Apple Mac Studio (Early 2025) Review: Renewed vigor with M4 Max and M3 Ultra

The new Mac Studio continues Apple's practice of placing its homegrown Arm-based chips into a workstation chassis far more compact than what we find in its PC counterparts. While you might not immediately be clued into just how powerful Apple's new Mac Studio is by looking at it, don't be fooled. While the previous generation Mac Studio with M2 Ultra was powerful, Apple has dialed up performance even more with this generation.

We don't often test pre-built workstations, but we couldn’t turn down the chance to review two configurations of the new Mac Studio: a lower-end system with the M4 Max and a higher-end configuration with what is currently Apple's most powerful processor, the M3 Ultra.

Apple is aiming the Mac Studio with M4 Max at creative professionals, particularly photographers, video editors, and engineers (among others). The M3 Ultra-equipped variant is equipped to handle more demanding tasks like LLMs and scientific research.

Design of the Mac Studio (2025)

Apple has not changed the design of this year's Mac Studio, which is a good thing. The chassis is 7.7 inches wide, 7.7 inches deep, and 3.7 inches tall. Our M4 Max review unit weighs 6.1 pounds, while our M3 Ultra unit weighs a more substantial 8.0 pounds due to its inclusion of a larger copper heatsink to keep thermals in check.

Although the two systems look identical from the front, some internal differences exist. The M4 Max system has two USB-C ports up front that support 10 GB/s speeds and an SDXC (UHS-II) card slot. The M3 Ultra also has an SDXC card slot, but its two USB-C ports support Thunderbolt 5 at speeds up to 120 Gb/s.

The port allotment on the back of the two systems is identical. You'll find four Thunderbolt 5 ports, two USB-A ports (5 Gb/s), an HDMI 2.1 port, 3.5 mm headphone jack, and a 10 Gb/s Ethernet port. The Mac Studio has Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 for wireless connectivity. Even though Wi-Fi 7 is becoming more commonplace on high-end PC motherboards, laptops, and desktops, Apple hasn't yet made that shift with the Mac Studio.

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Above the rear ports you'll find a large panel with exhaust holes for the internal fan. Cool air is drawn in from the bottom of the unit.

We’ve grown accustomed to Macs not allowing for hardware upgrades post-purchase (with the exception of the Mac Pro's storage). That remains the case with the Mac Studio. CPU, RAM, and storage configurations must be selected at the time of purchase. If you get your Mac Studio home and want to later add more memory, you’re out of luck. Technically, the internal SSD is removable, but Apple’s on-SoC encryption protocols make a DIY change difficult. Some third parties have developed SSD modules that reverse-engineer Apple’s efforts, but that’s a risky proposition for a workstation-grade system that starts at $1,999 and can creep into 5-digit territory with all the trimmings.

Mac Studio Specifications

M3 Ultra and M4 Max Performance on the Mac Studio

The M4 Max is a known quantity; This is the same chip that debuted with the most recent refresh of the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros. Our M4 Max review unit has a 16-core CPU (12 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores), 40-core GPU, 128GB of unified memory, and a 128GB SSD.

The M3 Ultra is the more interesting of the two chips, and not just because it isn’t called the M4 Ultra. Apple’s official response to the lack of an M4 Ultra is that not every generation of its M-Series chip will get an “Ultra” variant. So, that leaves us with the M3 Ultra, which joins together two M3 Max chips (they are joined using what Apple eloquently calls “UltraFusion”). The 184 billion-transistor chip inside our review unit has 32 cores (24 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores) and can be paired with up to 512GB of unified memory (256GB in our review unit) and delivers a maximum of 819 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Apple says that customers opting for the full 512GB allotment can run large language models (LLMs) that have up to 600 billion parameters completely within memory.

Given that our review unit also has a fully-enabled version of the M3 Ultra, it also incorporates 80 GPU cores, up from a maximum of 70 on the previous-generation M2 Ultra. It also has a 32-core neural processing unit (NPU) and a dedicated hardware media engine for H.256, HEVC, and ProRes encoding/decoding.

