The best thing about this studio that it has zero upsell potential. With the M2 line, for a near-maxed out m2 pro's price one could get a better studio. Now the 64 GB 8-pcore M4 Pro is nearly the same as the base studio, which only has 36gb ram. To increase the ram, one has also upgrade the cpu, skyrocketing the costs. This gen, it's easy to stick with the mini for anyone not dependent on gpu power.
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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 might not like it, but the only pass I would give Apple is if they make the M4 Ultra for the Mac Pro. I just could not justify the extra $3,000 between the Studio and Pro for the same specs, I’d just be spending that on case, PSU, and ports which is not worth the extra cost. So the Mac Pro needs something to stand out. And if that is the case, I’ll get the Mac Pro.
Edit: scratch that. Just saw the news Apple confirmed M4 doesn’t have ultra fusion.
Edit: scratch that. Just saw the news Apple confirmed M4 doesn’t have ultra fusion.
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That is exactly the problem. These peripheral manufacturers keep releasing USB-A products as long as computers come with them. It needs to end.
If you have any other current Mac, you would also not be able to use old dongles because USB-A has been phased out there a long time ago. If these dongles don’t work with an adapter or the manufacturer doesn’t offer a USB-C version, drop that manufacturer. It isn’t difficult for them to replace USB-A. They just choose not to make any investments into their customers. If they don’t care about you, why would you care about them? Vote with your wallet.
Well Apple clearly chose to cater to that crowd though, so they have made their point. Also it is much easier said than done, when discussing dropping profession software suites, some are hardware / machine bound and any change means millions of investment needed.
The dumbest marketing strategy of all time? Why on Earth would they make an M4 Ultra, then call it an M3 Ultra? Obviously not the case.
Perhaps there was no space left on the M4 die for an UF connector.
This.
I could be persuaded otherwise when benchmarks appear (3D rendering might get a useable speed boost because of the hardware raytracing), but it's a shedload of money for marginal gains on the CPU front.
I agree with those saying that releasing the Ultra as an M3 doesn't make sense.
So I conclude Apple did this only because they weren't able to produce an M4 Ultra in time. They must be struggling to merge the two Max chips. To make up for this, and keep the model relevant for AI development, the max RAM on the Ultra is, for the first time, 4x the max RAM on the Max (512 GB vs. 128 GB) (rather than 2x) which should be appealing to those who are working on very large models. Though it still does have (two of) the older (20 TOPS) M3 neural engines, rather than the newer (38 TOPS) engine on the M4, and Apple promoted the latter as being a valuable advancement for AI.
This Ultra also differs from past Ultras in that its max storage is upped to 16 TB, twice the Max's, where before they had the same max storage.
Definitely a win for Gurman, but I have to wonder how Apple feels about him stealing their thunder. Normally you'd think Apple wouldn't like this, but I wonder if Apple authorized these leaks, thinking Gurman's audience would bring more attention to this announcement (?).
So I conclude Apple did this only because they weren't able to produce an M4 Ultra in time. They must be struggling to merge the two Max chips. To make up for this, and keep the model relevant for AI development, the max RAM on the Ultra is, for the first time, 4x the max RAM on the Max (512 GB vs. 128 GB) (rather than 2x) which should be appealing to those who are working on very large models. Though it still does have (two of) the older (20 TOPS) M3 neural engines, rather than the newer (38 TOPS) engine on the M4, and Apple promoted the latter as being a valuable advancement for AI.
This Ultra also differs from past Ultras in that its max storage is upped to 16 TB, twice the Max's, where before they had the same max storage.
Definitely a win for Gurman, but I have to wonder how Apple feels about him stealing their thunder. Normally you'd think Apple wouldn't like this, but I wonder if Apple authorized these leaks, thinking Gurman's audience would bring more attention to this announcement (?).
Have you confirmed that this M3 Ultra cannot do hardware accelerated 8K encoding? That seems like a stretch that it wouldn't, given the fact that the M4 Max can.
Edit: I just saw that another commenter replied with a screenshot showing the encoding capabilities of the M3 Ultra. It will clearly do 8k hardware encoding.
Sit this down mate, chillout. There really is no need for so much emotion.Dude. YOU already replied to the source. Why don't YOU quote where I said anything about the m5 Max memory. Go ahead. I will wait. Oh right, you can't. You are shooting from the hip so much you can't even remember what you have replied to or to whom.
