Apple Mac Studio Review: A Hefty Little Powerhouse

Listen. The Mac Mini can do a lot of things and do them well. But there are just certain jobs that you’ll need more power than even the top-of-the-line model can handle. In those cases, it’s time to whip out the big guns, namely the Mac Studio. From its chunky size (compared to the Mac Mini) to its M4 Max or M3 Ultra chipset, the Mac Studio falls solidly in the realm of creative professionals and the AI coder wunderkinder. Plus, Apple Intelligence is baked in, so some editing tasks can be completed even faster.

The Studio is made for work, and you’ll be hard-pressed to tax it to the point where you’ll elicit anything but a soft whir from its fans. And the performance is just that damn good; the price is a horse of a different color. The base model prices are prohibitive for the average customer, and it only gets more painful as you look to expand the memory and storage.

But if your wallet can stomach it, the Apple Mac Studio is the new king of desktops for creative professionals and those with heavy-duty workloads.

Apple Mac Studio Review: Pricing and Configurations

There are two configurations of the Mac Studio to consider, and neither is inexpensive. The M4 Max base model costs $1,999 and has a 14-core M4 Max chip with 36GB of unified memory, a 512GB SSD, and a 32-core M4 Max GPU. A tricked-out M4 Max Mac Studio will set you back $5,800. That eye-watering price gets you a 16-core M4 Max CPU with 128GB of unified memory, an 8TB SSD, and a 40-core GPU. My review unit falls in between with $3,699 and has the 16-core M4 Max CPU,128GB of unified RAM, and 40-core GPU with only 1TB of RAM.

But if you need even more power, the M3 Ultra configuration starts at $3,999. The base model uses a 28-core M3 Ultra CPU with 96GB of unified RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 60-core M3 Ultra GPU. The highest configuration of the M3 Ultra Mac features a 32-core CPU with a ridiculous 512GB of unified RAM, a 16TB SSD, and an 80-core GPU. I’m not sure what type of work you’ll be doing with that much power, but it’ll cost you $14,099 for the privilege. Wowzers!!

Apple Mac Studio Review: Design and Build Quality

The Mac Mini I reviewed last year is every bit the dainty darling. When I picked up the Mac Studio, however, it immediately triggered some 80s baby nostalgia.

“HEFTY, HEFTY, HEFTY!”

The Studio is indeed hefty, weighing a solid 6.1 pounds, which jumps to an even eight pounds for the M3 Ultra model. It makes the 1.5-pound Mac Mini feel like a paperweight. And measuring 3.7 x 7.7 x 7.7 inches against the Mini’s 2 x 5 x 5 inches, the Studio easily dwarfs its little brother.

However, that doesn’t mean that the Studio is any less pretty. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a truly ugly product design from Apple? I’ll wait. While you ponder that question, I’ll give you a tour of the design. As expected, the exterior is made from silver anodized aluminum with gently rounded edges. The iconic half-eaten apple logo is stamped in the middle of the top of the device.

Two Thunderbolt 5 ports and an SDXC card reader are on the Studio’s front. And just like a mullet, the party’s definitely in the back as there are four Thunderbolt 5 ports in the back, a pair of USB-A 3.2 ports, an HDMI port, an Ethernet jack, a headset jack, and AC power input. All this sits below a large rear exhaust grille meant to distribute air into the system to keep things nice and cool. Unlike its smaller counterpart, the power button is located on the back of the device instead of the undercarriage, which was my one major qualm with the Mini.

If you flip the Studio over, you’ll see a protruding foot covered with holes. Those holes are part of Apple’s new cooling system, which moves cool air over the power supply and components. Mac Studio is pressed into the very bottom of the foot.

Apple Mac Studio Review: Apple Intelligence

Nowadays, increasing numbers of gadgets are jumping on the artificial intelligence train, and a lot of major companies are developing their own version of the technology. Apple’s no different. Apple Intelligence is baked into the Studio. In fact, my review unit has a 16-core Neural Engine to handle any AI-powered tasks such as photo or video editing, utilizing generative AI or even using one of those snazzy AI video conferencing backgrounds.

But Apple Intelligence has a few more tricks designed to make your work go just a little smoother. The Writing Tools feature can help work through a writer’s block with its summarizing, proofreading, and rewriting capabilities. Best of all, the feature can be utilized beyond Apple apps.

You’ll also get a helping hand from Apple Intelligence in your Mail and Messages app and Notifications. It will parse the information to the most important parts, making it easy to skim and go. This particularly comes in handy when you have a long email thread. And when it’s time to reply to an email correspondence, the Smart Reply feature can crank out a tone-appropriate response.

I touched on the photo-editing capabilities at the top of the section. Like Google’s Magic Eraser, Apple’s Clean Up feature can remove objects and people from photos taken with an iPhone and DSLR images. And instead of scrolling through a ton of old photos and videos looking for that specific shot, the search has been streamlined with support for natural language queries. You can also look for specific spots in videos.

Siri is also getting an Apple Intelligence power-up. The digital assistant is a much chattier and more conversational version of Siri that can pick up on context cues. That means you can refer back to something you or Siri said in a recent request, and the digital assistant will respond in kind. My favorite part about the new, improved Siri is that it doesn’t get tripped up when you stutter or have a case of brain freeze. And for questions that you’d rather not ask out loud, you can type in your query.

Apple Mac Studio Review: Software

The Mac Studio runs on the latest version of macOS Sequoia. The operating system looks to be a jack-of-all-trades as it aims to optimize productivity, video conferencing, security, and, in certain cases, some gaming. As a tab hoarder, the updated window tiling is my new favorite thing. It gives me easy access to multiple tabs to quickly move between Google Docs, Adobe Photoshop, social media, and Google Chrome.

