Review: The Mac Studio shows us exactly why Apple left Intel behind

Update: Our chart calculating processor power efficiency has been updated to be more readable and accurate.

Apple Silicon Macs have gotten more interesting the deeper into the transition we've gotten. The MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini all looked and felt exactly like the Macs they replaced, just with better performance and much better battery life. The 24-inch iMac and 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros were throwbacks to the colorful G3 iMacs and titanium PowerBooks from two decades ago. And now we've gotten to the Mac Studio, the first totally new Apple Silicon Mac.

The Studio reminds me of a few Macs we’ve seen before—it’s sort of a trashcan Mac Pro by way of the PowerMac G4 Cube. It borrows elements of the Mac Pro and the Mac mini, but it replaces neither. It’s both a glimpse at what is possible now that Apple is leaving the Intel era behind, and yet another recommitment to the Mac as a powerful and flexible platform for getting work done.

It’s not quite the mythical midrange “xMac” workstation of yore, but it’s as close as we’ve ever gotten. That’s an exciting place to be.

Table of Contents

Look and feel

Ports on the front of the Mac Studio. — The Mac Studio is one of the few Macs to include ports on the front. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Rumors pegged the Mac Studio as a “more powerful Mac mini,” and that’s not a bad way to think about its design. The Studio occupies the same 7.7-inch-squared footprint as the 12-year-old unibody Mac mini design, but it’s 3.7 inches tall instead of 1.4 inches. That makes it just over two-and-a-half Mac minis tall. (If you’re using it with one of Apple’s Studio Displays, there’s a bit more than an inch of clearance between the bottom of the monitor and the top of the Mac, depending on how you have the screen tilted.)

These days, especially post-Apple Silicon, the current mini design has trouble justifying its size, but there’s no wasted space in the Studio. The base of the computer holds its 370 W integrated power supply—no external brick is necessary, a nice carryover from the mini—and the base and back of the machine are primarily dedicated to airflow grills for its tall dual-fan cooler. The actual computer part, according to Apple’s detailed renders, is a single slim board sandwiched in between.

Assuming these renders are reasonably accurate, the "computer" part of the Mac Studio is that thin board wedged between the power supply on the bottom and the heatsink and cooling fans on top. Credit: Apple

The heatsink Apple is using for the Studio’s cooling apparatus is made of aluminum in the M1 Max version of the Studio and copper in the M1 Ultra version—the copper heatsink adds two pounds to the weight of the computer, and you can instantly tell the difference when you pick them up.

But in both cases, the size of the cooler and the power efficiency of Apple’s chips keep the Studio nearly dead silent no matter what you’re doing with it. My air-cooled Intel and AMD systems both spin up audibly when crunching on lengthy video-encoding jobs or playing games, but the Studio’s fans were never audible. And both versions of the Studio will get warm to the touch when they’re working hard, but neither is ever uncomfortably hot to the touch, something that could occasionally be a problem with Intel Macs.

The other Mac mini-ish thing about the Studio is that it’s a “BYODKM” affair, with no display, keyboard, or mouse included in the package. Apple will sell you silver-and-black versions of all of its Magic accessories, including the TouchID keyboard and a version of the Magic Trackpad with slightly more rounded corners. But you’re also free to keep using whatever accessories you use with your current Mac (for me, a Mac-layout Varmilo VA87M mechanical keyboard and original Magic Trackpad 2).

Ports, ports, ports

Ports on the back of the Mac Studio and a Mac mini. — The Mac Studio has a lot more ports than the Mac mini. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Performance is a big part of the Mac Studio’s appeal, and we’ll take a close look at it shortly. But ports are at least as important.

The back of the Studio has the same number and type of ports as the 2018 Intel Mac mini, give or take some protocol upgrades. You get four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10 gigabit Ethernet port, two 5Gbps USB-A ports, a single HDMI port, and a headphone jack.

But there are now ports on the front of the machine, something Apple has resisted in every one of its computers other than the Mac Pro. In the M1 Max version of the Studio, there are two 10Gbps USB-C ports, plus a UHS-II SDXC card reader. On the M1 Ultra version, the addition of a second M1 Max SoC makes it possible for those front ports to be full 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4 ports, just like the ones on the back.

