Let’s start with the important thing: the Mac Studio M2 Max/Ultra It is the best equipment for professional use that you can buy. For people like me, who are dedicated to the creation of video, audio and text content, it is a true dream come true. It’s overly powerful, small, quiet, easy to transport, and takes up little desktop space. I don’t have to deal with a hulking tower full of cables and noisy fans to keep its components at operating temperatures, but I do get a hell of a lot more power.
Released in 2022, it was the machine we were begging Apple to release. Many of us don’t need a hulking machine like a Mac Pro, but a Mac mini or iMac just wasn’t enough. This halfway point was the ideal that we both hoped for.
The Mac Studio M2 Max/Ultra maintains its shape and exterior design, in almost all aspects it also maintains ports. In fact, if I put a Mac Studio M1 next to a Mac Studio M2, there’s no way to tell them apart. So, everything I mentioned about its external design in my review of last year’s model stands in this.
So let’s go to what really matters in this machine: its enormous power with the new M2 Ultra, the chip that incorporates the test equipment sent by Apple. Along with 192 GB unified RAM and 2 TB HDD. A true wild beast that eats absolutely everything I put in front of it.
Mac Studio with M2 Ultra: Ridiculously Wild Power
Apple’s new M2 Ultra chip is an untamed wild beast. I’m not exaggerating. In fact, it is the same one that incorporates the Mac Pro for 6,999 dollars or 8,399 euros. The only difference between the two machines is that one supports PCI expansion and the Mac Studio does not.
Inside there are 24 cores, 16 high-performance and 8 efficient. A 60 core GPU and 32 cores for the neural engine. In addition, it has a bandwidth of 800 GB per second to access memory.
For those who need even more graphics power, the M2 Ultra’s GPU can be configured with 76 cores. These are numbers so high that they are difficult to comprehend. What am I doing with so much power? That’s why Mac Studio is geared toward professionals who require all those cores to get their apps up and running as fast as possible.
And what about the M2 Max? There is also news in that regard. It is the other Apple chip, a little less powerful than the Ultra but not for that reason disposable. In fact, the M2 Max is already sufficient for a large number of professional tasks. For reference: I work with a MacBook Pro M1 Max both for writing content and for editing and producing video, and I still have a hard time squeezing all the performance out of it.
Chip | CPU | performance cores | efficiency cores | GPUs | motor neural | RAM |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
M2Max | 12 cores | 8 cores | 4 cores | 60 (expandable to 76) | 16 cores | up to 96GB |
M2Ultra | 24 cores | 16 cores | 8 cores | 30 (expandable to 38) | 32 cores | up to 192GB |
Mac Studio Performance
The synthetic tests make it clear. The Mac Studio is, along with the Mac Pro, the fastest computer Apple has ever made. Both computers have exactly the same chips designed by the company.
The fundamental difference between the two products is that the Mac Pro is designed to offer expansion via PCIe cards, with a very resistant case. While Mac Studio offers the same performance, encapsulated in the smallest possible way.
So, if you don’t require additional expansion, or use your equipment in a situation where the case must be as resistant as possible, the Mac Studio will give you the same performance in a significantly smaller volume.
By measuring the performance of the Mac Studio M2 Ultra, it handily outperforms any other Mac Apple has released in the past. It’s notable that the Mac Studio 2023 is nearly three times as powerful in single-core and twice as powerful in multicore as a 2019 Mac Pro with the fastest Intel chips it was available in when it was still shipping. A team that had a price of about 9,000 euros, at the time.
But synthetic evidence tells half the story. On a day-to-day basis, working with text, editing images in Photos or Lightroom or video editing in Premiere Pro, Mac Studio has behaved in an exemplary way. With 128 GB of unified memory, I can keep all the professional applications I use on a daily basis open and work without a single sign of performance degradation.
I have edited this video, using clips in 4K quality with 10-bit color (4:2:2), with preview, in the editor at maximum quality using Premiere Pro, and I have been able to work in the timeline completely and completely fluid. By comparison, with my MacBook Pro M1 Max, I can do it, but with 1/4 preview quality of the video clips.
The increased performance for video editing means that I can work on color correction at any time, at any point, with the video playing at full quality in real time. It is an example of many, which in this case makes a big difference and manages to save a lot of time.
Higher performance means shorter video export times. With the same video, the time of render with Mac Studio 2023 was 4 minutes and 34 seconds. With a MacBook Pro M1 Max it was 8 minutes and 51 seconds.
All this in absolute silence. If the Mac Studio’s fan was active, I never heard it. In the past, to get similar results you had to resort to a $9,000 Mac Pro or invest $3,000 to $4,000 in a professional edition PC mounted in a tower ten times the size, plus the handicap of having to use Windows.
Connectivity and expansion
The Mac Studio 2023 maintains all the ports of the Mac Studio 2021. Two USB-C or Thunderbolt 4 —in the case that it incorporates M2 Ultra— and an SDXC slot on the front, four Thunderbolt 4 ports, 10 Gb Ethernet, two USB-A , an HDMI and a 3.5mm port for audio on the rear. All this allows you to connect dozens of accessories and peripherals of all kinds.
The HDMI port has improved in the Mac Studio 2023. It is now version 2.1 and supports resolutions of 8K@60Hz or 4K@120Hz. The 2022 version had HDMI 2.0, limiting it to 4K@60Hz displays.
But that’s not the only way to connect monitors to the device. Through the Thunderbolt port as well and supports the following configurations:
- Eight simultaneous displays in 4K resolution at 60 Hz.
- Six screens with 6K resolution at 60 Hz.
- An 8K display at 60 Hz
- You can also make combinations such as four Apple Pro Display XDR monitors and an 8K TV at the same time.
As for the wireless connection, it supports Wi-Fi 6E, which allows downloads at very high speeds, up to 2.4 Gb/second. And Bluetooth 5.3 to connect the latest speakers or headphones at low latency.
Mac Studio: the jewel in the crown
Apple has reached a level of sophistication with its Macs, combining the innovation of making its own chips, making its own software, and designing its own hardware that is simply unrivaled. It’s hard to find any cons to the Mac Studio. It is extremely fast, powerful, quiet and small. So much so that —leaving the screen aside— it is even highly transportable due to its small size.
It is the perfect equipment for thousands of modern uses for a powerful equipment. Gone is the need to use external components to increase the power of the purchased computer. This really has it all.
But, looking to the future, its small size may be its biggest drawback. The equipment cannot be updated. You cannot put more memory or later change the chip to a faster one. For some people this can be a problem. In my opinion, today’s Mac Studio will still be powerful enough for the next five to seven years.