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Quick Mac Studio Unboxing with M1 Ultra!

5:36 video

Shall we unbox a Mac Studio? This is the brand new Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra, and if you’re wondering what $4,000 buys besides significant heartburn, it’s this.

The unboxing

  • The packaging looks a lot like the 24-inch iMac’s, and like the Studio Display’s I opened a couple of hours earlier: you pull from the side and the box comes apart and releases the computer. On top there’s a pretty large Apple sticker (I’ve never used one).
  • It’s pretty dense: the M1 Ultra version is about two pounds heavier than the M1 Max version, apparently because of the heat sink needed to cool what is essentially two M1 Maxes stuck together. It feels like a cinder block.
  • It comes with a braided black power cable, and I’m happy with the braided accessories Apple’s been putting in the boxes lately: they don’t tangle or get gross and feel more durable than plastic or rubbery cables.
  • Soft-touch material, tons of exhaust holes on the back, an air intake vent on the bottom with a laser-etched “Mac Studio” that looks like a wood router did it, as on the MacBook Pros. The rubbery ring on the bottom is meant to keep it still, but it isn’t very tacky, and the Mac will move around easily.
  • There’s a security slot on the back.

Ports

On the back: four Thunderbolt 4 ports, 10 Gb Ethernet, a power port, two USB-A ports, HDMI, a headphone jack and a power button. On the front, an SD card slot and two ports: USB-C on the M1 Max version but Thunderbolt 4 on this M1 Ultra.

Compared with a 2006 Mac mini

I compared it with my Core Solo Mac mini (the first Intel Mac mini, 1.5 GHz, released in 2006). The Studio is about twice as tall. The two have similar layouts: ports on the front (the old one had an optical drive), an air intake and a rubber pad on the bottom, and, funnily, both have nine ports on the back, 16 years apart. I wonder how much faster the M1 Ultra is than a 1.5 GHz Core Solo (30,000 times?); tell me if you know.

This will no doubt be the most powerful computer I’ve ever used, even though I work on servers, virtualization and hyper-converged systems daily. I can’t wait to set it up and then discover I can’t do anything to take advantage of the speed and feel really bad about my purchase.

Some links in this post are affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I may receive a small commission. See my ethics statement.

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