Apple Mac Studio (2025) review: pure — if confusing — performance magic

The Mac Studio’s design didn’t change with the 2025 update, and that’s perfectly fine with me. It’s exactly right, at 7.7 inches in width and depth and 3.7 inches tall, although it looks more like a slightly smaller block of aluminum that’s floating in midair. It’s actually fairly heavy at 6.1 pounds for the M4 Max version and 8.0 pounds with the M3 Ultra (clearly, there’s some additional cooling components inside). It’s a desktop that won’t be moved around much, so the weight isn’t as important. The point, though, is that it not only looks like a solid chunk of metal, but it feels like one, too. But consider that a recent Windows gaming desktop that we reviewed, the Lenovo LOQ Tower 17IRR9, is both massive in size by comparison and weighs 18.52 pounds. That just underscores how insanely diminutive the Mac Studio is, particularly given that it’s so much faster in all but gaming.

I hinted at the aesthetic, and really, elegant simplicity rules here. It’s just a floating block with no ornamentation, highlighted by some front ports that are purely functional and exhibit that exquisite Apple manufacturing prowess that the company applies to all its products. Yes, the Mac Studio is expensive, and yes, you really do come away thinking you’ve spent your money wisely.

I use the Mac Studio with an Apple Magic Keyboard, and I’ve tried out a variety of mice ranging from the Logitech MX Master 3S to the Apple Magic Mouse and the Magic Trackpad. Really, take your pick, of course. Apple’s Magic Keyboard is my favorite across both this external accessory and the ones built into Apple’s laptops. This really doesn’t belong in a Mac Studio review, but it’s still worth mentioning — pair this keyboard with the Mac Studio and you’re in productivity heaven. As a writer, the Mac Studio might be overkill but that keyboard is perfect.

Note that the built-in speaker is suitable only for system sounds.But there’s a 3.5mm audio jack that will plug into headphones or an external speaker system. It’s my one design complaint that the audio jack is in the back, along with the power button that would be better up front. I reviewed the Mac Studio using an Apple Studio Display, and the pairing was excellent. They looked great together as well, and the Studio Display has impressive audio built in, which is terribly convenient. I also used it with my standard collection of dual 27″ 4K and one 32″ 4K OLED display (I know, but it kind of just happened), and that worked incredibly well, too.

In terms of performance, the 2025 Mac Studio is like two different machines. One of them is expensive but within the reach of “normal” people, while one of them is insanely expensive and in the provide of hardcore professionals. That all comes down to the M3 Ultra versus the M4 Max chipsets that power them — along with the massive amounts of RAM and storage available to the M3 Ultra model.

Note that no matter which model you buy, the Mac Studio is very likely to be the quietest superfast PC you’ve ever used. No matter how hard I pushed either chipset, the machine remained silent. At most, there might have been a barely audible hush. Obviously, Apple designed a thermal system that can keep things cool and move a lot of air without making a lot of noise whenever necessary. When I run the same demanding tasks on a MacBook Air 16 M4 Max, which is quiet for a laptop, it sounds like a freight train by comparison. That’s part of the Mac Studio’s magic.

M4 Max

The M4 Max chipset is the same as you’ll find in the MacBook Pro, coming in two versions. The base model has 14 CPU cores and 32 GPU cores, and the high-end model has 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores. It features the incredibly fast M4 CPU cores that have the fastest single-core performance you’ll find in a chipset today — macOS or Windows — and GPU cores that feature second-generation ray tracing and the same mesh shading and Dynamic Caching features as the M3. Each of those cores is actually faster than the ones you’ll find with the M3 Ultra, which as the name implies is based on the previous-generation M3 chipset. And, the M4 Neural Engine runs at 38 tera operations per second (TOPS), compared to the M3 Neural Engine’s 18 TOPS. That will make it a lot faster for on-device AI processing.

Looking at our standard benchmarks, where I reviewed the M4 Max 16/40,  you’ll see that the Mac Studio is a significant upgrade over the previous generation Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra. Consider the relative difference in price, at $2,899 for the M4 Max 16/40 with 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, which compares to the M2 Ultra model that was $3,999 for the same configuration. For $1,100 less, you get a machine that’s a lot faster.

I suspect that for most users, the M4 Max Mac Studio will be the way to go. I’ll talk more about the comparison after touching on the M3 Ultra.

