huge increase in CPU and GPU cores (and there are other Ultra-specific benefits, too), but it makes the expensive Studio feel like less of a step up over the regular one.

How do these chips stack up to each other, and how big a deal is the lack of an M4 Ultra? How much does the Studio overlap with the refreshed M4 Pro Mac mini from last fall? And how do Apple's fastest chips compare to what Intel and AMD are doing in high-end PCs?

A big metal box

The bottom of the Mac Studio, which says "Mac Studio."
Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Externally, the Mac Studio looks the same as it has since it was first launched in 2022. It's a small but substantial rounded aluminum box with the same 7.7-by-7.7-inch base as the old Mac mini but about two and a half times as tall as the old Mac mini. The redesigned Mac mini has proportions that more closely mimic the Studio's, just with a smaller 5-by-5-inch footprint.

The Max and Ultra models are externally identical, but they have a couple of different details. The Ultra version of the Studio is still about two pounds heavier (8 pounds, up from 6.1) than the Max version because of its heatsink, which uses heavier but more-conductive copper instead of aluminum. The two ports on the front of the Ultra version of the Studio also support full 120Gbps Thunderbolt 5 speeds, while the ports on the Max version are 10Gbps USB-C.

The other ports on both Macs are the same: four 120Gbps Thunderbolt 5 ports, a 10 gigabit Ethernet port, two 5Gbps USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a headphone jack. There's also a UHS-II SD card slot on the front, one nicety that the redesigned Mac mini doesn't offer. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 round out the connectivity options. Thunderbolt 5 support is provided by a separate controller chip outside of the M4 Max and M3 Ultra.

Performance and power

The M4 Max version of the Mac Studio performs pretty similarly to the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the same chip—maybe the tiniest smidge faster, thanks to the extra heat dissipation of a desktop computer, but the difference so small that we'd put it within the margin of error if it weren't so consistent.

Unlike the MacBook Pro, the Mac Studio's version of the Max doesn't include a High Power performance toggle in the energy settings. That's not necessarily a bad thing—we tested High Power mode on multiple Macs in the fall and never actually observed meaningful performance improvements in any of the tests we ran.

But the Mac Studio seems like it has the extra thermal headroom it would need to actually allow the M4 Max or M3 Ultra to use more power in exchange for better performance. As we've seen in our PC processor testing, bumping up those power limits can have real benefits, even if performance doesn't usually increase proportionally with power usage. It's just not an envelope Apple is apparently interested in pushing.

As for the M3 Ultra, there are upsides and downsides. The biggest downside is obviously that the M3 Ultra comes with M3-class single-core performance, which is still relevant for things like games and other workloads that can't be split among multiple cores. Note how the M3 Ultra GPU outperforms the M4 Max in the GFXBench graphics benchmark at 4K and 1440p, but the M4 Max is actually way faster at 1080p—that's because the M3 Ultra's CPU is bottlenecking the GPU, and the M4 Max's CPU isn't.

Single-core performance aside, the M3 Ultra does eventually start to run the expected circles around the M4 Max when it comes to multi-threaded CPU work and GPU benchmarks that are actually bottlenecked by the GPU. Sure, the CPU and GPU cores are a little older, but there are still twice as many of them in the Ultra. The M3 Ultra does use more power under load than the M2 Ultra or M1 Ultra—77 W in our Handbrake video encoding test, compared to 62 W for the M2 Ultra and 57 W for the M1 Ultra—but it's fast enough that it's still a little more efficient overall, using a little less power to do the same task.

It doesn't feel great that Apple wants you to spend twice as much money on an M3 Ultra Mac Studio as you would for an M4 Max version. The Ultra processors have never been exactly twice as fast as the Max processors, despite literally being two Max chips in a single CPU package—you've always lost some performance thanks to higher power consumption and heat, and the overhead needed for the two chips to communicate with each other over the silicon interposer that joins them together. But in previous Studio generations, the Ultra has always been as fast or faster than the Max, and that's not true here.

As for the Intel and AMD comparisons, both companies' best high-end desktop CPUs like the Ryzen 9 9950X and Core Ultra 285K are often competitive with the M4 Max's multi-core performance, but are dramatically less power-efficient at their default settings.

Mac Studio or M4 Pro Mac mini?

The Mac Studio (bottom) and redesigned M4 Mac mini.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Ever since Apple beefed up the Mac mini with Pro-tier chips, there's been a pricing overlap around and just over $2,000 where the mini and the Studio are both compelling.

A $2,000 Mac mini comes with a fully enabled M4 Pro processor (14 CPU cores, 20 GPU cores), 512GB of storage, and 48GB of RAM, with 64GB of RAM available for another $200 and 10 gigabit Ethernet available for another $100. RAM is the high-end Mac mini's main advantage over the Studio—the $1,999 Studio comes with a slightly cut-down M4 Max (also 14 CPU cores, but 32 GPU cores), 512GB of storage, and just 36GB of RAM.

In general, if you're spending $2,000 on a Mac desktop, I would lean toward the Studio rather than the mini. You're getting roughly the same CPU but a much faster GPU and more ports. You get less RAM, but depending on what you're doing, there's a good chance that 36GB is more than enough.

The only place where the mini is clearly better than the Studio once you've above $2,000 is memory. If you want 64GB of RAM in your Mac, you can get it in the Mac mini for $2,200. The cheapest Mac Studio with 64GB of RAM also requires a processor upgrade, bringing the total cost to $2,700. If you need memory more than you need raw performance, or if you just need something that's as small as it can possibly be, that's when the high-end mini can still make sense.

A lot of power—if you need it

Apple's M4 Max Mac Studio.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Obviously, Apple's hermetically sealed desktop computers have some downsides compared to a gaming or workstation PC, most notably that you need to throw out and replace the whole thing any time you want to upgrade literally any component.

But for people who just want to buy a small, fast, efficient, powerful desktop, the Mac Studio remains a better choice than the Mac Pro was for most of its life (and certainly better now that the Mac Pro is stuck on the M2 Ultra). The Mac mini is more than enough for casual desktop computing, but content creators, photo/video editors, and people who just like having a fast Mac will all find something to like about the M4 Max version of the Studio—if they can stomach the price tag.

The M3 Ultra version of the Studio is weirder and a little harder to recommend. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is the fastest Mac Apple has ever made, and when you're doing real CPU-intensive work, it can still outrun the M4 Max by a respectable margin. But it does still lag behind the M4 series' single-core performance by a considerable amount, and psychologically, it just feels kind of bad to pay twice as much money (and as much as $14,099!) for hardware that already "feels" one-generation old.

But it does make it clearer who the Ultra version of the computer is for. Do you need the best GPU you can get and more than 128GB of RAM for some reason? Do you also want multiple ProRes video encoders? These are the things the M3 Ultra gets you. Almost any other power user, whether you're hoping to play some games, do app development, or run a bunch of virtual machines or Docker containers, will be better served by either the M4 Max Mac Studio or, in cases where you want a good CPU but don't particularly care about playing games, the M4 Pro Mac mini.

The good

• Computers go fast!
• Big upgrades to the maximum amount of RAM and storage you can get in a Mac, if you can pay for them
• Quieter and much more power efficient than anything Intel or AMD are doing on the PC side
• Good port selection and connectivity options

The bad

• Virtually zero upgradeability
• Some overlap with the M4 Pro Mac mini

The ugly

• M3 Ultra is a downgrade from M4 Max in single-core CPU performance
• Waiting for a clearly articulated Mac Pro strategy