And even though it’s not my default app, Safari, Apple’s web browser, is making a strong case for a promotion with the Highlights feature. It can suss out quick summaries, directions to a location, information about a song, TV show, movie, and other helpful information. And for those moments where I want to jump down a YouTube hole, Distraction Control restricts access for more focused web browsing.

As a journalist, I conduct a fair amount of interviews. Going back and transcribing the audio is a tedious experience that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. The Notes app eliminates boredom as it now supports audio transcription. And when I need to take benchmarking averages, Notes can become a makeshift calculator.

iPhone Mirroring lets iPhone owners interact with the smartphone via the desktop. It took a little less than five minutes before I scrolled through Instagram reels and every app on my iPhone. Being able to check my phone’s notifications without having to grab my phone is a definite time saver.

As scammers become more sophisticated with AI scamming tools, having a different password for every login is vital. But let’s be real: Many of us don’t follow that sage advice, leaving ourselves open to a serious security breach. The Passwords feature eliminates all that hassle, storing your passwords in one place, protected by end-to-end encryption.

For gamers, Apple’s new Game Porting Toolkit 2 gives developers handy new tools to bring games to all Macs and iOS devices. One such title is Cyberpunk 2077, a notoriously graphically-taxing title that can make lesser devices produce stuttering, unplayable messes. Assassin’s Creed Shadows will also make an appearance on Macs. This is a big step for Apple, as Macs have been written off as gaming machines due to the lack of support for console and PC games over the years.

Apple Mac Studio Review: Performance

There’s work, and there’s work. You know, the kind that could potentially put a colony on Mars, edit some of the world’s most breathtaking photography, or code the next technological boom. That’s what Apple has in mind with its M3 Ultra and M4 Max chipsets. The company has dubbed the latter “the world’s fastest CPU core,” while the former has decided to deliver “extreme performance” on both the CPU and GPU fronts. Both 3-nanometer chips are designed to deliver optimal performance without sacrificing efficiency, thanks to increased cores and unified memory. These chips mark the first time the big three of graphics performance come to the Studio: Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated mesh, and ray tracing.

While I would have loved to get my hands on both iterations of the Studio, I have to say that the M4 Max will suffice for a lot of creative professionals. According to Apple, the CPU with its 12 performance cores and four efficiency cores offers multithreaded CPU performance that’s twice as fast as the M1 Max and over 3x faster than the fastest 27-inch Intel-based iMac (Whew, remember when Intel in Macs was a thing?) On the graphics side, Apple claims “3.5x faster graphics performance than M1 Max, and up to 6.1x faster than the fastest Intel-based iMac.”

And if that wasn’t enough, here are a few other figures to mull over

• Up to 1.6x faster image processing in Adobe Photoshop compared to Mac Studio with M1 Max, and up to 2.9x faster than the 27-inch iMac with Core i9.
• Up to 2.1x faster build performance when compiling code in Xcode when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Max, and up to 3.1x faster when compared to the 27-inch iMac with Core i9.
• Up to 1.2x faster ProRes transcode performance in Compressor compared to Mac Studio with M1 Max and up to 2.8x faster than the 27-inch iMac with Core i9.
• Up to 1.6x faster video processing performance in Topaz Video AI compared to Mac Studio with M1 Max and up to 5x faster compared to the 27-inch iMac with Core i9.

All that’s a fancy way of saying that I threw everything I had at the littlest tank, and it just laughed at my effort. My 80 RAM-eating tabs in Google Chrome with its mix of G-Suite apps, videos, news, entertainment, and shopping sites? Nope. Resizing a cache of 300 RAW photos to 1080p in Photoshop? Done in 1 minute and 12 seconds. Rendering five 10-minute 4K videos on DaVinci Resolve? Completed in an average of 2 minutes and 53 seconds. It’s annoyingly good, and I vow to find something to trip this thing up. Maybe a flight simulator or some RAW video files? But for now, the Mac Studio considers my regular workflow a joke. And btw, I barely heard the fans outside of a soothing whir at times.

The Studio also had a big laugh at the expense of the synthetic benchmarks. For instance, it notched 3,926 on the single-core version of the Geekbench 6 test with a corresponding 25,885. The same test on the CyberPowerPC Gamer Supreme desktop, which has an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and the Falcon Northwest Tiki (Intel Core Ultra 9 285 CPU) yielded scores of 3,142 and 3,045, respectively. The Studio also kept its pace on the multi-core section, scoring 25,885. The Tiki took second place with 21,753, and the Gamer Supreme took third with 17,148.

I saw similar results on Cinebench 2024, where the Studio hit 2,071 and 186 on the multi- and single-thread tests, sweeping the two PCs out the door. On the Handbrake benchmark, it took the Studio 1 minute and 58 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p, speeding past the Tiki’s 2:31 and the Gamer Supreme’s time of 3:07.

Apple Mac Studio Review: Verdict

The Mac Studio is in a class of its own. Designed for the AI coders and Disney Imagineers of the world, this little box has enough power to tackle any work task, no matter how big. The M4 Max is an absolute beast of a chip that, with the right amount of unified memory (I suggest at least 48GB), is a nigh-unstoppable force to the average consumer. Hell, I think its target audience will have problems slowing this thing down, and that’s a great thing.

While massive compared to the Mac Mini, the Studio gets the job done and stays pretty quiet. It has a host of speedy Thunderbolt 5 ports, which will come in handy for a multi-display setup or whatever dock you want to plug into this thing. Is it a bit of a chunky customer? Sure, but like most desktops, it’s not meant to travel with you over the river and through the woods. The biggest obstacle for most consumers is the price, which, if you’re trying to get the most powerful system possible, will set you back almost $15K. That’s a wild proposition in any economy. However, the Apple Mac Studio is best in class for the world’s heavy-duty coders and creative professionals.