Apple Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) First Viewed: One Weekend, There are $8,000 Electric Power Company

Apple’s new top-notch Mac Studio is powered by the M3 Ultra Chip, which contains so much computing horsepower that it will never get the attention of most tech enthusiasts, let alone your average consumer. It starts at $3,999, but if you upgrade each spec to the best offer (including the surprising 512GB of unified memory), you land for an incredible $14,099.

As the price is clear, Mac Studio is not everyone’s computer. This is a workstation for those who have already thought about how to make their lives easier and more productive. If it is you, this investment can be paid for in relatively short orders with faster exports and more complete items. After all, time is money. And it really screamed. To give just one example, this is the first Mac to break a one-minute barrier in a long-running 4K export test in Premiere Pro.

Even so, I still guide most people to buy desktop Macs To M4 Mac miniif you need some extra wallop, then the M4 Pro version of this machine never damaged sweating in my photography workflow. Videographers and those working in resource-intensive 3D can offer better services through the M4 Max version of the new studio; view Our MacBook Pro reviews To understand the performance of this chip. It also comes at a more regular $1,999 entry-level price.

But even though I’m not a target market for “Ultra” studios, I still really want to get my hands on it after introducing it with Apple last week. New MacBook Air and Faster iPad air. World Health Organization Won’t Want to kick tires on a computer like this? Apple sent me a Mac Studio, which costs $8,099. This is a high-spec M3 Ultra with a 32-core CPU and an 80-core GPU; you’ll get a 32-core neural engine anyway. It also comes with 4TB of storage and 256GB of unified memory – half of the maximum amount I mentioned earlier.

These are impressive specs, but it must be noted that there are objective benefits to choosing an M4 Max Mac Studio model. It surpasses the M3 Ultra in single-core performance, the most critical element that makes most everyday applications feel “fast”. In both cases, the daily user experience is very sensitive, which is true in all Apple silicon products. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a reliable fast Mac.

In addition to substantial multi-core gain, it also needs to improve the super layer network, which can also provide some I/O advantages. Two front-end ports provide Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, and in theory, data transfer speeds up to 120GB/s on the M3 Ultra Studio. If you choose the maximum, you just need to get a pair of normal 10GB/s USB 3 ports in front. The back of the studio includes four Thunderbolt 5 ports, which is mainly a question whether you need peak performance in each available port. If your job requires a large number of external monitors, it’s also worth knowing that Ultra Studio supports up to eight monitors, while the M4 Max Model has five highest numbers.

At the back you will also find two USB-A ports, one HDMI port, 10 gigabit Ethernet and a 3.5mm audio jack. On the Mac Mini, the 3.5mm jack is on the front, which is more convenient for headphones, but less if you plug in a full-time speaker that doesn’t have anywhere. Like the MacBook Pro, the studio has a UHS-II SDXC reader, which is me Continuously Miss Mini. If money is not the object, will I upgrade the SD card slot? This is not a problem.

There is still a significant weight difference between the M4 Max (6.1 lb) and the M3 Ultra Studio (8 lbs); the latter has a tack on nearly two lbs, as it has a larger cooling module inside, which is made of copper compared to the Max’s aluminum hot link.

Like its ex, 2025 MAC Studio performed well on my former colleague Monica Chin Written two years ago. It’s still so real today. During a few days of testing, this thing laughed at my Lightroom editing, quickly completing Adobe’s AI noise and other effects, and I’ve never heard as much noise from any fan.

The M3 Ultra chip is overkill for many people. If you need this power, you already know exactly how to get the most out of it. This is for visual effects artists and animators. It is suitable for professionals working in ambitious audio and video production. Do you process large medical data sets regularly? Maybe you can bring all of these cores and memory to the fullest potential. As AI development continues to flourish, a configuration suite with 256GB or 512GB of memory may prove attractive to those interested in running complex LLM models locally on their machines.

I only have our Mac Studio Review Unit for a few days, so now I provide the usual benchmarks and set up some of these LLM test cases to evaluate its capabilities. In the coming weeks, I will also look for friends and experts in other fields that can fully appreciate the studio’s capabilities to understand their perceptions of their performance. If you want to see ideas or tests we have experienced, feel free to share them in the comments.

Chris Welch / Photography at the Edge
_{Shoot with Nikon Z6III}