Apple’s Mac laptops and desktops have long had a home on the desks of creative professionals, but the introduction of the Mac Studio (starts at $1,999, $3,199 as tested) may be the biggest move Apple has ever made that’s aimed so squarely at creators. This is an absolute powerhouse of a machine, packed into a design that’s basically a tall Mac mini. With power to rival desktop workstations, a size that makes some of the most potent mini PCs feel chunky, and an unexpectedly rich collection of ports from the famously minimalist Apple, it’s the most powerful Apple Silicon Mac we’ve seen—and we only tested the M1 Max model, not the twice-as-powerful M1 Ultra version.
With the processing muscle to tackle big jobs—from media editing to workstation-class medical imaging and animation—it’s meant to find a home in any professional’s studio. And from what we’re seeing so far, it’s a smart buy for any video or sound engineer, animator, or digital artist that demands a high level of capability, but doesn’t want to sacrifice aesthetics at the altar of computer performance. If you’ve been dreaming of a stylish alternative to a workstation desktop, or a more powerful option than the sleek little Mac mini, this is the system to get.
A Whole New Mac: Design, Ports, and Cooling
The look of the Mac Studio is at once familiar and revolutionary. First, the familiarities: It looks like the Mac mini. It looks a lot like the Mac mini. It has the same extruded aluminum construction of the mini, from the 7.7-by-7.7-inch footprint to the mirror-polished Apple logo on the top. Viewed from above, the Studio looks a bit like an app icon rendered in 3D.
But it’s also very different. It’s taller—3.7 inches to the Mac mini’s 1.4 inches—and the rear IO panel has a different port selection. It also trades the mini’s black plastic rear panel for a design that sets the ports flush with the aluminum chassis, for a seamless unibody construction.
And the Mac mini isn’t the only past Apple product that seems to have been referenced in the new Mac Studio’s design. It also looks a heck of a lot like the square internal chassis of the PowerMac G4 Cube, just without the clear acrylic that Apple’s designers loved so much at the time. (I won’t be surprised if some enterprising accessory makers start selling a look-alike transparent stand for the Studio that echoes the G4 design.)
On the front, the Studio has two USB-C ports (on the M1 Ultra configurations they’re actually Thunderbolt 4 ports) along with an SDXC card slot, which supports SD 4.0 and UHS-I and UHS-II, the ultra high-speed bus interface used by higher-performance cards.
On the back of the small machine, you’ll find four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10Gbps Ethernet jack, dual USB Type-A ports, a single HDMI output, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Compared to other Mac products, it’s one of the most comprehensive port selections offered.
Even as Apple has started adding ports to products like the MacBook Pro (which recently saw the return of HDMI and the SDXC card slot), it’s also slimmed down the selection on products like the 24-inch iMac, which offers just four Thunderbolt 4 ports and a standard Gigabit Ethernet connection. As it stands, the only current Mac with better connectivity seems to be the highly configurable Mac Pro—but that’s a full tower desktop, with the option of adding additional graphics cards and connections over PCI Express.
The Mac Studio has two processor options: the M1 Max and the M1 Ultra. The M1 Max isn’t new—it was already being offered in the MacBook Pro—but the M1 Ultra was announced alongside the Mac Studio, and isn’t yet offered on any other Mac. It’s essentially two M1 Max systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) crammed into a single die, joined by UltraFusion, a silicon interposer that processes signals and communicates between the two halves to make the doubled-up CPU work as a single chip. (More on processor and configuration options later.)
Additionally, the Mac Studio has active cooling, with a double-sided blower and ventilation that draws cool air up from the bottom of the chassis and exhausts the hot air out through the ventilated back of the machine. Apple boasts that it has more than 2,000 perforations, but there’s probably not a huge performance benefit to having more tiny holes, even if it does look kind of cool.
The cooling system not only accounts for much of the Mac Studio’s height, but it’s also the source of a lot of the weight. Our M1 Max-powered review unit weighs 5.9 pounds, which isn’t bad for a system that is actually made out of a block of aluminum. But the M1 Ultra model is a bit heavier, with a full two pounds of additional weight. The extra heft is all due to the cooling system, which replaces the aluminum construction of the M1 Max model with copper in the M1 Ultra version. The rest should be identical, from the blowers to the ventilation, but that big chunk of copper makes it a heavyweight in the mini PC world.
