The long wait for an upgraded Mac Studio finally ended. A version with an M4 Max processor and (surprise!) an M3 Ultra chip launched Wednesday.
“The new Mac Studio is the most powerful Mac we’ve ever made,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering. “A complete game-changer for pros around the world — powering both home and pro studios — Mac Studio sits in a class of its own, offering a staggering amount of performance in a compact, quiet design that fits beautifully on your desk. With this new Mac Studio, we’re delivering even more extreme performance with M4 Max and M3 Ultra, support for half a terabyte of unified memory, up to 16TB of superfast storage, and Thunderbolt 5 connectivity. Mac Studio truly is the ultimate pro desktop.”
2025 Mac Studio sports M4 Max and…M3 Ultra?
Mac Studio is a compact desktop, but bigger than a Mac mini, giving room for an array of connectivity options. It targets graphics professionals and other business users. The first version came in 2022, but the last new one launched in 2023, with the M2 Max and M2 Ultra processors. The series skipped the M3 series… until now.
But the new model actually starts with an M4 Max, an enhanced version of the chips Apple put in the latest MacBook Pro, Mac mini and other computers in late 2024. The new Max iteration of the processor boasts up to 16 CPU cores, up to 40 GPU cores, and over half a terabyte per second of unified memory bandwidth.
It starts at 36GB of unified memory (AKA RAM), with support for up to 128GB.
Image: Apple
About that M3 Ultra processor
It’s not a typo: the 2025 Mac Studio can be configured with an M3 Ultra processor, not the M4 version. Nevertheless, it’s a big step up from the M4 Max version.
“It delivers nearly 2x faster performance than M4 Max in workloads that take advantage of high CPU and GPU core counts,” promises Apple.
The M3 Ultra offers up to 32 CPU cores with 24 performance cores, 50% more than any previous Ultra chip and the most CPU cores ever in a Mac. It also offers up to 80 GPU cores, more than any Apple silicon chip.
The 2025 Mac Studio with M3 Ultra starts with 96GB of unified memory, which can be configured up to 512GB. And it can be configured with up to 16TB of ultrafast SSD storage.
As for why it’s not an M4 Ultra, there’s speculation that Apple decided to reserve its supreme processor for a version of the Mac Pro expected in mid-2025.
So many ports
On the back: Four Thunderbolt 5 ports, 10Gb Ethernet port, two USB-A ports, HDMI port, headphone jack
Images: Apple
No matter the chip, the 2025 Mac Studio supports Thunderbolt 5, for data transfer speeds up to 120 Gb/s.
The M3 Ultra version can drive up to eight Pro Display XDRs at the full 6K resolution. The M4 Max option supports up to five displays.
Other connectivity options include a 10Gb Ethernet port, an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot on the front, along with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Pre-order 2025 Mac Studio now
Apple began taking pre-orders for the 2025 Mac Studio today. It’s available in 28 countries and regions, including the U.S.
Pre-order from: Apple
Mac Studio starts at $1,999 for a version with M4 Max, 36GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The M3 Ultra version starts at $3,999 for 96GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
The desktop can be configured at purchase with a range of faster processors, and more RAM and storage options, with the price going up accordingly, of course.
Deliveries to customers and purchases from Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Resellers begin Wednesday, March 12.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
