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Mac Studio Unleashed!

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Apple just finished its March event and dropped a bomb: the Mac Studio, everything you might want from a super powerful, tiny desktop, though not tiny in price. (Luke Miani busted it open the day before.) I’ve already placed an order.

Size and ports

It’s about 7.7 inches square and just under 4 inches tall. On the front is an SD card slot and a couple of Thunderbolt or USB 4 ports, depending on the processor. On the back, four more Thunderbolt ports, 10 Gb Ethernet (you probably don’t need it, but I have a 10 gigabit network at home), a power connector, two USB-A ports (the biggest surprise of the day: USB-A on a new computer), one HDMI port and a headphone jack. Apple says there are about 2,000 drilled holes in the back for cooling.

Chips

  • M1 Max (as in the MacBook Pros): a 10-core CPU, a 32-core GPU and up to 64 GB of unified memory.
  • M1 Ultra: two chips fused together (every time they said “M1 Ultra” on stage I thought of MK Ultra), with a 20-core CPU, up to 128 GB of unified memory and 800 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple says it’s up to 5.3x faster than the i9 27-inch iMac and up to 5x faster than the 27-inch iMac with the Radeon Pro 5700 XT. It supports up to nine streams of 8K ProRes playback, has 57 billion transistors, can do 11 trillion operations per second, supports up to five displays, and goes up to 8 TB of SSD.

Pricing

  • $1,999: M1 Max with a 10-core CPU, 24-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 32 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage. You can configure the 32-core GPU, 64 GB, and up to 8 TB of storage, which gets pricey.
  • $3,999: the M1 Ultra, with a 20-core CPU, 48-core GPU and 32-core Neural Engine. The 64-core GPU is another $1,000. It comes with 64 GB of memory (up to 128 GB for $800, which seems like a deal in Apple memory terms) and 1 TB of storage (up to 8 TB for another $2,200).

What I ordered

I want a lot of storage and memory, but I can’t justify it: the 32 GB in my 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro is plenty, and I mostly use GPU power for Final Cut Pro exports. So I ordered the base M1 Ultra (64 GB, 48-core GPU), and I got my order in before the event ended. I also ordered the new Studio Display (27-inch, 5K, 600 nits, with speakers, mics and camera, and a couple of stand options). Stay tuned for my unboxing and first tests next Friday.

Is it what you thought, more than you need, or too expensive?

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