Mac Studio most powerful Mac ever from Apple

Bert van Dijk Volunteer Apple.hcc.nl

In recent days, Apple has presented a number of new devices, such as the renewed iPad Air, iPad and Magic Keyboard and also with the MacBook Air M4 a new version of their most popular laptop. Apple has also renewed the Mac Studio and therefore improved as you read below and where you also read with which version of the Mac Studio you are better off.

Mac Studio M4 Max
This cheapest version of the Mac Studio has the same M4 Max chip as in the most luxurious MacBook Pro models. This chip has extremely good performance and the standard memory of 36 GB can be expanded to 128 GB. The M4 Max version has four super-fast Thunderbolt 5 ports that have a maximum speed of 120 GB/s which is 3x faster than with the previous generation! Due to that large bandwidth of Thunderbolt 5 you can connect external storage space at a lower cost that is faster than the storage space within the Mac Studio itself. There are two USB-C ports at the front (up to 10 GB/s). With the almost twice as expensive M3 Ultra version, those ports also have the maximum Thunderbolt 5-speed.

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In addition to the Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI port and SDXC card reader, the Mac Studio also has a 10-GB Ethernet port

Mac Studio M3 Ultra
The Mac Studio with M3 Ultra-Processor is an AI power pATER where you can quickly run large large Language Models up to 600 billion parameters. Also for developers, video editors, composers, photographers and for heavy graphic applications, it is the most powerful Mac ever to do his work on your desk. With this Mac you quickly browse thousands of images and you can compose music with hundreds of traces, plug-ins and virtual instruments. The M3 Ultra chip actually consists of two combined M3 MAX chips. As a result, this chip has a double prores accelerator and, according to Apple, it is ideal for video producers who work with several 4K video streams in Prores quality. With the M3 Ultra you can now even connect up to eight 6K screens; The M4 MAX version supports a maximum of four of these screens.

Performance Mac Studio
Depending on the application, the Mac Studio M4 Max 1.2 (with video) is up to 2.1 times (with xcode) as fast as the Mac Studio with M1 Max. With the Mac Studio 3 Ultra, Apple indicates that it is up to 2.6x faster than the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and many other applications are mentioned, so that the mutual comparison of the two versions seems to be hidden by Apple. The reason for this is likely that in many situations you are better off with the cheaper M4 Max. Some leaked benchmark scores also seem to confirm this. With applications with a single core, the more efficient M4 Max scores more than 21% better and with Multi Core the M3 Ultra scores with 2x as many CPUs but 8% better.

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When which Mac Studio version?

The M3 Ultra has twice as many cores due to the chip doubling, but dates from a somewhat older less efficient chip generation. The question is what applications benefit from double amounts of cores and that extra memory. According to Apple, generating tokens with a large language model with many billions of parameters goes with a lot of memory in the M3 Ultra chip no less than 16.9x faster than in the Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra. If your applications have little or no benefit of very large memory, you better purchase the M4 Max version or perhaps even a Mac Mini M4 Pro that is also equipped with Thunderbolt 5 ports. Only with applications that benefit from the higher number of CPU+GPU Cores and a lot of memory is the M3 Ultra 2x faster than the M4 Max. If you mainly use applications that do not need so much memory, it therefore seems wise to choose the M4 Max with no more than 64GB of memory and an increase in the storage space to 1 TB. With those two extensions you are still a lot cheaper with an extra investment of € 1,125 than the almost twice as expensive M3 Ultra version. The biggest difference is then actually the somewhat lower bandwidth of 546 GB/s against 819 GB/s. But with the cheaper version, those speeds are so high that most users probably have no benefit from that higher bandwidth.
The amount you save can then be spent on a nice 27inch 5K studio display from Apple. This screen has a 12MP Center Stage camera, three microphones of studio quality and six speakers with spatial audio. If you work a lot with HDR recordings, the 32inch 6K Pro Display XDR with a higher peak brightness of 1600 Nits is an even better option.

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Comparison table

TIP: Students, their parents and teachers from a university or college and other education employees including those who give home education, are eligible for a Mac Studio for an educational discount via https://www.apple.com/nl-edu/shop/. With educational discount you pay for the Mac Studio M4 max € 2,279.