Why the Mac Studio Is the Most Impressive Desktop PC Ever

BY Parth Shah

Published 8 Mar 2022

Staying true to the event name ‘Peak Performance’, Apple announced the pinnacle of the M1 family of CPUs – M1 Ultra. The beast member of the M1 series is here to power the Mac Studio to revolutionize your workspace into a creative powerhouse. Here are the top features of Mac Studio that make everything else in the market obsolete and allow it to deliver the most impressive desktop experience.

1. Small Tidy Package

The Mac Studio basically looks like Mac Mini on steroids but in a good way and will sit perfectly under most displays, delivering a clean and minimalistic look to your workspace.

Thanks to the impeccable power efficiency of M1 Max and M1 Ultra CPUs, Apple was able to deliver the whole package in a single aluminum extrusion with a square footprint of just 7.7 inches and a height of only 3.7 inches.

Apple claims the Mac Studio can remain quiet even under heavy workloads. That’s largely due to double-sided blowers, airflow channels, and over 4000 perforations on the back and bottom of the enclosure.

2. Faster than the Mac Pro

Mac Studio with Studio Display

Powering the Mac Studio are the two highest-end M1 series CPUs – M1 Max and M1 Ultra. We are already familiar with M1 Max capabilities, so we won’t go much into detail with that one. Let’s have a word on the new kid on the block – M1 Ultra.

Thanks to the all-new UltraFusion architecture, Apple’s silicon team was able to interconnect the die of two M1 Max chips to deliver the fastest CPU on the market.

Below are the performance claims Apple makes with the M1 Ultra-powered Mac Studio

  • Up to 3.8x faster CPU performance than the fastest 27-inch iMac with a 10-core processor.
  • Up to 90 percent faster CPU performance than Mac Pro with 16-core Xeon processor.
  • Up to 60 percent faster CPU performance than 28-core Mac Pro.
  • Up to 4.5x faster graphics performance than the 27-inch iMac, and up to 80 percent faster than the fastest Mac graphics card available today.
  • Up to 12x faster than the 27-inch iMac, and up to 5.6x faster than 28-core Mac Pro when transcoding video.

3. 128GB RAM Support

With M1 Max CPU, you can get up to 64GB RAM in Mac Studio. But it’s the M1 Ultra that takes a giant leap with up to 128GB unified memory support. This comfortably beats the current graphics cards in the market available with 48GB video memory.

4. Blazing Fast SSDs

Apple has made sure not to bog down Mac Studio with a standard SSD. The company is offering up to an 8TB SSD option with up to 7.4GB/s performance.

This will surely help users deal with massive projects.

5. Rich Connectivity Options

Mac Studio is full of rich connectivity options. On the back, Mac Studio includes four Thunderbolt 4 ports to connect displays and high-performance devices, a 10Gb Ethernet port, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and a pro audio jack, not to forget Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 support.

On the front, you have two 10Gb/s USB Type-C ports on M1 Max and M1 Ultra models will switch it with 40Gb/s Thunderbolt 4 ports.

6. Display Support

Looking at the performance numbers alone, it’s quite evident for the Mac Studio to deliver extensive display support. And oh boy! It doesn’t disappoint a bit.

You can hook up to four Pro Display XDRs, plus a 4K TV — driving nearly 90 million pixels. Yup, that’s right. That tiny little package will run all of them without breaking a sweat.

The Mac Studio starts at $1999 for the M1 Max and is ready to shell out atleast $3999 to handle the workspace with M1 Ultra. Apple has already started accepting pre-orders for the Mac Studio and Apple Studio Display.

Whether you are rendering massive 3D environments or playing back 18 streams of ProRes video, the Mac Studio is here to make sure you go through them without any hitch. Which is your favorite Mac Studio feature? Are you hitting the buy button? Share your thoughts in the comments below.