Apple Announces, With Much Surprise, Mac Studios With M4 Max and M3 Ultra (!) Chips

Jason Snell, at Six Colors:

With the M4 Mac mini being powerfully tempting for desktop Mac users who crave power, Apple has upgraded the Mac Studio to blast past the mini in terms of performance. The base model, still starting at $1999, is powered by the M4 Max chip previously available only in the M4 MacBook Pro. And the new high-end Mac Studio, starting at the same $3999 price tag, is powered by a monstrous chip with 32 CPU cores (including 24 performance cores) and up to 80 GPU cores. It’s a chip never seen before anywhere — the M3 Ultra.

You heard me. For Apple’s fastest Mac ever — and it’s clear that it will be — Apple’s shipping a chip based on two high-end chips (fused together with Apple’s UltraFusion technology) from Apple’s previous processor generation. Weird, right? It seems like a few things are going on here: first, that the development of the Ultra chip takes longer and that Apple won’t commit to shipping an Ultra chip in every chip generation. Second, that the first-generation three-nanometer chip process of Apple’s chipmaking partner, TSMC, isn’t as dead and buried as generally thought. Just this week Apple also introduced an iPad Air with an M3 processor, and of course the new iPad mini shipped with an A17 Pro processor based on the same process.

This M3/M4 generational fork — the M3 Ultra chip debuting in new Mac Studio models alongside the M4 Max — was so unexpected that, during my embargoed press briefing about the news yesterday, I thought the Apple rep misspoke when he said M3, not M4, for the Ultra models. But no, the Ultra chip really is a generation behind. When asked the obvious question — why — Apple’s answer was straightforward: the Ultra chips take a lot longer to engineer.

The M4 Max Studio models are, computationally, equivalent (exactly, I think) with the M4 Max MacBook Pros that debuted October 30, maxing out (no pun intended) at 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, 8 TB of storage, and 128 GB of RAM. The M4 Max Studio models start at $2,000, but that starting price only gets you a 14-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 512 GB of storage, and a measly 36 GB of RAM.

The intriguing M3 Ultra models start at $4,000, which gets you a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 1 TB of storage, and a healthy 96 GB of RAM. Available upgrades to, uh, ultra out the Ultra models:

  • 32-core CPU + 80-core GPU: +$1,500
  • 256 GB of RAM: +$1,600
  • 512 GB of RAM: +$4,000 (only available with the 32-core CPU/80-core GPU)

SSD storage options for the Ultra models go up to 16 TB (a cool $4,600 over the base storage).

★ Wednesday, 5 March 2025