Apple Mac Studio Review: A Rocket Engine in the Old Chassis

9.5/ 10

All told, you can max out the new Studio for $11,999, more than the Mac Pro, which isn’t bad given its power. Thanks to the M3 Ultra, it specs better than the Mac Pro, at least for the moment. The M3 Ultra introduction points to a possible refresh of the Mac Pro, though.

As much speed as you need

My only question about the Mac Studio’s performance with the Ultra is how well it compares on AI-related tasks; given that it’s dual linked M4 Pro chips, it’s likely faster, but its M3-based architecture lacks the optimizations that Apple made for the M4 — so faster because more processing available, but unclear just how much faster.

The M4 Max is significantly faster on everything than the M3 Max, and the same number of GPU cores get a boost on the M4 generation — 40 M4 GPU cores are generally faster than 40 M3 cores. But the M4 Pro comes pretty close, or at least as close as you might get if it had more cores. That makes a Mac Mini a pretty solid alternative.

As I’ve said before, Apple silicon’s performance remains remarkably consistent, in the sense that it’s more or less directly correlated with the number of cores (though that doesn’t mean it’s true for any specific application, because they’re too squidgy when it comes to producing generalizable results). It also means that system performance of the MacBooks and desktops are pretty similar to each other, and what makes a MacBook Pro a compelling alternative to an Apple desktop.

As you’d expect, the Studio is pretty comfortable with things you might use it for, such as heavy video editing or using local AI models. I used a 70B Llama model run locally (roughly 50GB) which wasn’t bad for text chats — it got a little slower as time went on, but it was never slow — I’m not a programmer and only had a few days so really couldn’t stress the system as much as I would have liked. The same goes for some basic 8K video editing in Premiere Pro, with real-time playback of sequences with auto-reframe. I’m not sure either would have been as smooth with the 96GB memory configuration, but 128GB was definitely comfortable.

Given that playing games was pretty good on the MacBook 16 M4 Pro’s 20C GPU, it should be as good or better on the 40C GPU; the problem isn’t whether you can play games on the Mac or how well you can play; there still aren’t that many and all but a few of the new ones have been out for a while.

I do like the Mac Studio. It’s a powerful compact desktop that, given you spend enough money on it, can do almost anything most people likely need it to do. But unless you have an unlimited budget, you may want to first figure out if less expensive configurations or other systems will serve your needs as well.