M2 Ultra Mac Studio review: Who needs a Mac Pro, anyway?

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The original Mac Studio, despite the absence of "Pro" in the name, was Apple's most compelling professional desktop release in years. Though it was more like a supercharged Mac mini than a downsized Mac Pro, its M1 Max and M1 Ultra processors were fantastic performers, and they were much more energy-efficient than the one in the most recent Intel Mac Pro, too.

Apple is releasing the M2 version of the Mac Studio this week, and even though it's being launched alongside a brand-new Mac Pro, it still might be Apple's most compelling professional desktop. That's partly because the new Studio is even faster than the old one—Apple sent us a fully enabled M2 Ultra model with 128GB of RAM—and partly because Apple Silicon Macs are designed in ways that make Mac Pro-style expandability and modularity impossible.

There is probably still a tiny audience for the redesigned Mac Pro, people who still use macOS and still use internal PCI Express expansion cards that aren't GPUs; it should also be relatively easy to add gobs of cheap, fast internal storage, a kind of upgrade the Mac Studio is still frustratingly incapable of. There's also a bit of awkward pricing overlap with the high-end M2 Pro Mac mini that didn't exist last year.

But for the vast majority of people who prefer to do their photo and video editing, 3D rendering, app development, and other heavy-duty work on Apple's desktops, the Mac Studio is still the one to beat.

The new Mac Studio

Ports on the front, one of the Mac Studio's killer features. On the M2 Ultra Studio, these are Thunderbolt ports; on the M2 Max., they're 10Gbps USB-C. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple hasn't changed anything about the outside of the Studio since the last generation, and nothing about the pricing or available configuration options has changed, either.

There are two versions of the Mac Studio, one with an M2 Max processor (as seen in the most recent MacBook Pro refresh, and one with an M2 Ultra chip that's new to the Studio and the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. In Apple's chip family, "Ultra" is the highest you can go, and "Max" (presumably short for "maximum") is the second-highest.

Everything about the M2 Ultra version of the Studio is exactly double what you get with the M2 Max: double the CPU cores, double the GPU cores, double the RAM, and double the price. That makes sense since, architecturally, the M2 Ultra is just two M2 Max chips fused together with a silicon interposer that lets them communicate at rates of up to 2.5TB per second. Performance doesn't exactly double, but we'll talk about that more later.

Aside from the chips, there are a few other notable distinctions between the two systems. The two ports on the front of the M2 Max Mac Studio are 10Gbps USB-C ports, while the two on the M2 Ultra are full 40Gbps Thunderbolt ports. The M2 Max has between 32GB and 96GB of RAM, and the M2 Ultra comes with between 64GB and 192GB; neither is upgradeable after purchase, per usual for Apple Silicon systems. Either can be configured with up to 8TB of internal storage, though doing this costs over $2,000 for either configuration, and you might be better off researching external Thunderbolt SSD enclosures if you're looking for a ton of space.

On the back, you still get four Thunderbolt ports, a 10 gigabit Ethernet port, a pair of 5Gbps USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and an audio jack. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The M2 Ultra Mac Studio is also a full two pounds heavier than the M2 Max version, though the two are the same size; Apple uses a heavier and more conductive copper heatsink to cool the faster chip, while the M2 Max gets by with a lighter aluminum heatsink.

Aside from the front Thunderbolt ports, connectivity is the same on both systems. You get four Thunderbolt ports, one 10-gigabit Ethernet port, two 5Gbps USB-A ports, a headphone jack, and an HDMI port on the back (Apple doesn't say which version it is, but since it can drive an 8K display at 60Hz, HDMI 2.1 seems likely). And there's an SD card slot next to the two ports on the front, a boon for photographers or other kinds of hobbyists who use SD or microSD cards.

I liked the Mac Studio a lot last year, and I still like it a lot. It performs well, it's dead silent, it will fit just about anywhere, and it's the rare Apple computer to put ports on the front, where they can actually be accessed. If you're eyeing an upgrade from an Intel Mac, the M2 Max version is a great step (at least performance-wise) for anyone used to a 27-inch iMac's performance level. The M2 Ultra can run circles around the Intel Mac Pro and should perfectly match the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, as it uses the same chip.

Why not consider a Mac Pro?

The Mac mini (top) and Mac Studio don't feature any internal expandability or upgradeability. But because of the way Apple Silicon chips are designed, even the Mac Pro isn't as flexible as it was before. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

On that topic, the appearance of an actual Apple Silicon Mac Pro has done nothing to convince me that the Mac Pro should continue to exist.

