M4 Max Mac Studio review: A familiar face
The new Mac Studio is an interesting product because it’s got a surprising wrinkle: its high-end configuration, which starts at $3999 and escalates rapidly from there, is powered not by an M4 chip but by a new and unusual M3 chip, the M3 Ultra, which offers the performance of two M3 Max chips but with twice the maximum RAM and support for Thunderbolt 5. It’s a curious outlier.
The other new Mac Studio configuration, which starts at $1999, is not so interesting to close watchers of Apple products. The new M4 Max Mac Studio is a solid update, given that the Mac Studio hasn’t been updated since the M2 generation. The M4 Max chip performs as you would expect. Apple provided me with a review unit elevated from the base model, with 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, 128 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of storage, which would cost $3699 on Apple’s site.
I was able to compare that Mac Studio with my own M4 Max MacBook Pro, which is powered by fewer CPU and GPU cores, and the results were as you might expect: The extra cores make a difference. But I’d expect that the base model M4 Max Mac Studio, which has the same cores as my MacBook Pro, would perform nearly identically in tests. In the Apple silicon era, generally all Macs with the same chip perform more or less the same.
Beyond that, there’s really not much to report about the new Mac Studio. Like the original model and its M2 follow-up from nearly two years ago, the Mac Studio is a powerful desktop computer that will satisfy the needs of pro users, amplified with a faster processor and support for the faster Thunderbolt 5 specification. Fewer Mac users than ever need a Mac Pro, because there’s so much power and expandability in the small Mac Studio enclosure.
That said, the arrival of the new M4 Mac mini may eat into the potential audience for the M4 Mac Studio. The high-end Mac mini model powered by the M4 Pro chip is roughly as powerful as the base-model Mac Studio at CPU-bound tasks, though the Studio comes with more RAM. What moving to the Mac Studio gets you is twice as many GPU cores, so if you’re doing GPU-bound tasks, you’ll want the Mac Studio. Plus, the Mac mini is tiny, like a shrunken-down version of the Mac Studio.
It’s a classic story. The Mac Studio steals from the Mac Pro, and the Mac mini steals from the Mac Studio. Meanwhile, the laptops steal from the desktops. (And the iPhones steal from the laptops? I’m not sure how far this story goes before it falls apart.)
I spent several years using an M1 Mac Studio as my main Mac, and it was great. If you’re someone who doesn’t need to move around with your Mac (if you do, consider a MacBook Pro instead) and really taxes GPU cores in the work you do, the Mac Studio continues to be an excellent option. I wish I had more exciting new stuff to report about, but the truth is that the M4 Max Mac Studio is the same Mac Studio we all know… it’s just on M4 now.
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