Software: MacOS Monterey
No discussion of the Mac Studio (or any other Mac) would be complete without some explanation of macOS. Apple regulars may not need an introduction to the latest operating system, but Windows users that are Apple-curious should be aware of a few things, both good and bad.
The latest version of Mac software is Apple macOS Monterey. It comes with the usual Apple caveats, like the inability to run many Windows-friendly apps and utilities, and the need to get used to different shortcuts and function keys, along with a different mousing experience. There are very few things that Apple’s macOS can’t do, but it may take some getting used to.
If you want a showcase for what a PC can be with tightly integrated software and hardware, it’s hard to ignore how good the latest macOS version really is. Our own Ed Mendelson noted that the OS is both stable and secure, and praised the “elegance, coherence, and ease of use” that easily exceeds Windows 11.
Apple’s latest includes exceedingly cool features like Universal Control, which lets you pair your Mac with an iPad or iPhone, and use them like a second extended display, complete with cursor control and the ability to share files between devices.
If you pair a Mac Studio with Apple’s new Studio Display, which is launching alongside it (more about it in a moment), you also get to take advantage of Center Stage. Using the feature and the Studio Display’s 12-megapixel webcam, you can move around knowing that the camera will follow you to keep you centered in frame. (We’ve got a list of the 10 Coolest Things in macOS Monterey that gives you a nice sampling of some of the latest new features.)
Native apps like Safari and GarageBand are old hat by this point, but the introduction of Apple Silicon has added an additional incentive for developers to create especially for Mac. When it comes to media and creative production, the assortment of tools is huge and extremely polished. We got to try out tools like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, and they not only offer a deep set of professional-grade tools, but they also function flawlessly on this Mac, with some of the smoothest experiences you’ll ever see.
The result is literally thousands of apps that run natively. But there are still some that do not; for those, Apple offers Rosetta 2, an integrated emulation layer that lets you run older Intel-optimized apps on the new machines. It’s pretty good, and mostly seamless in the sense that you don’t have to actively turn it on, but you may encounter some noticeable lag when running older apps on Rosetta 2.
It also adds an additional wrinkle to Apple’s already fractured relationship with mainstream software—in addition to not working with common Windows tools or offering slightly different versions of the same software, there’s now the question of performance. When an app works well on macOS it’s spectacular—literally, one of the best computing experiences you can get. But if it doesn’t work, the results can range from choppy and slow to nonexistent.
Apple Studio Display: 5K Retina, With Sound to Match
The Mac Studio is made for use with the $1,599 Apple Studio Display. This 27-inch 5K monitor is pretty much exactly what Apple die-hards have begged for for years—a way to get the excellent Retina display of the 27-inch iMac without having to purchase the entire desktop computer.
Just running through the specs should be enough to impress most shoppers. The 5K display has a native resolution of 5,120 by 2,880 pixels, serving up 14.7 million pixels and over a billion colors. And while it’s not as bright as the Apple Pro Display XDR, it still offers 600 nits of brightness and P3 wide color, along with Apple’s True Tone technology, which adjusts the color temperature so that the display looks its best even as the room lighting changes.
The optional features, though a little expensive, are almost as exciting. The default stand offers simple tilt adjustment, but a dual hinged stand with height adjustment, extremely similar to the stand offered with the Pro Display XDR, is also available (albeit at a $400 premium). You can also get the display with nano-textured glass, if the standard anti-reflective coating isn’t enough for you.
But there’s more going on here than just a display. The Studio Display also has six internal speakers, with spatial audio support. Video calling is a major concern, with a three-microphone array built in, along with a 12-megapixel webcam with an ultra-wide lens and its own internal processor—it’s powered by an A13 Bionic processor, just like the iPhone, letting it support advanced features like Center Stage, Dolby Atmos, and other spatial audio formats, and the built-in Siri voice assistant.
On the back of the machine you’ll find a Thunderbolt port for connecting to the Mac Studio, or any other current Mac, as well as a trio of USB-C ports that can be used to charge devices or connect storage and peripherals.
Traditionally, this sort of 5K display was found only in Apple’s 27-inch iMac and iMac Pro, but there was another solution for use with Mac desktops and laptops—the LG UltraFine 5K. Until recently, the LG was even listed in the Apple Store as “The perfect companion for your Mac,” and it had a somewhat similar price of $1,299. The similarities went past the screen size and resolution—LG’s 5K monitor also boasted a Thunderbolt port for connecting the display, and USB-C for peripherals, along with built-in webcam and speakers.
