Apple announced the new Mac Studio at its March 2022 hardware event, powered by its all-new M1 Ultra SoC. While it starts off reasonable (for Apple), at $1,999 in the US, if you want to beef it up with the best specs you can possibly buy, it's going to cost you a whopping $7,999.
That will get you an M1 Ultra with a 64-core GPU and 20-core CPU, 128GB of RAM and a ludicrous 8TB SSD. That's a lot of money, but to be honest, that's a lot of computer, too.
It's unlikely that most people would ever need this spec, but the option is definitely there for folks that want the absolute best Mac Studio that money can buy. Especially ludicrous is the 8TB SSD, which adds a huge $2,200 to the Mac Studio's price tag from the 1TB base spec.
The most egregious, though, is that when you buy the Mac Studio, the only thing you're getting in the box, even if you spend $7,999, is the Mac Studio itself and the power cord. Apple really wants you to spend extra cash on its peripherals.
Don't worry, you don't need that much
If you're looking at that price in disbelief, take some comfort that it's a bit overkill for what most people will actually need. The base spec is actually going to be more than enough for most people, with its 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.
Even most video editors should get by fine with a 64GB configuration with a 1TB SSD, especially considering that the Mac Studio supports Thunderbolt 4, so you can use external SSDs without losing much storage performance.
128GB of RAM is only going to be necessary for people that are doing heavy rendering workloads. If you're not making a big budget movie or doing heavy data science work, you probably don't need 128GB of RAM. And if you are doing that stuff, your company is probably paying for the Mac Studio anyway.
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