Apple presented the new Mac Studio, a desktop that is positioned at the top of the range for power and versatility. This system, available with the M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips, is designed to meet the needs of professionals who operate in creative and technical areas, offering high performance and a wide range of connectivity options. The Mac Studio stands out for its architecture based on the Apple Silicon chips, which guarantee high energy efficiency and significant calculation performance. The M4 Max chip, ideal for intense working flows such as video editing, software development and photography, boasts a CPU of up to 16 cores and a GPU of up to 40 cores. Advanced graphic architecture, present for the first time on Mac Studio with the M4 Max chip, includes functionality such as dynamic cache, mesh shading with hardware acceleration and a second generation ray tracing engine. These characteristics improve fluidity in gaming and in the creation of content.
The M3 Ultra chip, on the other hand, represents the culmination of professional performance, with a CPU up to 32 cores (of which 24 performance cores) and a GPU up to 80 cores. This chip offers almost double performance compared to the M4 max in workloads that benefit from a large number of cores and a large amount of unified memory. Both chips are equipped with an enhanced Neural Engine, which accelerates artificial intelligence operations and machine learning. In particular, the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra, thanks to its ability to support up to 512GB of unified memory, is able to perform large linguistic models (LLM) with over 600 billion parameters entirely in memory.
The Mac Studio offers several unified memory options, starting from 36GB for the M4 Max chip model (supporting up to 128GB) and 96GB for the model with M3 Ultra (supporting up to 512GB). The memory bandwidth reaches 800 Gbps with the Ultra M3 chip. As for storage, the Mac Studio supports Ultraveloci SSDs up to 16TB, allowing you to store large quantities of data and content. One of the distinctive features of the new Mac Studio is the support for Thunderbolt 5, which offers transfer speeds up to 120 Gbps, three times higher than the previous generation. This allows you to connect high -speed external storage units and PCIe expansion chassis. The Mac Studio with M3 Ultra chip also supports up to eight pro display XDR with 6k resolution. Other connectivity options include a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port, an HDMI port, a SDXC, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards slot.
The Mac Studio is designed to integrate with Apple Intelligence, Apple’s personal intelligence system (available in Italian since early April). This system offers features such as writing tools, which help to rewrite, correct or summarize texts, and priority notifications, which reduce distractions. Siri has been improved to allow a more fluid interaction between writing and voice commands, and can answer questions about the Mac functions and settings. Access to chatgpt is also integrated, with the possibility for the user to check which information to share. The Macos Sequoia operating system introduces further features, such as the alignment of the windows, a new password app for the management of credentials, customizable backgrounds for video calls and improvements in safaris, including the “in evidence” function and a redesigned reading mode. For gamers, improvements to personalized space audio and game mode are planned.
Apple underlines the commitment to sustainability in the design of the Mac Studio. The device is made with over 30% of recycled materials, including aluminum recycled in the shell and rare lands recycled in the magnets. The company aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030 and uses renewable energy in its data centers. The Mac Studio is available for pre-order starting today, with deliveries and availability in stores starting from 12 March. The starting price is € 2,549, with a reduced price of € 2,299 for the education sector. Several configuration options are available on the Apple website.