Even if your work doesn’t require the full power of an M1 Max or Ultra, the amount of I/O here does make the Studio better suited for all kinds of workloads than the M1 Mac mini. The Studio can connect to up to five displays at once, compared to two for the mini (and up to four of those can be 5K Studio displays as opposed to just one for the mini). And you’ll be able to set up a multi-monitor array while still having plenty of ports left over for external storage or other accessories (external GPUs aren’t supported, just as in other Apple Silicon Macs).

The external expandability is important because the Studio’s internal components can’t be upgraded after you buy it. There’s no way to add RAM or internal storage, so you’ll need to rely on externally connected USB or Thunderbolt drives whether you want a fast PCIe scratch drive for your photo or video work or a big hard drive array for archiving old projects—or even if you just prefer not to pay Apple’s higher-than-typical prices for SSD upgrades.

Performance: The M1 Max and Ultra

The M1 Max and M1 Ultra versions of the Mac Studio look exactly the same. — Can you tell the M1 Max and M1 Ultra versions of the Studio apart? (Hint: No.) Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple sells two distinct versions of the Studio, and although they look identical, the performance gap between them is huge. The basic $1,999 studio includes the M1 Max SoC from the Apple Silicon MacBook Pro, offered in flavors with two efficiency cores, eight performance cores, either 24 or 32 GPU cores, and 32 or 64 GB of RAM. The step-up $3,999 M1 Ultra includes four efficiency cores, 16 performance cores, a 48- or 64-core GPU, and either 64 or 128 GB of RAM.

One interesting thing about the M1 Ultra compared to, say, AMD’s Ryzen CPUs is that Apple is duplicating the entire M1 Max SoC and not just the CPU-related parts. That means that you have two of everything, from CPU and GPU cores to memory controllers, Neural Engine accelerators, Thunderbolt controllers, and video encoding and decoding blocks. That’s how the Ultra version of the Studio offers Thunderbolt 4 ports on the front instead of plain USB-C and why Apple lists twice as many video and ProRes encoding and decoding engines on the Ultra Studio’s spec sheet. There are surely things in the M1 Ultra that you don't need two of, strictly speaking, but Apple is letting the software take as much advantage of that second SoC as it can.

We’ve run a wide range of benchmarks on both the M1 Max and M1 Ultra versions of the Studio (in both cases, the maxed-out versions with 32 and 64 GPU cores and 64GB and 128GB of memory). We’ve also run the same tests on an M1 Mac mini with eight GPU cores and 16GB of memory to represent Apple’s other current desktops.

As for other chips, we also thought it would be interesting to compare the Apple Silicon versions of the Studio to the Intel Mac Studio we never got—one of Intel’s best high-end desktop CPUs, the Core i9-12900. We ran this chip in a high-end Gigabyte Aorus Z690 Ultra motherboard provided by Gigabyte, used 64GB of DDR5 RAM provided by Crucial, and cooled it with a Vetroo v5 tower cooler. An EVGA-provided GeForce RTX 3070 FTW GPU is our graphical reference point (Apple has invited performance comparisons between the M1 Ultra and the RTX 3090).

Our review of the slightly slower Core i7-12700 explains this idea in more depth, but one thing to know about Intel’s CPUs is that they perform pretty differently depending on how much power they’re allowed to use. We ran everything on the Core i9 twice—once with Intel’s stock power settings intact and once with those power limits lifted. Lifting the limits allows the chips to do things a lot faster at the cost of dramatically higher power usage.

In our testing, the M1 Max in the Studio performs pretty much identically to the same M1 Max in the MacBook Pro—Apple isn’t letting the chip use more power or run faster just because it doesn’t have to worry about battery life. In CPU-intensive tasks, this makes the Max not quite twice as fast as the M1 in most of our tests since the M1 has four fewer performance cores but two extra efficiency cores.

