Apple Mac Studio Review: A Rocket Engine in the Old Chassis

9.5/ 10
SCORE

Apple Mac Studio (2025, M4 Max)

Pros

• Really fast and quiet
• Compact
• Thunderbolt 5/USB4 added

Cons

• Can’t upgrade memory
• M4 Max model has two fewer Thunderbolt connections than the M3 Ultra, and the front ports aren’t USB 4

At this point, being fast is beside the point for the Mac Studio. Maxed out, it’s likely the most powerful Mac you can get at the moment, at least until Apple upgrades the Mac Pro. Now it supports Thunderbolt 5, but it’s mostly unchanged from the model that shipped in 2023, which was mostly unchanged from the original. It remains a well-designed compact desktop for Mac upgrades. 

But your ultimate decision about which Mac system to buy and which configuration to get will ultimately come down to how many Thunderbolt ports you want (and how many displays you need to drive) and how much memory you need. Both of those determine which chip you need to get and whether you can get away with a Mac Mini if your budget’s tight. 

The configurations aren’t that flexible if you’re trying to save money by balancing what you need vs. what you don’t. The base $1,999 configuration comes with 36GB of memory and that’s it — you can’t get more RAM without spending $300 to bump to the 16C CPU/40C GPU chip, which comes with 48GB of memory. Once you’ve moved up, you have a little more leeway in memory configurations, as long as you’re OK with either 64GB or 128GB. If you want 256GB you have to jump to at least the base M3 Ultra chip, and for 512GB of RAM or 16TB of storage, you have to opt for the top-end chip. 

None of this would be a big problem if you could upgrade the memory on the Studio. But as it is, unless you think you’ll never need more than 36GB of memory, the base model makes no sense. And if you do think 36GB of memory will last you for the next three-plus years, then you probably don’t need a Mac Studio and might be better off with a MacBook Pro M4 Pro, a kitted-out Mac Mini or an older Mac Studio. 

In some ways it just comes down to how many USB ports you need; it’s annoying that you have to spend $3,999 for the base Ultra model just to get Thunderbolt ports (for 40Gbps USB-C data transfer) in the front instead of slow 10Gbps USB. My Mac Studio is crammed into a relatively small space where it’s really awkward to get to the ports in the back.

All told, you can max out the new Studio for $11,999, more than the Mac Pro, which isn’t bad given its power. Thanks to the M3 Ultra, it specs better than the Mac Pro, at least for the moment. The M3 Ultra introduction points to a possible refresh of the Mac Pro, though.

As much speed as you need

My only question about the Mac Studio’s performance with the Ultra is how well it compares on AI-related tasks; given that it’s dual linked M4 Pro chips, it’s likely faster, but its M3-based architecture lacks the optimizations that Apple made for the M4 — so faster because more processing available, but unclear just how much faster.

The M4 Max is significantly faster on everything than the M3 Max, and the same number of GPU cores get a boost on the M4 generation — 40 M4 GPU cores are generally faster than 40 M3 cores. But the M4 Pro comes pretty close, or at least as close as you might get if it had more cores. That makes a Mac Mini a pretty solid alternative.

As I’ve said before, Apple silicon’s performance remains remarkably consistent, in the sense that it’s more or less directly correlated with the number of cores (though that doesn’t mean it’s true for any specific application, because they’re too squidgy when it comes to producing generalizable results). It also means that system performance of the MacBooks and desktops are pretty similar to each other, and what makes a MacBook Pro a compelling alternative to an Apple desktop.

As you’d expect, the Studio is pretty comfortable with things you might use it for, such as heavy video editing or using local AI models. I used a 70B Llama model run locally (roughly 50GB) which wasn’t bad for text chats — it got a little slower as time went on, but it was never slow — I’m not a programmer and only had a few days so really couldn’t stress the system as much as I would have liked. The same goes for some basic 8K video editing in Premiere Pro, with real-time playback of sequences with auto-reframe. I’m not sure either would have been as smooth with the 96GB memory configuration, but 128GB was definitely comfortable.

Given that playing games was pretty good on the MacBook 16 M4 Pro’s 20C GPU, it should be as good or better on the 40C GPU; the problem isn’t whether you can play games on the Mac or how well you can play; there still aren’t that many and all but a few of the new ones have been out for a while.

I do like the Mac Studio. It’s a powerful compact desktop that, given you spend enough money on it, can do almost anything most people likely need it to do. But unless you have an unlimited budget, you may want to first figure out if less expensive configurations or other systems will serve your needs as well.