Apple has announced its Mac Studio 2025 refresh with M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips, Thunderbolt 5 ports, up to 512GB of unified RAM, and more. The company claims that this is the most powerful Mac they have ever made.
The Mac Studio was last updated in 2023 with the M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips. Apple has skipped a year and finally brought the M4 chip to the Mac Studio, however, it is a bit confusing. Instead of releasing an M4 Ultra chip variant, Apple has only released the M4 Max chip variant of the Studio. The M4 chip was first introduced with the iPad Pro in 2024.
For the Ultra variant, Apple has created an M3 Ultra chip variant of the Studio. The M3 chip was first released in 2023.
Keep the confusion aside, the specifications for both chips are very powerful. Here’s how they stack up:
M4 Max
- 16-core CPU (12 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores)
- 40-core GPU
- 128GB RAM
- Up to 546GB/s memory bandwidth
- 16‑core Neural Engine
This chip is 75% faster than the M2 Max chip.
M3 Ultra
- 32-core CPU (24 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores)
- 80-core GPU
- 512GB RAM
- Up to 819GB/s memory bandwidth
- 32‑core Neural Engine
The CPU performance is 3.3x faster than its predecessor while the GPU is 6.4x faster.
Other updates in the new update include:
- Thunderbolt 5 support, which provides 120 GB/s data transfer speed. This makes it 3 times faster than Thunderbolt 4.
- Ray tracing support
- AV1 decode
- Support for up to eight 4K displays, eight 6K displays, or four 8K displays
In terms of connectivity, Apple has continued using Wi-Fi 6E on the new Mac, instead of Wi-Fi 7. The design is also the same as before, with the same number and type of ports.
The starting price is the same as before: $1999, while a fully maxed out version with M3 Ultra chip, 512GB unified memory, and 16TB SSD will cost your $14,099. Remember, this is without any display, keyboard or mouse.
Apple has started taking pre-orders today and will start shipping the product on Wednesday, March 12.
