- Apple Upgrades Workhorse Mac Studio
- It finally gets M4 Max
- The Breakout Star may be the M3 Ultra model, however
Mac Studio fans, get ready for two big upgrades. Apple brings M4 Max to its Pint-Size Power Center, potentially a significant benefit increase over the existing M2 MAX and M2 Ultra settings. But Apple also reveals its most powerful piece of Apple Silicon yet, M3 Ultra as an opportunity in the Mac study.
I know it’s a little confusing. How can M3 Ultra be more powerful than M4 Max? But based on the specifications that Apple shared, it is and by a wide margin.
Apart from the Apple Silicon updates, the only other notable hardware update has switched to the high-performance Thunderbolt 5. Designed on 7.7-inch square with 3.7 inch high aluminum brick is unchanged, as is the port location and wide vent grill on the back.
Not that any of it matters to Mac Studio’s Power-Sult audience of developers, 3D animators, designers and musicians on par.
The new M4 Max and M3 Ultra
M4 Max, which we first saw on the MacBook Pro, starts with a 14-core CPU, but is configurable up to 16 cores. GPU starts at 32 cores, but can be configured up to 40 cores. The MAC study starts with 32 GB of RAM, but you can bump it up to 128 GB. Apple claims that the system will have half a terabyte per Second of the total memory bandwidth.
M4 Max brings Apple’s updated graphics architecture, which includes hardware-accelerated mesh shade and Apple’s updated beam tracking engine.
But wait there’s more.
If the M4 Max is not enough horsepower for you, the Apple M3 Ultra revealed with it. Although built of a few m3 max chips, the M3 Ultra’s specifications are eye-catching. It delivers a 32-core CPU with 24 performance nuclei and up to an 80-core GPU. It can support up to 16 TB of storage space. An M3-ULTRA configured Mac study starts with 96 GB of Unified Memory and can be upgraded to half a terabyte.
M4 Max
While I got touched by a disconnected Mac study, I didn’t get one on my own (not that I would have known what to do with all that power).
Apple showed me both a Mac study running the M4 Max and another Mac study running the new M3 Ultra. In both cases, the performance was impressive.
In the first scenario, a Mac Studio M4 Max was connected to a number of studio screens and peripheral devices, including a box of 100 TB storage space, a 46 GB Fast SSD, a 48TB Raid -Array and a PCIe cabinet. All were connected to the Mac study via the new high-speed Thunderbolt 5 ports.
The box quietly ran Autodesk Flame, a native Apple Silicon app that handles VFX in real time and color classification. They showed us how the Mac study could handle dozens of layers and thousands of elements for a scene with people running down a street. We quickly added new buildings, lighting and atmosphere. Each task was quick and it seemed effortless for the Mac study and its M4 Max chip.
Mac Studio with M3 Ultra and Cyberpunk 2077
The MAC study with the new M3 Ultra was connected to a 6K Studio screen and running Cinema 4D, another native Apple Silicon app.
On screen was a roughly reproduced beach scene. Instead of adding thousands of pieces of foliage by hand, we used LM Studio and Local LLM to request it to write a Python script to put 1,000 Ficus plants in the stage. It did, and then we did the stage using red changes in about 12 seconds.
Running behind this was a prior release of Cyberpunk 2077 coming to Mac in 2025.
It looked wonderful on the screen. The visuals were sharp, reflections were rich and convincing, like the atmospheres like fog. The game, we saw, trusted the M3 Ultra’s original beam pording features, but Cyberpunk 2077 supports the more powerful path tracking when sent on Mac.
The price of power is not cheap. M4 MAX MAC study with 36 GB memory starts at $ 1999, and the MAC study with M3 Ultra and 96 GB Unified Memory Starts at $ 3,999.
Both systems are on pre -order now and will be shipped on March 12.