M3 Ultra

The M3 Ultra is an odd choice, really. The M2 Ultra was two then-current-generation M2 Max chipsets fused together. Limitations in the UltraFusion technology that links them together means that you weren’t getting exactly twice the performance, but you got a significant upgrade in performance. Depending on the benchmark, the M2 Ultra was around 45% faster, which made it not only the fastest Mac (tied with the Mac Pro at the time) but one of the fastest PCs, period.

Similarly, the M3 Ultra is two M3 Max chipsets fused together. Compared to the M3 Max in the MacBook Pro 16, it ranges from 31% faster in Geekbench 6 multi-core up to 81% faster in the Cinebench R24 multi-core test. Naturally, its single-core performance is similar. The Mac Studio has an advantage in terms of its thermal design, but even so, the M3 Ultra is a very fast chipset.

Clearly, it’s faster than every other PC we’ve tested in most of our benchmarks. The Falon NW Talon desktop with the Core i9=14900KS desktop chipset and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 desktop GPU can’t keep up anywhere except the brute force of the RTX 4090. And that’s in these synthetic benchmarks, not necessarily in real-world tasks where the M3 Ultra’s GPU cores might be more competitive.

I’ll be looking more into AI performance at another time, where I will consider how the M3 Ultra’s Neural Engine performs. It’s also double the core count of the M3 Neural Engine at 32 cores, but at even at double the performance that would be 36 TOPS compared to the M4’s 16-core Neural Engine that runs at 38 TOPS. While that means the M4 Max actually has a faster Neural Engine with fewer cores, the most aggressive AI processing is likely to use the GPU cores instead. So, the question of AI processing performance requires some more research.

M3 Ultra versus M4 Max

The challenge is comparing the M3 Ultra to the M4 Max. After all, while the M3 Ultra (as I reviewed it) has twice the CPU and GPU cores — and in fact, the most Apple has ever put into a chipset — the individual cores aren’t as fast. That’s clear in the single-core results, and synthetic benchmarks don’t give the entire story.

In Cinebench R24, the M3 Ultra is 45% faster in multi-core but 27% slower in single-core. That won’t matter much, because this isn’t a single-core kind of machine. In Geekbench 6, the M3 Ultra is only 4% faster in multi-core, and it’s 28% slower in single core. In Handbrake, it’s just 5% faster.

One very important test is the Pugetbench Premiere Pro benchmark, where Apple Silicon chipsets benefit greatly from a host of CPU optimizations that speed up various processes like encoding. In Windows, the GPU is a lot more important. In this real-world benchmark, the M3 Ultra is 30% faster than the M4 Max, which is significant given that’s time saved for the kind of professionals who might be willing to spend that kind of money. If you can do your work 30% faster, that’s well worth the investment. And, the Mac Studio M3 Ultra is 16% faster than the Falcon NW Talon Windows desktop with one of the fastest GPU’s available.

Stepping up to the GPU, the story is even more nuanced. In our synthetic benchmarks, the M3 Ultra GPU cores don’t seem all that impressive. In the Cinebench R24 GPU test, the M3 Ultra is just 18% faster. And it’s just 4% faster in the Geekbench 6 GPU Metal test.

However, those synthetic benchmarks don’t tell the whole story. I also ran a Blender test that used the GPU to render a complex drawing. In the single frame test, the M3 Ultra finished in 10.50 seconds compared to the M4 Max at 14.87 seconds. That’s a 42% difference. Over 145 frames, the M3 Ultra took 26:08 compared to the M4 Max at 35:51, a 37% difference. That’s a much better test of how a modern application will utilize all those cores, and those kinds of results will only get better with optimization.

When you consider the real-world performance in Premiere Pro and Blender, and extrapolate that over similar applications, the M3 Ultra looks a lot stronger. A 30% or greater improvement in performance isn’t anything to sneeze at. And that doesn’t take into account the ability to upgrade to 512GB of RAM, which will be incredibly important to some people who are doing extremely intensive work — for example, editing 8K video and running local LLMs — and the 16TB of on-device storage. Of course, that configuration costs over $14,000.

Should you get the M3 Ultra or the M4 Max? Most likely, if you can’t imagine spending that much money on the M3 Ultra, then you’re not its target. The M4 Max will probably be more than fast enough for you, and it’s still one of the fastest PCs we’ve tested for many tasks — second only to the Mac Studio M3 Ultra, in fact.

But if your business relies on you completing tasks as quickly as possible, then the M3 Ultra is well worth your consideration. You won’t find a more capable machine.

