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Apple Announces New Mac Studio With M4 Max and M3 Ultra Chips, Thunderbolt 5, and More
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I'm not even convinced the Mac Pro will ever see another release
Very confusing. M4Max is worse than M3 Ultra? Apple needs to try and make better sense of their chips naming scheme for our sakes. M3 Ultra Ram is amazing. I wish that was as good as an Nvidia chip for Ai models because 512 Gb of memory is insane.
I think a lot of people don't realize how big of a deal the 512GB RAM option is. There's nothing else like it on the market, and the price is literally pennies when compared to similar solutions.
For comparison:
A single Instinct MI300X 192GB HBM3 card alone is around $35-40k.
For the price of less than a single MI300X card, you can have a 3 Ultra's interconnected with total 1.5TB of VRAM that will be able to run a non distilled, full 671B parameters models locally, like Deepseek R1 or llama 3.3.
Wild, this is a game changer.
That's literally knocking down AI costs by an order of magnitude overnight. If you don't believe me, just watch how quickly that 512GB RAM option will move into the distant future of delivery after it goes on sale.
For comparison:
A single Instinct MI300X 192GB HBM3 card alone is around $35-40k.
For the price of less than a single MI300X card, you can have a 3 Ultra's interconnected with total 1.5TB of VRAM that will be able to run a non distilled, full 671B parameters models locally, like Deepseek R1 or llama 3.3.
Wild, this is a game changer.
That's literally knocking down AI costs by an order of magnitude overnight. If you don't believe me, just watch how quickly that 512GB RAM option will move into the distant future of delivery after it goes on sale.
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Apple doubled the prices of their unbinned chip and only gave it an update to an M3. Now a fully configured Mac Studio is $20K. Has Apple lost their minds?
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Given the price of M* Ultra models, it's a tough call to have you pay more for a compromise or temporary filler IMO.
Why exactly you're disapointed? Just because of a number or some missing features/performance?
You can't upgrade the base model to 64GB RAM without a processor upgrade now, so this is a price hike overall. Might just buy a refurb M2 Studio now instead.
Always "fun" to dig into the configurator options to see the newly embedded price hikes like this
M3 Ultra haha. No M4? Apple Comedy.
The M3 Ultra is partly an M4 chip as it has Thunderbolt 5 ports.
The single core performance of M3 Ultra vs the single core performance of M4 Max will tell us more.
If it's the same then the M3 Ultra is actualy an M4 Ultra with a marketing strategy.
The single core performance of M3 Ultra vs the single core performance of M4 Max will tell us more.
If it's the same then the M3 Ultra is actualy an M4 Ultra with a marketing strategy.
- 32 Core CPU
- 80-Core GPU
- 819GB of Bandwidth
- 512GB RAM
- 16TB SSD
- 8 4K 144hz
-4 TB5 ports
Not sure how this is disappointing.
Spitballing here, beyond the standard Apple Tax™, I'm guessing that the Mac Studio (and therefore the M3 Ultra/M4 Max) are probably fairly low volume sellers, so gotta pay for the R&D some how.
Whatever the reason, this is ridiculous.
The new Mac Studio supports Thunderbolt 5 but the current Studio Display only supports Thunderbolt 3. WTF.
M5 Max is going to blow this out of the water no problems. And it’s almost here in the fall.
About double the industry prices… this is the reason why I keep going with external storage. Not quite the same speeds as internal, but with TB5 and in RAID 0, it’s no slouch.
or perhaps the m4 version faced technical hurdles and we won't see a m4 ultra. Maybe the next ultra be in the m5 family.
It also got a lot hungrier M2 Ultra was 295W, and now it goes up to 480W, according to Apple’s specs.
I agree 110%. Maybe Apple made a bad decision by putting the ultra into the studio. The Mac Pro makes more sense if only the pro had the ultra.
That's the most likely situation here
I'm pretty sure Apple didn't like having to put a new M3 "anything" out there ... but needed to release something here.
Then why did they not release it last year? None of this makes sense.
Lol, these are just your guesses, nothing more. Zero chance of M5 Max having 512GB RAM, heck, even having 192GB option.
That is what people said about M3 and why we didn’t get one when it made sense. As someone with three Ultra Mac Studios, I have no idea what Apple is doing and I certainly don’t get the good faith impressions that the Mac Studio and/or Mac Pro are going to remain. If Windows wasn’t so trash I would be back with PCs. At least they are consistent.