Joining our M3 Ultra and M4 Max review units in our testing are two PC-centric workstation chips: Intel’s Xeon W9-3495X and AMD’s Threadripper Pro 5995WX. We already had systems built around these processors in-house, so it seemed appropriate to compare them. The Xeon w9-3495X is a 56-core chip with a $5,889 MSRP. The Threadripper Pro 5995WX is a 64-core chip with a suggested retail price of $6,499. Those are before being built into systems, so it's a big difference from Apple, which makes entire PCs, not just chips.

We started our benchmarks with the Geekbench 6.4 CPU test. Here, the M3 Ultra delivered a single-core score of 3,349, putting it well ahead of the M2 Ultra (2,815) and beyond what’s possible with our AMD and Intel workstation systems. Apple’s decision to use two different generations of SoCs in the new Mac Studio shows the first quirk in our testing when it comes to the M4 Max. The M4 Max uses TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process node, along with a new, faster, and more powerful CPU architecture. The M3 Ultra, on the other hand, is using a first-generation 3nm TSMC node.

Geekbench reported that our M3 Ultra ran at 4.05 GHz, while the M4 Max ran at 4.5 GHz. As a result, the M4 Max put up a single-core score of 4,113. Multi-core performance was surprisingly close between the two, despite the M3 Ultra having double the cores. The M3 Ultra scored 27,929 on the multi-core benchmark, while the M4 Max wasn’t too far behind at 26,966.

Our file transfer test involves copying 25GB of mixed media files. The M3 Ultra finished the task, recording 2,685 MBps along the way, while the M4 Max hit 2,441 MBps, essentially tying the result of the last M2 Ultra Mac Studio that we tested.

The Mac Studio with M3 Ultra really stretched its legs in our Handbrake test, which involves transcoding a 4K video file to 1080p. The M3 Ultra completed the task in just one minute and 16 seconds compared to one minute and 56 seconds for the M4 Max. The Mac Studio with M2 Ultra finished in 2:45. The Xeon and Threadripper systems finished the transcode in roughly 2:40.

Moving on to the Xcode benchmark, which we use for simulating a large development project, the M3 Ultra finished in 64 seconds, which was an oddity compared to the M2 Ultra, which took just 58 seconds. The M4 Max completed the task in 79 seconds.

Using Cinebench 2024 we stress tested the M3 Ultra and M4 Max over ten runs in the multi-core benchmark. The M3 Ultra started the test just under 3,000, but remained consistently between 3,000 and 3,100 through the subsequent runs. The M4 Max, on the other hand, hovered between 2,050 and 2,100. We also use Cinebench 2024 to measure CPU temperatures, and TG Pro is our go-to macOS utility for measuring this data. TG Pro doesn’t fully support the M3 Ultra yet, but showed a system temperature of 43 degrees Celsius, while the M4 Max measured 42 degrees Celsius.

We use the Blender benchmark for testing performance applying visual effects and 3D modelling. We tested the CPU and GPU on the Mac Studio systems, while only the CPU was tested on the Xeon and Threadripper systems. While the M3 Ultra put up a valiant fight in Monster (339.9 samples per second), it was still no match for the core-packed Xeon (446.67) and Threadripper (485.33). The M4 Max was further behind at 240.52. It was a similar story in Junkshop, where the M3 Ultra and M4 Max recorded 243.2 and 153.9, respectively, compared to 302 and 350 for the Xeon and Threadripper. Finally, the Classroom test (173.3 for the M3 Ultra, 104.28 for the M4 Max) chalked up another win for the x86-64 stalwarts (212.33 for the Xeon, 230 for the Threadripper).

However, the M3 Ultra had the last laugh when switching to the GPU testing where it absolutely clobbered the competition. The M3 Ultra hit 3,246.45 samples per second in Monster, 1,581.17 in Junkshop and 1,643.26 in Classroom. The M4 Max also had a strong showing at 2,344.09, 1,271.57, and 1,234.93, respectively.

To test the gaming acumen of the new Mac Studios, I opted to try Resident Evil Village. I tested both systems with a 49-inch Philips Evnia 8000 DQHD 240 Hz QD-OLED gaming monitor. The game looked absolutely brilliant with all detail settings maxed out and with MetalFX upscaling turned on. I saw around 100 fps on the M3 Studio and around 80 fps on the M4 Max at 5120 x 1440.

My daily driver is a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro processor and 36GB of RAM. Either variant of the Mac Studio was overkill for my daily needs. I was never left wanting for more performance while gaming, editing photos in Pixelmator Pro (now an Apple app), or editing videos of my kids.

