Apple’s new Mac Studio breaks records in more ways than one

Apple has announced a new Mac Studio to add to the company’s range of high-end Macs. In a surprising twist, the new Mac Studio will come in two flavors, one containing the M4 Max and one containing a previously unreleased chip: The M3 Ultra. It’s safe to say that this Mac Studio will break several records, all thanks to the staggering amounts of unified memory and storage that it’s equipped with — but also largely thanks to the eye-watering price.

The M3 Ultra is a new addition to the lineup. Apple says that it’s built for AI and promises to deliver up to 2.5x the performance of the M1 Ultra, although there’s no mention of how much faster it’ll be than the M2 Ultra. M3 Ultra, and thus the Mac Studio, will offer support for up to 512GB of unified memory, which, as Apple says, is “the most ever in a personal computer.”

The basic configuration of the new Mac Studio starts at 96GB, but you can deck it out with up to 512GB. That’s going to be huge for creators who need a lot of power to run various resource-heavy workloads. Apple teases that the Mac Studio can run large language models (LLMs) with over 600 billion parameters entirely in memory, so that 512GB is bound to come in handy, even if it’s a pricey upgrade.

As is usually the case with Apple, the new Mac Studio comes in several configurations. The top M4 Max setup includes, at most, a 16-core CPU and a 40-core GPU. Meanwhile, the top M3 Ultra setup provides a 32-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and up to a whopping 16TB of SSD storage.

Digging deeper into the M3 Ultra, the chip is made out of two 3nm M3 Max dies combined with Apple’s UltraFusion packaging architecture. This brings it to a whopping 184 billion transistors. The new chip supports Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, with each port equipped with a custom-designed controller placed directly on the chip. This means dedicated bandwidth for each of the ports, which feature transfer rates of up to 120Gb/s.

Apple promises a hefty performance boost from using the new Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra. Some of the highlights include up to 16.9x faster token generation in LLMs; up to 2.6x faster scene rendering performance, and up to 1.4x faster 8K video rendering. All of these comparisons are made against the M1 Ultra, though.

The new Mac Studio is now available for pre-order with availability starting on March 12. The base model costs $1,999 (or $1,799 for education), but the prices go up exponentially as you upgrade the chip, the memory, and the storage. The top configuration costs a whopping $14,099.

It comes just one day after Apple launched a new iPad Air with M3 chip, which Apple CEO Tim Cook teased on X with the phrase “there’s something in the air.”

The Mac Studio received no such clue leading up to its reveal, making its announcement more of a surprise. Although a new Mac Studio has been expected for some time, past rumors had suggested that it might not launch until around the middle of the year.

Now, though, professional and creative users will have an updated Mac Studio that’s designed to handle their demanding workloads. Anyone needing even more power should look to the Mac Pro, which is expected to be retooled with new chips later in 2025. Apple also launched a new MacBook Air, starting at $999.