There’s a new Mac in Apple’s line-up – and it’s made for power users like videographers, photographers, developers and engineers. Unveiled on March 5, the Apple Mac Studio with M4 Max or M3 Ultra chips brings some of Apple’s most advanced technology yet, including the most unified memory to date for any personal computer, up to 32 core CPU, up to 80 core GPU and a media engine made for working with multiple large 4K ProRes files.
Announced the day after the launch of the iPad Air M4 and the same day as the new MacBook Air M4, Apple’s John Temus, a senior vice president of hardware engineering, calls the new Mac Studio “the most powerful Mac we’ve ever made.” Compared to the earlier Mac Studio with M2 Max or M2 Ultra, the 2025 release brings the M4 Max, which, like the M4 Max version of the MacBook Pro, jumps up to up to 16 cores with 12 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, and up to 546GB/s of memory bandwidth. But, those specs are similar to the M4 Max version of the MacBook Pro. The M3 Ultra chip brings more desktop power, with the M3 Ultra chip bringing up to 32-cores in the CPU and up to 80 core GPU with 819 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Apple says the new Mac Studio is designed for “video editors, colorists, developers, engineers, photographers, creative pros, and other users.” The M4 Max chip is up to 3.5 times faster than the M1 Max, while Apple says that users stepping up the most powerful Intel-based Macs can expect as much as a six times boost in performance. That translates into about 1.6x faster performance in Photoshop and 1.2x faster ProRes performance compared to the to generations ago with the M1 Max.
The Mac Studio’s media engine uses two ProRes accelerators to better handle large 4K ProRes files. The M3 Ultra uses four video encoding engines, where the M4 Max uses two. While the earlier M2 Max Mac Studio also used two ProRes engines, the latest version uses AV1 decode in the media engine as well, for both the M4 Max and M3 Ultra variants.
The 2025 Mac Studio also brings Thunderbolt 5 support, which supports data transfers up to 120 Gb/s. The M4 Max variant has four of those Thunderbolt 5 ports, while the M3 Ultra offers six. The desktop computer can support up to eight 4K or 6K displays, or up to four 8K displays at once.
The dimensions for the new Mac Studio remain identical to the M2 Max and M2 Ultra variants, but weigh in slightly heavier at 6.1 pounds / 2.74 kg for the M4 Max and 8 pounds / 3.64 kg for the M3 Ultra.
Like most of Apple’s other recent announcements, the Mac Studio supports Apple Intelligence, with on-device processing for some tasks and Private Cloud compute for larger off-device tasks.
The new Mac Studio ships with MacOS Sequoia, which includes features like iPhone mirroring and the ability to drag and drop files from the Mac Studio to an iPhone.
The Mac Studio M4 Max starts at $1,999 / £2,099 / AU$3,499 while the M3 Ultra costs twice that, beginning at $3,999 / £4,199 / AU$6,999. Storage configurations go up to 8 TB for the M4 Max version and up to 16 TB for the M3 Ultra.
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