The 2023 Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra was a fairly quick gaming machine as far as MacOS goes, thanks primarily to having a massive number of GPU cores. But, those cores didn’t possess the various graphics enhancements brought by the M3 architecture. Hardware ray tracing, mesh shading, and Dynamic Caching for memory optimization elevated Apple Silicon a lot closer to powering viable gaming desktops and laptops. The M4 architecture actually enhanced that further for gaming, meaning that the M4 Max actually has slightly better GPU cores than the M3 Ultra. But, of course, that chip gives you 60 or 80 cores, which are insane numbers that serve to overcome the M4’s architectural advantages.

We’ve seen that the M3 Ultra GPU cores don’t have as much of an upside over the M4 Max GPU cores. The problem is, we don’t have a lot of gaming benchmarks we can run on macOS. I ran the 3DMark Steel Nomad Light Unlimited benchmark and the M3 Ultra scored 19,139 compared to the M4 Max at 14,967. That’s a 28% difference, still not a lot but more than we saw with either Geekbench 6 or Cinebench R24 GPU tests.

However, I did run one game with a built-in benchmark, specifically Civilization VI. At 1440p and Ultra graphics, the M3 Ultra managed 91 frames per second (FPS) while the M4 Max was faster at 114 FPS. That’s odd. Both are an improvement over the M2 Ultra Mac Studio that hit just 64 FPS, but I did expect the M3 Ultra to be faster in this benchmark.

We’re seeing more modern games come to macOS, including Civilization VII, AC Shadows, and Cyberpunk 2077. We use the latter game for our Windows gaming benchmarking, and I’d love to run that on the Mac Studio. I ran Baldur’s Gate 3, and it was smooth at 4K on both machines. I couldn’t really tell a difference between the M3 Ultra and M4 Max versions, but that game doesn’t have an in-game benchmark, so I couldn’t quantify them.

Of course, the Mac Studio isn’t really aimed at gamers. At least, nobody’s going to buy it exclusively to play games. And, developers will certainly do the good work of optimizing the games for those 80 CPU cores. So, things will just get better over time.

There’s an incredibly wide and diverse set of ports and connectivity in the Mac Studio. The biggest change from the previous generation is the switch to Thunderbolt 5, which triples the available bandwidth over Thunderbolt 4 from 40Gbps to 120Gbps. That means you’ll get the fastest possible speeds for connecting peripherals, including the external storage that many creators will likely want to plug in.

On the front, you get two Thunderbolt 5 ports on the M3 Ultra model and two USB-C ports on the M4 Max, along with a full-sized SD card reader. On the back, there are four Thunderbolt 5 ports (on both models), two USB-A ports, a 10Gbps Ethernet connection, a HDMI 2.1 port, and a 3.5mm audio jack. You’ll also find the power button on the back, along with the power connection.

In my setup, that means that all of the cables tucked away out of sight, adding to a clean look. I do wish the 3.5mm audio jack, one of the USB-A ports, and the power button were on the front for easier accessibility, but that’s a quibble given that this isn’t a massive tower placed on the floor where all the ports are hard to reach. And, wireless connectivity is a generation behind at Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4. That won’t matter for a few years, though, which is how long it’s likely to take for Wi-Fi 7 to be a dominant standard.

Display support is a bit complicated. It remains almost the same as the previous model with support for five monitors, and there’s better performance with the M3 Ultra. The M4 Max can run four displays with 6K resolution at 60Hz via Thunderbolt 5 and another 4K display at 144Hz (up from 60Hz) via HDMI. Or, you can connect two displays at 6K and 60Hz and one 8K at 60Hz or 4K at 240Hz via HDMI.

With the M3 Ultra, you can run up to eight displays at 4K and 144Hz or 6K at 60Hz. Or, you can connect four displays at up to 8K at 60Hz or 4K at up to 240Hz. That’s a significant improvement over the M2 Ultra Mac Studio, and it’s really unparalleled external display support.

Look, there’s no getting around it: the Mac Studio can be an insanely expensive desktop. Spending $14,099 may sound crazy, but when you consider that the price includes a massive 512GB of RAM and 16TB of storage, it’s not really all that unexpected. If you need it, you need it, and the price won’t be as much of an impediment. If you don’t, you can safely ignore it.

But maybe just as crazy is that the $1,999 configuration will be plenty of computing power for a lot of users. The real magic might be in how you can get such a remarkably small and fast desktop for what amounts to a reasonable price, while power users can invest in a desktop that’s sure to meet every conceivable need.