- Apple highlights the Mac Workhorse studio
- He finally obtains the M4 Max
- The rupture star could be the M3 Ultra model, however
Mac studio fans, prepare for two major upgrades. Apple brings M4 Max to its power the size of a pint, potentially a significant increase in performance compared to the M2 Max and M2 ultra existing options. But Apple also unveils its most powerful Apple silicon piece to date, the optional M3 Ultra on the Mac studio.
I know, it’s a bit confusing. How can the M3 Ultra be more powerful than the M4 Max? But on the basis of the specifications shared by Apple, it is, and by a wide margin.
Aside from Apple Silicon’s updates, the only other notable hardware update is the transition to high performance Thunderbolt 5. Design on the 7.7 -inch square by a 3.7 -inch aluminum brick is unchanged, as is the port placement and the large grill at the rear.
Not that all this is important for the public of developers, 3D animators, designers and musicians of pro-level level of the Mac studio.
The new M4 Max and M3 Ultra
The M4 Max, which we saw for the first time on the MacBook Pro, begins with a CPU with 14 cores but is configurable up to 16 cores. The GPU begins at 32 cores but is configurable up to 40 cores. The Mac Studio will start with 32 GB of RAM, but you can do it up to 128 GB. Apple claims that the system will have half a teraoctet per second of unified memory bandwidth.
The M4 Max brings the Apple update architecture that offers, among other things, the accelerated mesh shaded in equipment and the Apple updated tracing engine.
But wait, there is more.
If the M4 Max is not enough for you, Apple has unveiled the M3 Ultra next to it. Even if it is built from a pair of M3 Max chips, the specifications of M3 Ultra are breathtaking. It delivers a processor of 32 cores with 24 performance cores and up to a GPU with 80 cores. It can support up to 16 TB of storage. An ultra-configured M3 Mac studio starts with 96 GB of unified memory and can be upgraded towards half a teraoctet.
M4 Max
Although I can touch a disconnected Mac studio, I couldn’t perform a single one (not that I would have known what to do with all this power).
Apple showed me both a Mac studio performing the M4 Max and another Mac studio performing the new M3 Ultra. In both cases, the performance was impressive.
In the first scenario, a Mac Studio M4 Max was connected to a range of studio screens and peripherals, including a box with 100 TB of storage, a quick 46 GB SSD, a 48 TB raid network and a PCIE speaker. All were connected to the Mac Studio via the new Thunderbolt ports at high speed.
The box was quietly performing Autodesk Flame, an Apple native silicon application that manages the VFX and the coloring of colors in real time. They showed us how the Mac Studio could manage dozens of diapers and thousands of elements for a scene of people who run on a street. We quickly added new buildings, lighting and atmospheres. Each task was fast and, it appeared, effortlessly 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 connected to a 6K studio screen and Running Cinema 4D, another native Apple silicon application.
On the screen was a beach scene almost returned. Instead of adding thousands of pieces of foliage by hand, we used LM studio and local LLM to ask that it wrote a Python script to put 1,000 Ficus plants in the scene. He did it, then we returned the scene using Redshift in about 12 seconds.
Running behind it was a pre-version of Cyberpunk 2077, which arrived at Mac in 2025.
He looked beautiful on the screen. The visuals were clear, the reflections were rich and convincing, just like atmospheres like fog. The game we have seen was based on the tracing capacities of the native rays of M3 Ultra, but Cyberpunk 2077 will support the most powerful path tracing when it ships on the Mac.
The price of power is not cheap. The M4 Max Mac Studio with 36 GB of memory will start at $ 1999, and the Mac studio with the M3 Ultra and 96 GB of unified memory will start at $ 3,999.
The two systems are pre-order now and shipped on March 12.