Apple’s version of the 5K monitor, however, delivers a better, brighter picture, a sturdier stand, and upgraded, well, everything. The webcam and speakers are better, the backlight is brighter, the Thunderbolt port is faster, and the optional nano-textured glass and adjustable-height stand make it a fantastic option for shoppers willing to spend a little more to pull out all the stops.
If you want an even better display, the Studio will also support the Pro Display XDR, the 6K monitor that sells alongside the Mac Pro desktop—our Mac Studio unit can support up to four of them simultaneously, and the M1 Ultra model can do even more.
The Studio Display’s overall quality is excellent, and even without running our more involved monitor tests, the picture quality is noticeably crisp and richly colored. In a past life as a TV reviewer, I would have gushed about the deep contrast and inky blacks that verge on OLED quality, not to mention some excellent brightness and vivid colors. (We’ll have a full, tested review of the Studio Display in the coming days.)
The 5K resolution offers the same neat trick that the 5K iMac’s screen did, letting you work with 4K video at full resolution while still offering plenty of screen real estate for editing tools alongside. That makes it a must-have for creators, particularly those working with video or high-resolution photography.
The integrated webcam is also superb, offering excellent resolution—way, way better than the 720p webcams offered on most laptops, and better than the 1080p camera in the iMac—and the addition of features like Center Stage steps up the quality of the experience as well as the image.
Sound quality is just as good. Dialogue during video calls was super clear, and the six internal speakers sounded fantastic whether I was in a conversation with someone over FaceTime, watching the Dolby Atmos trailer for No Time to Die, or just listening to Pearl Jam’s album Ten, which recently got a Dolby Atmos remaster. The mix of sound quality and Atmos’ verticality offers one of the best experiences I’ve ever had listening to a system’s built-in speakers.
Mac Studio Peripherals: Pretty Familiar
Apple sent along the new black and aluminum versions of the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad ($199), the Magic Mouse ($99), and the Magic Trackpad ($149). Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that those prices all run $20 more expensive than the standard white versions. Sadly, the black versions of these accessories offer no functional improvement.
The trio of color-coordinated peripherals is a nice match with the new system. They were previously available only with the purchase of the Mac Pro tower, so the option of getting these striking black-on-bare-metal versions of the classic Mac accessories is a real treat.
But, to be perfectly honest, it’s a little frustrating to see Apple stagnate on the peripherals front. So much of the Apple mystique comes down to the user experience, but in the most tactile elements of a desktop computer, there’s been no progress, no substantial improvement in years.
The biggest example of this stagnation is the Magic Mouse. Does it look better in black? Yes. But the Magic Mouse is deeply flawed as a mouse. And it’s been that way for a long time. The touch-sensitive surface doesn’t support all of the Mac gestures you might know from your MacBook Pro, but that’s far from the worst problem with the mouse. The shape isn’t ergonomically friendly, and the multitouch surface and wireless functionality are serviceable (though not without their own problems).
But the charging has been a particularly sore spot for more than a decade. Because of the placement of the Lightning port on the bottom of the Magic Mouse, the mouse is useless while it is charging. Apple’s stubborn insistence on sticking to this design choice is all the more maddening since it has been pointed out as a problem since 2009. (But hey, now it’s available in black!)
Gripes about the mouse aside, the now-in-black peripherals are pretty good. The Magic Keyboard is as good as or slightly better than the keyboards on Apple’s MacBook Pro laptops, and it gets the addition of a 10-key pad and an integrated Touch ID sensor. It’s not great for longer typing sessions, but if you’re just doing spurts of web browsing or firing off the occasional email, it’s more than adequate.
The Magic Trackpad (technically the Magic Trackpad 2, though Apple seems to have dropped the number from its recent branding) may be the best of the three. The large touchpad gives you all of the tapping, swiping, and gesture support that MacBook users are used to, along with pressure-sensitive Force Touch support and haptic feedback. And while it doesn’t offer anything new in terms of basic functionality, it looks better in black than the previous white or even the iMac Pro’s Space Gray.
No Upgrades in the Studio
One of the truest-to-form Apple moves in the Mac Studio is the lack of post-purchase upgrade options, or even user-accessible internals. The Studio may pack a lot of hardware inside, but it’s not letting users get to any of it. The compact desktop isn’t readily opened, and unlike the 2018 Mac mini, which touted the fact that RAM modules could be swapped out—even if Apple discouraged doing so—there is no promise of upgrading anything internally on the Mac Studio.