Software and Warranty on the Mac Studio

The new Mac Studio ships with macOS Sequoia 15.3.1, and required no additional OS or security updates out of the box (though by the time you get one, your mileage may vary). This is the latest version of the operating system that we first visited in our review of the 14-inch MacBook Pro in late 2024. Apple hasn’t given macOS a significant design overhaul in many years, and most of the updates to the operating system have been iterative and mostly fly under the radar.

The biggest addition to Sequoia is Apple Intelligence, which makes better use of context clues to find information in your treasure trove of digital data. Apple Intelligence also means that Siri is no longer dumber than a box of rocks when it comes to answering complex (and sometimes, rather basic) queries thanks to integration with ChatGPT. However, a fully rebuilt Siri is still way off in the distance for Mac users. Continuity updates mean that you can now mirror your iPhone on your macOS desktop using iPhone Mirroring, and you can drag and drop files and media between your Mac and iPhone. There are also quality of life improvements to Apple’s pack-in apps like Safari, Mail, and Messages.

There's no egregious bloat among the included software. Apple’s usual array of programs that are preinstalled include Safari, Maps, Notes, FaceTime, Mail, and Calendar. Apple also wants to lure you in on the recurring revenue train with its popular services like Apple Music and Apple TV. All of Apple’s apps, and a significant segment of third-party apps natively support Apple Silicon. After all, Apple first made the shift to its in-house chip designs in late 2020. For developers that haven’t yet gotten onboard the Apple Silicon train, Rosetta 2 serves as a translation layer between older apps designed for x86 software. When you first start an x86, Rosetta 2 automatically downloads from Apple to ensure that the app runs flawlessly.

All Mac Studios ship with a one-year warranty. If you’d like to add AppleCare+ coverage (Apple’s extended warranty), which in my opinion seems a little unnecessary for a desktop system, Apple charges $59.99/year.

Mac Studio Configurations

The base Mac Studio costs $1,999, which gets you an M4 Max processor with 14 CPU cores and a 32-core GPU. 36GB of unified memory comes standard, as is a 512GB SSD. Our M4 Max review unit was configured with the 16-core CPU/40-core GPU variant of the M4 Max, 128GB of unified memory, and a 1TB SSD, which retails for $3,699.

Our M3 Ultra review unit came with a 32-core CPU and 80-core GPU. Add in 256GB of unified memory and a 4TB SSD pushes the price to an eye-watering $8,099. If you have an itch for the M3 Ultra but want to save a few bucks, you can go with a smaller SSD, less memory, or opt for the 28-core CPU/60-core GPU version. The base M3 Ultra with the 28-core CPU/60-core GPU, 96GB of unified memory, and a 1TB SSD costs $3,999.

If you want to fully max out the M3 Ultra version of the Mac Studio, opting for 512GB of unified memory and a 16TB SSD brings the grand total to $14,099. You don’t get a mouse/trackpad or keyboard in the box, so be sure to source those as well if you’re speccing out a new system.

Bottom Line

The Mac Studio is a fascinating product. For less than the cost of just a Xeon or Threadripper workstation processor, you can get a fully-functioning macOS machine with some serious horsepower under the hood. The M3 Ultra dominated most of our CPU tests, except for the single-threaded Geekbench test that favored the M4 Max, and the Blender CPU tests which favored the Xeon and the Threadripper with their huge advantage in core counts.

The M3 Studio blew through our Handbrake transcode test in record time, aced our file transfer test, and held its own on the Blender CPU benchmark tests against the Intel and AMD competition. However, when we switched to the GPU in the Blender tests, the Mac Studio blew the doors off the competition, with the M4 Max trailing not too far behind.

The new Mac Studios achieves these feats silently, as even under full load, I could only hear the dual internal fans if my ear was up against the exhaust vent. But for all its plusses, the Mac Studio still has some downsides. There’s no way to upgrade your memory or SSD after purchase, so you’ll need to forecast what your needs will be a few years down the road regarding hardware resources. Also, memory and SSD upgrade prices are far pricier than what you find on the PC side.

But if you’re firmly in the Apple camp, or even a PC stalwart that doesn’t mind expanding his or her horizons to the macOS realm, the Mac Studio remains a compelling choice in a compact package.