And, what the heck was I WRONG about? That gurman only got it 'right' the day before the formal announcement? Oh geez, I am RIGHT about that. So hard for some people to apply reading skills apparently. But I will say it again, NOT IMPRESSED THAT GURMAN ONLY GOT IT RIGHT LITERALLY THE DAY BEFORE THE ANNOUNCEMENT.
Feel free to point out what I have said about Gurman that was wrong. You can't. Factually I have been correct. My opinion is the facts don't support the praise you give him. sorry to have offended you with that. You must have thin skin.
definitely happy about having USB-A ports as a lot of my large capacity drives are USB-A. For me that's a downside to the Mac mini.
I don’t get this. The M5 chip family is likely to be announced before the end of 2025. Why bother with the M4 Max in the Mac Studio at this late date?
No Base memory increase
£400 just to get it to 64GB memory
But oh no - you have to pay another £300 for a tiny bump in the processor - just to make that option available...
Apple takes the absolute piss.. As ever - 2 years late and a waste of everyone's time..
£400 just to get it to 64GB memory
But oh no - you have to pay another £300 for a tiny bump in the processor - just to make that option available...
Apple takes the absolute piss.. As ever - 2 years late and a waste of everyone's time..
MKBHD and ijustine would like a word with you
You think either of those guys are using Macs with 16TB system drives? Total system storage, sure, but TB5 / 10GbE is surely adequate for their video work.
So you can't back up your false assertions on what you claim I said? Cool.
Being condescending doesn't make you right. You are about as accurate as Gurman a few months out. But this is boring, you want to believe Gurman is helpful. Great.
Now that the Studio has been released and we don't have to speculate any more, I am more interested in the disk access speeds as a function of storage size. My original M1 Ultra has insane disk access speeds but there was a marked increase from 512 gb to 8 tb, with I think 4 being the sweet spot (7000 MB/s write, 5700 MB/s read). I wonder if the do not yourselfers are getting the same.
But you want to go on talking about Gurman, cool.
Because Pro desktops are a very low priority for Apple, so they get the new chips last. Be thankful they're not still on M2.
They didn't even bother updating the Mac Pro, which presumably would have just required a slightly revised logic board for the M3U.
I’m pretty sure that very few people need 16TB of storage. If you do, you can just get a 1 or 2TB Mac Studio and plug it into an OWC Thunderbolt 5 RAID system and save thousands of dollars. Anyone with one working brain cell would know better than to pay Apple $6900 to go from 1TB to 16TB of storage. Or if you don’t need the warranty and can repair it yourself, just find a compatible 16TB of storage modules (not technically SSDs since the storage controller is on the chip), and upgrade the Mac Studio yourself to 16TB and save yourself $6000
It's my understanding that Apple continues to have product development run by small teams rather than by the marketing team, so each product is ready when it's ready. I'm sure there is some coordination in terms of components, of course. I don't think we want Apple to hold computers until the whole line is ready at once. That would slow things down even further, wouldn't it?
Anyway, if you'd rather use an M5 Max ASAP rather than an M3 Ultra now, wait for the next MacBook Pro. If you want to wait for an M4 Ultra or M5 Ultra, wait. If something is available that does what you need it to do now and you can afford it, get it....
Wow, you keep rambling, lol.
You replied "it's a rumor site..." to a comment making baseless claims about M5 Max performance implying there is some merit. What don't you understand?
Voting with our wallet is what we're doing when we buy Macs with USB-A ports. There are a lot of use cases where USB-A is a better solution than C, or at least a solution that can't readily be produced with C. The fact that the new Studio has USB-A checks a box for people (like me) with those use cases.
Where does someone get off using the word scam, as in "...the biggest scam ever?" A Mac Pro when it surfaces will simply be whatever it is. Buy or do not buy. No scam.
Studios are pretty much the perfect desktop box for visual design studios not doing Star Wars type stuff. The biggest limiter on sales IMO has been the late release dates, pushing folks who cannot wait [me] into buying MBPs and force-fitting them into desktop work.
Apple probably prefers that I bought a loaded MBP instead of a Studio. And TBH it works great! Just barely enough ports for me to be able to kludge it into being an excellent desktop box. And yes, I do utilize the MBP's fine display. Two 32" Viewsonics are placed side-by-side in a shallow V with the 16" MBP below.
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That [Ultra] is simply what Apple calls it when they marry two chips. Just a name. If Apple marrys two M4s or M5s (my guess) in a Mac Pro they will probably also call it an Ultra.
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