That’s not to say that you’re entirely stuck with what you buy, as the system’s four Thunderbolt 4 ports will ably handle even the fastest, most spacious external drives. But you won’t be able to swap out the internal SSD, or salvage the one that’s there when you upgrade to the next Mac desktop.
And that raises the question of how long the Mac Studio will really be around. If we look to the Mac mini, it could easily be upgraded year after year, with regular spec bumps and ever-more impressive hardware options. But if we look to the recent past of the 2018 iMac Pro or the trashcan design Apple Mac Pro from 2013, the Mac Studio might not even be offered in the next upgrade cycle. Unfortunately, only time will tell what sort of longevity the new cube-shaped desktop will have.
Mac Studio Configuration Options
The Mac Studio is available in several configuration options. Our own review unit is equipped with an M1 Max processor, with 10 CPU cores, a 32-core GPU, 64GB of memory, and a 2TB SSD for storage. All told, our test unit sells for $3,199 for the Mac Studio alone. With the included Studio Display and new black Magic Keyboard, Trackpad, and Mouse, the full package sells for $5,245, which gives you everything you need, without having to bring your own keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
There are two primary versions of the Mac Studio available, one using the M1 Max processor previously seen in the MacBook Pro, and a step-up model that uses the new M1 Ultra processor. Configurations can also be upgraded with additional GPU cores for more graphics power, larger memory options, and storage options that range from standard to huge.
The M1 Max model starts at $1,999 for the base model, with a 10-core CPU, a 24-core GPU, a 16-core neural engine, and 32GB of unified memory, all paired with 512GB of SSD storage.
You can upgrade the M1 Max to a 32-core GPU for $200 more. You can also upgrade the system memory to 64GB for an additional $400. Storage can be increased incrementally, ranging from the standard 512GB up to 8TB of SSD storage for $2,400.
The M1 Ultra models step up the basic package considerably, with a 20-core CPU and a 48-core GPU, literally doubling the M1 Max specs. With 64GB of unified memory and 1TB of SSD storage, the M1 Ultra Studio starts at $3,999. It also swaps out the Studio’s front ports from USB-C to Thunderbolt 4, giving you a grand total of six Thunderbolt 4 connections.
Again, you can increase the specs and capability of the machine by adjusting the configuration. To start, you can bump up to a 64-core GPU for an additional $1,000. You can increase the memory allotment to a whopping 128GB for an additional $800. And system storage can be increased up to 8TB for an additional $2,200. All told, the top model of the Mac Studio, with M1 Ultra, 64-core GPU, 128GB of memory, and 8TB of SSD storage rings up at $7,999.
Comparisons: Apples to Apples and Intel
It’s an old cliché (and a nearly unavoidable pun for tech reviewers), but it’s tough comparing apples to oranges. It’s even harder comparing Apple to Intel, or macOS to Windows-based systems these days, since the number of reliable tests that overlap the two computing paradigms is pretty sparse.
While both systems will let you do more or less the same things in terms of office productivity, web browsing, and even running many advanced media-creation tools, the underlying layers of software and hardware are sufficiently different that our usual batch of benchmark tests isn’t fully supported by modern Macs.
Some software, like Adobe Photoshop, may have a native Mac version that’s readily available, but Photoshop doesn’t work with the PugetBench benchmark extension we use for our usual controlled testing. And other test apps, like UL’s 3DMark and PCMark, just aren’t supported for macOS use at all.
As a result, we supplement our usual tests with a handful of additional tests, including an older game (Rise of the Tomb Raider), and a set of browser-based tests: JetStream 2, WebXPRT, and Basemark Web 3.0, which all run in Safari as well as in any Windows browser.
For comparison products, we looked at two different groups of machines. We looked at powerful Windows desktops that fall somewhere under the umbrella of mini PCs, small form factor (SFF) desktops, and workstation desktops—the Studio sort of qualifies as all of those. For comparison’s sake, we looked at the Intel NUC 12 Extreme Kit (“Dragon Canyon”) and the Corsair One i300, two compact but powerful systems that offer the same mix of performance and small footprint designs as the Studio.
