Apple is still a few months away from unveiling its Apple silicon-equipped Mac Pro. But in the meantime, for demanding users who can’t wait to take advantage of Apple silicon on a Mac, there’s the new Mac Studio, the newest computer revealed during the company’s “Peek Performance” event on Tuesday.
At the heart of the Mac Studio is an M1 Max or M1 Ultra, a new addition to the M1 System on a Chip lineup. The M1 Ultra has a 20-core CPU (16 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores), a 64-core GPU, a 32-core Neural Engine, and 800GBps of bandwidth. Since the M1 Ultra is essentially a pair of M1 Max chips working together, the Ultra also has double the Max’s media enhancements, including four ProRes accelerators.
Apple offers two standard configurations of the Mac Studio:
- $1,999: M1 Max (10-core CPU), 24-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 32GB of RAM, 512GB SSD
- $3,999: M1 Ultra (20-core CPU), 48-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 64GB of RAM, 1TB SSD
M1 Ultra deep dive: Workstation performance at a fraction of the power
Apple
The Mac Studio looks like an oversized Mac mini but it has the power of the Mac Pro. The extra height is to house a blower to help alleviate the heat generated by the internals and keep the noise down during heavy processing sessions, such as with video editing, graphics rendering, and code compiling.
The Mac Studio can connect to any third-party display using its Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, but it can also connect to the new Apple Studio Display that was also revealed on Tuesday. The Mac Studio can connect to up to five displays at the same time, with four of them having up to 6K resolution at 60Hz connected via USB-C, and another with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz connected via HDMI 2.0
The back ports of the Mac Studio.
Apple
On the back of the Mac Studio, you’ll find four Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, two USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.0 connector, and a 10Gb ethernet port. There’s also a headphone jack that can be used with high-impedance headphones. The front panel of the M1 Max model has two USB-C ports, which are Thunderbolt ports on the M1 Ultra model. There’s also an SDXC Card slot on the front.
The Mac Studio is available for preorder now on Apple’s website, with availability beginning March 18.
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor
Roman has covered technology since the early 1990s. His career started at MacUser, and he's worked for MacAddict, Mac|Life, and TechTV.