Apple Announces New Mac Studio With M4 Max and M3 Ultra Chips

Apple has just announced a new Mac Studio today alongside its refreshed 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Airs with M4 chips. The new workstation was last updated in June 2023 with M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips, and Apple’s newer silicon once again makes the Mac Studio the most powerful model on the entire lineup.

“With this new Mac Studio, we’re delivering even more extreme performance with M4 Max and M3 Ultra, support for half a terabyte of unified memory, up to 16TB of superfast storage, and Thunderbolt 5 connectivity. Mac Studio truly is the ultimate pro desktop,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering.

Apple’s M4 Max chip was previously seen on the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros released last year. The new Mac Studio with M4 Max comes with an up to 16-core CPU, an up to 40-core GPU with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and a 16-core Neural Engine. The Mac Studio with M4 Max starts with 36GB of unified memory with up to 546GB/s bandwidth, with a maximum of 128GB of memory. The base 512GB of storage can also be upgraded up to 16.

The new M3 Ultra chip links two M3 Max chips together to provide even more performance than Apple’s newer M4 Max chip. Customers can configure it with up to 32-core CPU cores, up to 80 GPU cores with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and the neural engine is also faster with 32 cores by default. On the memory front, the M3 Ultra Mac Studio starts with 96GB of unified memory with an 819GB/s bandwidth, but that can be upgraded to up to 512GB. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio also offers up to 16TB of SSD storage.

Both chips add support for AV1 decoding, up to eight 4K displays, eight 6K displays, or four 8K displays. With faster Thunderbolt 5 ports, the M4 Max and M3 Mac Studio also support transfer speeds up to 120 Gb/s, up to 3x faster than the prior generation.

Overall, Apple says that its Mac Studio with M4 Max is up to 3.5x faster than Mac Studio with M1 Max, and up to 6.1x faster than the most powerful Intel-based 27-inch iMac. With the M3 Ultra model, the company promises up to 2.6x faster performance than the M1 Ultra model, and up to 6.4x faster performance than the 16-core Intel Xeon W-based Mac Pro.

This new Mac Studio starts at $1,999 for the M4 Max model ($1,799 for education) and $3,999 for the M3 Ultra model. Pre-orders are already available and shipments will start on March 12 alongside the new M4 MacBook Air.