But we also looked at the current crop of M1-powered Apple systems, looking primarily at desktops, like the Apple Mac mini and the Apple iMac, but also the M1 Max-powered MacBook Pro, to see what sort of performance difference you’ll get between the laptop and the desktop, which has more GPU cores and fewer power and heat limitations compared to the laptops.
Benchmarking the Mac Studio: Pure Performance
With a limited selection of cross-platform tests, our comparison set for the Mac Studio versus other Apple and non-Apple systems isn’t perfect, but it’s enough to give us a clear picture of what the Mac Studio can really do, and how it stacks up against other classes of system you might be considering. First, for the Apple systems…
In some ways, the Mac Studio is right in line with the other M1 Max-powered system, the 16-inch MacBook Pro. That may cause a lot of desktop purists to scoff at the Mac Studio ever offering a competitive level of performance, but our test results say otherwise—at least, some of the time.
Many basic CPU-focused tests delivered identical results between the MacBook Pro and the Mac Studio. But others leveraged our test unit’s expanded GPU core count and better cooling to deliver some solid performance gains. Does it match Apple’s claims about the Studio putting the Mac Pro to shame? Not really, but then, we haven’t tested the more powerful M1 Ultra, either. And if the impressive capabilities of the M1 Max are anything to go by, it might be wiser to wait for real tests on the M1 Ultra before writing it off.
In any case, the test results reveal a capable desktop in the Studio. We started by looking at demanding workflows like video transcoding in HandBrake to image rendering in Maxon’s Cinebench. In HandBrake, the Studio had one of the quickest results recorded, and tied with the powerhouse Intel NUC 12 Extreme Kit. But in Cinebench, the results were more modest, handily beating the Apple iMac, but lagging behind desktops like the Intel NUC 12 and the Corsair One i300.
And the weirdness of macOS reared its head in Photoshop, where Adobe has a native version of Photoshop as part of its Creative Cloud apps, but our test extension, made by Puget Systems, is only available using Rosetta 2. So, in this peculiar instance, it’s not so much a test of the Studio’s photo editing chops, but of the performance offered on the machine for demanding apps that require emulation. Despite the big asterisk put on this test, the Mac Studio still holds its own, falling only a step or two behind Apple’s last Intel-powered iMac and the powerful Intel and Corsair desktops.
One of the most frustrating aspects of such a powerful machine is the absolute dearth of gaming support on Macs. With our 32-core integrated GPU, the Studio should have made mincemeat of our gaming tests, but due to the limited number of games with Mac versions—and the limited subset of those games that offer integrated benchmarking tools—we only had one good option for testing the Studio: Rise of The Tomb Raider, from late 2015. (As we’ve explored elsewhere, the gaming prospects for Apple’s M1 chips routinely lag 5 or 6 years behind the current AAA titles, making it rough for the would-be Mac gamers out there.)
In any case, the results in our Rise of the Tomb Raider tests make one thing very clear: Even without a huge library of games, the Mac Studio’s graphics capabilities make it one of the best gaming options in the Apple family, with frame rates that more than double those of the regular M1 iMac and the Mac mini. But it’s sort of like Brian Fantana’s cologne from Anchorman, which reportedly “works 60% of the time…every time.”
Verdict: A Fantastic Machine for a Niche
In the final tally, the Apple Mac Studio is a fantastic option for Apple users who need more power than other recent Mac offerings, but not a lot more power than they’d see in the M1 Max version of the MacBook Pro. It’s a little cheaper when comparing configurations that use the same processor, but it also requires an extra monitor and peripherals, which erase the price differences pretty quickly.
On its own, the Mac Studio is a powerful little desktop, and a huge step up from the Mac mini and the Apple iMac. If you want a macOS desktop for video editing or similar media work, this is the little workstation to get. But the comparisons on the Intel side show that putting that kind of power into a compact desktop is still a pricey option. Comparable Windows systems from Corsair are just as expensive, and others may require a lot more work to get up and running, like the DIY-minded Intel NUC 12 Extreme Kit, which offers the power of “Alder Lake” 12th Generation Core processors, but is a barebones unit that requires bringing your own GPU, RAM, storage, and copy of Windows.
If you’ve been eyeing an aging 27-inch iMac and are due for an upgrade, or have considered the Mac Pro but know that it’s way too much computer for your needs, then the Mac Studio is the perfect option. But for such an impressively built machine, that narrow appeal is the biggest problem with the new Mac Studio. It’s a great machine, arguably one of the best Apple has made, but it’s not a great fit for most.