The M1 Ultra is also almost exactly twice as fast as the M1 Max most of the time, as you’d expect from a chip that fuses two M1 Max SoCs together. There are signs that the Ultra won’t always scale perfectly, as in our Handbrake video-encoding test; despite double the CPU cores, the Ultra only crunches through the video about 67 percent faster. The xcodebenchmark also falls short here, running in about three-quarters as much time as the same test runs on the M1 Ultra (though this build test is light enough, relatively speaking, that we may simply be running it as quickly as it can possibly be run).

Doubling the GPU cores and memory bandwidth scales less evenly and consistently than CPU performance, something we also observed when we tested the M1 Pro and M1 Max in the MacBook Pros. There are some individual benchmarks in which the Studio’s 32-core M1 Max GPU is four times faster than the 8-core M1 GPU, but it's more frequently around three times as fast.

Scaling from the M1 Max to the 64-core M1 Ultra GPU is even less predictable, with increases ranging from about 73 percent (Wild Life Extreme Unlimited) to 57 percent (GFXBench 1440p) to around 40 percent (Geekbench 5 Compute). None of our tests came close to running twice as fast on the Ultra as they did on the Max. These are undeniably impressive numbers from what is still functionally an integrated GPU, and the M1 Ultra does trade blows with the hulking RTX 3070 in our Intel system, depending on the benchmark. Still, it’s a good reminder that doubling your computing resources doesn’t always get you double the speed.

Power efficiency: Apple Silicon demolishes Intel

Both the M1 Max and M1 Ultra are objectively strong performers, but the whole-system power consumption numbers we recorded are where Apple’s chips really impress.

Both the power-unlimited Core i9-12900 and the M1 Ultra performed roughly the same in our Handbrake video-encoding test, and the i9 did even better than the M1 Ultra in a handful of our CPU benchmarks. But measured at the wall, the Core i9 PC was drawing roughly 300 W of power the entire time the encoding task was running compared to the mid-80s for the M1 Ultra.

Reining in the Intel chip and making it use Intel’s stock power settings makes the Core i9 much less power-hungry, and it still handily outperforms the M1 Max in that scenario even as it falls behind the M1 Ultra. But even then, full-system power draw is roughly 130 W compared to about 47 W for the M1 Max version of the Studio. These are also the numbers to look at if you want to compare Intel's latest NUC Extreme to the Mac Studio—it's the closest to the Studio's size and performance that you can get in an x86 desktop computer right now.

This is a rough measure of the total amount of power each system used to encode the exact same video file. Power use for each system fluctuates a bit throughout the course of the encode task, but this gives us a reasonably accurate idea of how efficient each system is. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

If anything, these numbers make it seem like Apple could have made the performance of both Studio models even better by raising the chips’ clock speeds a bit at the expense of a little extra power use. The M1 chips could use twice as much power as they do and still stack up favorably to Intel’s CPUs. But as we’ve seen with Intel’s Alder Lake chips (or even the M1, which delivers the best performance-per-watt by far in this test), you definitely don’t get 200 percent of the performance just because you're using twice as much power. Apple’s chip design team seems acutely aware of those diminishing returns and has tuned all of its M1 chips accordingly.

What makes this even more impressive is that the M1 is a year-and-a-half-old CPU architecture built on TSMC’s 5 nm process, and Intel’s CPUs are recent releases built on a 10 nm process that the company struggled with for years. With an M2 series built on TSMC’s 4 nm process allegedly right around the corner, it’s hard to see how Intel will close this gap in the short term.

Which one to pick, and the significance of single-core performance

A Mac mini stacked on top of a Mac Studio. — In many cases, the Mac mini's M1 will feel a lot like the Studio's M1 Max and Ultra in daily use. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

It’s remarkable just how consistent Apple has decided to make single-core performance across the entire M1 lineup, from the M1 itself to the Ultra. All the chips performed identically in every one of our single-threaded benchmarks every single time.

This has big implications for day-to-day use. Most of what we perceive as “responsiveness” in a phone, tablet, or computer still comes down to single-threaded CPU performance—processors need to handle a bunch of separate, individual tasks more often than they need to do one big job that can be evenly split among all its CPU cores.

