Apple levels up the Mac Studio with the M4 Max and unveils its most powerful chip ever, the M3 Ultra

(Image credit: Apple)

Apple upgrades the workhorse Mac Studio
It finally gets the M4 Max
The breakout star might be the M3 Ultra model, though

Mac Studio fans, get ready for two big upgrades. Apple is bringing the M4 Max to its pint-sized powerhouse, potentially a significant performance boost over the existing M2 Max and M2 Ultra options. But Apple is also unveiling its most powerful piece of Apple Silicon yet, the M3 Ultra as an option on the Mac Studio.

I know, it's a bit confusing. How can the M3 Ultra be more powerful than the M4 Max? But based on the specs Apple shared, it is, and by a wide margin.

Aside from the Apple Silicon updates, the only other notable hardware update is the shift to the high-performance Thunderbolt 5. The design on the 7.7-inch square by 3.7-inch tall aluminum brick is unchanged, as is the port placement and wide vent grill on the back.

The new M4 Max and M3 Ultra

The M4 Max, which we first saw on the MacBook Pro, starts with a 14-core CPU but is configurable up to 16 cores. The GPU starts at 32 cores but is configurable up to 40 cores. The Mac Studio will start with 32GB of RAM, but you can bump it up to 128GB. Apple claims the system will have a half terabyte per second of unified memory bandwidth.

The M4 Max brings with it Apple's updated graphics architecture that features, among other things, hardware-accelerated mesh shading and Apple's updated Ray Tracing engine.

But wait, there's more.

If the M4 Max isn't enough horsepower for you, Apple unveiled the M3 Ultra alongside it. Even though it's built from a pair of M3 Max chips, M3 Ultra's specs are eye-popping. It delivers a 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores and up to an 80-core GPU. It can support up to 16TB of storage. An M3 Ultra-configured Mac Studio starts with 96GB of unified memory and can be upgraded to a half terabyte.

M4 Max

While I got to touch a disconnected Mac Studio, I didn't get to run one on my own (not that I would've known what to do with all that power).

Apple showed me both a Mac Studio running the M4 Max and another Mac Studio running the new M3 Ultra. In both cases, the performance was impressive.

In the first scenario, a Mac Studio M4 Max was connected to an array of Studio Displays and peripherals, including a box with 100 TB of Storage, a 46GB fast SSD, a 48TB RAID array, and a PCIe enclosure. All were connected to the Mac Studio via the new high-speed Thunderbolt 5 ports.

The box was quietly running Autodesk Flame, a native Apple Silicon app that handles real-time VFX and color grading. They showed us how the Mac Studio could handle dozens of layers and thousands of elements for one scene of people running down a street. We quickly added new buildings, lighting, and atmospherics. Each task was fast and, it appeared, effortless for the Mac Studio and its M4 Max chip.

Mac Studio with M3 Ultra and Cyberpunk 2077

The Mac Studio with the new M3 Ultra was hooked up to a 6K Studio display and running Cinema 4D, another native Apple Silicon app.

On the screen was a roughly-rendered beach scene. Instead of adding thousands of pieces of foliage by hand, we used LM Studio and local LLM to request that it write a Python script to put 1,000 ficus plants in the scene. It did it, and then we rendered the scene using RedShift in about 12 seconds.

Running behind this was a pre-release of Cyberpunk 2077, which is coming to the Mac in 2025.

It looked splendid on screen. The visuals were sharp, the reflections were rich and convincing, as were the atmospherics like fog. The game we saw relied on the M3 Ultra's native Ray Tracing capabilities, but Cyberpunk 2077 will support the more powerful Path Tracing when it ships on the Mac.

The price of power is not cheap. The M4 Max Mac Studio with 36GB of memory will start at $1999, and the Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra and 96GB of unified memory will start at $3,999.

Both systems are on pre-order now and ship on March 12.

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A 38-year industry veteran and award-winning journalist, Lance has covered technology since PCs were the size of suitcases and “on line” meant “waiting.” He’s a former Lifewire Editor-in-Chief, Mashable Editor-in-Chief, and, before that, Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for Ziff Davis, Inc. He also wrote a popular, weekly tech column for Medium called The Upgrade.

Lance Ulanoff makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Live with Kelly and Mark, the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNBC, CNN, and the BBC.