Also consider the way that macOS divides tasks between the M1’s performance and efficiency cores. Even on an M1 Max or M1 Ultra, if you’re just browsing and working on documents and typing in Slack or Discord and listening to music in the background, a look at Activity Monitor will show you that it’s the efficiency cores that are handling the lion’s share of those tasks. Performance cores are definitely pitching in when they’re needed, but in this fairly representative screenshot, you’ll see that most of them are just sitting there waiting for work to do.

While browsing and playing music and handling other light tasks, even on an M1 Max or Ultra, the efficiency cores are actually doing most of the lifting. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

So if you’re waffling between the Max and the Ultra versions of the Studio and you don't regularly compile code in Xcode, encode video, or do high-end rendering tasks, save yourself the money and skip the Ultra. For workloads lighter than those, you aren’t likely to notice the difference very often.

Even the M1 Mac mini I use as my daily driver doesn’t feel too different in day-to-day use than either of the Studio models. I know that the Studio is faster because I have the numbers telling me it is, and when I’m working with huge photos or video files, I can occasionally feel it. But most of the time—by Apple’s design—all of these computers will feel pretty similar, and you should resist the urge to overspend in the name of future-proofing.

It’s when you’re working with multi-gigabyte graphics, 4K or 8K video projects, or complex After Effects or Final Cut rendering projects that you’ll really benefit from the extra CPU, GPU, and RAM of a Studio—not if you just want a desktop that feels zippy for everyday work.

All the Mac most people will need

Apple Mac Studio

From $1999 at Apple

The 27-inch iMac was Apple’s de facto high-end desktop workstation for many years, and while the increasing core count of Intel’s desktop CPUs helped it fill this niche reasonably well, it never felt quite like a natural fit. The display was nice, but you had to replace it every time you wanted to upgrade your CPU or GPU. And both the CPU and GPU were restricted by a slim design that tucked them behind the screen since there was only a limited amount of room to dissipate heat.

The M1 Studio solves most of these problems. A big, beefy fan and a switch to Apple Silicon means that heat and power consumption are total non-issues for this machine, and you can connect whatever screen you want to it, whether it’s a Studio Display or a $100 1080p LCD. That Apple is delivering such good performance while also completely crushing Intel on the power-efficiency front makes the Studio an even more impressive machine, and it helps to explain why we had to wait until after the Intel era to get a Mac that works and looks like this.

The only thing keeping the Studio from being a perfect “xMac” is its lack of upgradability. Even so, it stacks up well to Mac Pros of years past. The cheapest Studio is one-third the price of the cheapest Mac Pro, and the Studio has a faster processor, a better GPU (going off results in the Geekbench database), and the same amount of storage and RAM; it's also safe to assume at this point that Apple Silicon Macs will be getting macOS updates for a few years longer than their Intel counterparts. The most expensive Studio you can buy ($8,000) costs only a bit more than it costs to max out the CPU alone on the Mac Pro ($7,000). The Studio can’t be upgraded after you buy it, but it won’t hurt your wallet quite as much to replace it a few years down the line.

The worst thing I can say about the Studio is that it prioritizes function over form, which is a deeply strange criticism of a modern Apple product. The second-worst thing is that there is still a gap between the least expensive Studio and the most capable Mac mini. It would be nice to see a product that’s not much faster than the mini but does support more displays and offer more ports on the back (and, ideally, on the front). That hypothetical Mac may be coming sooner rather than later. In the meantime, the Studio is an excellent workhorse and a great Apple Silicon upgrade path for a lot of people still using older Intel iMacs, Mac minis, and Mac Pros.

The good

Good enough to replace the Mac Pro in many circumstances for just a fraction of the price.
A great port selection on the back, including support for up to five external displays.
Also: ports on the front! Ports. On. The. Front. Of. A. Mac. The times we live in.
M1 Max version will outrun any Intel iMac or Mac mini and will trade blows with many Mac Pro configs.
Outstanding power efficiency.
Quiet.

The bad

Can't be upgraded after the fact.
Either re-use the monitor, keyboard, and mouse you have or factor in the cost of new ones, because the Studio doesn't include them.
Not exciting to look at.

The ugly

M1 Ultra includes twice the CPU and GPU hardware and costs twice as much but doesn't always deliver twice the performance.

Listing image: Andrew Cunningham

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Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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