It's not that there isn't a need or demand for high-end, modular, upgradeable desktop computers in 2023. It's that the Apple Silicon Mac Pro just barely manages to fit that description, and an identically specced Mac Studio costs $3,000 less and is considerably smaller.

Here's a refresher for those who don't follow pre-release Mac rumors regularly: Supposedly, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro was supposed to use an even more powerful version of the M2, one that stuck a pair of M2 Ultras together just like the Ultra sticks a pair of M2 Maxes together. The extra power would be a key selling point, especially compared to the Mac Studio.

At some point, those plans were scrapped. (At one point, it was also suggested that Apple might skip an M2 update for the Studio so that the Pro could have the faster chips; if this artificial segmentation gambit was ever actually floated internally, I'm glad someone shot it down). So the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro is the fastest Mac that has ever existed, as a new Mac Pro tower should be. But it's now tied for that distinction with a second Mac that's much, much smaller and $3,000 cheaper.

Compounding this problem, the new Mac Pro can no longer take advantage of dedicated external GPUs and upgradeable memory because of how Apple Silicon chips are built. The memory and GPU are all part of the M2 package, and that integrated unified pool of memory that can be shared by the CPU and GPU is part of Apple Silicon's appeal for some people. The chips just aren't built for modularity or expandability. Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux team, one of the people outside Apple who probably has the most low-level familiarity with Apple's chips, even points out that Apple has needed to fudge the Mac Pro's PCI Express slots a bit since the M2 Ultra doesn't have enough PCIe lanes to give every slot its full bandwidth at the same time.

All of this leaves the Mac Pro in an awkward spot. The 2019 tower could be upgraded by end users to use up to 1.5TB of RAM; the new one tops out at the same 192GB as the Studio (it's hard for even the most advanced home users to imagine needing more, but longevity and future-proofness was once a selling point of the Mac Pro). The 2019 tower can use GPUs that were made after 2019 thanks to new AMD graphics drivers in newer versions of macOS; the new one will use the same Apple GPU for its entire working life. It might look like an old-fashioned Mac Pro tower on the outside, but it has many of the same limitations as the decade-old "trash can" Mac Pro.

That leaves the Mac Pro with a narrower-than-ever potential audience: people who require macOS for high-end work and don’t care about RAM or GPU upgradeability but who do need multiple internal PCI Express expansion slots for other non-GPU, non-Afterburner cards. I'm not saying there's no demand for that kind of a machine. But the Mac Pro feels like an unsatisfying compromise between the desire for an expandable computer and the realities of Apple Silicon.

Performance and power use

Apple's M2 Ultra combines 16 high-performance CPU cores with eight efficiency cores for a total of 24, twice as many as the M2 Pro or M2 Max. The GPU also includes either 60 or 72 cores, depending on the configuration you buy, plus a 32-core Neural Engine for accelerating some AI and machine-learning workloads.

We don't have an M2 Max version of the Studio to compare to the M2 Ultra this time around, but based on the numbers we have from a 16-inch MacBook Pro, the Ultra's multi-core CPU performance is between 70 and 90 percent faster, depending on the test, while its 3DMark graphics performance is more than twice as fast. This may be an imperfect comparison if the M2 Max can run a bit faster in a Studio desktop than it can in a more thermally constrained laptop.

We can say more authoritatively how much faster the M2 Ultra is compared to the M1 Ultra, though. Single-core performance increases by 14 to 20 percent, depending on the test, while multi-core performance goes up by 19 to 23 percent thanks to the four additional efficiency cores.

A dearth of modern gaming benchmarks on the Mac makes this comparison harder than it ought to be, but comparing 3DMark Wild Life Extreme results to those in the results database, it looks like the M2 Ultra's GPU performance is roughly in the vicinity of a desktop GeForce 4070 Ti in a desktop, albeit one with as much as 192GB of memory available to access.

Apple also seems to have changed its approach to single-core performance a bit in the M2 generation. While all the M1 chips from the M1 all the way up to the Ultra had essentially the same single-core performance, Apple seems to be giving the M2 Ultra some extra room to stretch, boosting single-core benchmark scores by around 10 percent compared to the regular M2. The difference isn't as extreme as the separation between, say, the Core i5 and Core i9 tiers on Intel's side or the Ryzen 5 and the Ryzen 9 on AMD's. But Apple's approach with the M2 is more similar to Intel's and AMD's than it was before.

As for Apple's competition in the PC space, the good news for Intel and AMD is that their current high-end performance (as represented here by the Core i9-13900K and Ryzen 9 7950X) is usually as good or a bit better than Apple's; Apple looks better in Geekbench 5, but Intel and AMD manage to do better in Cinebench and our Handbrake video encoding test.

The bad news for Intel and AMD is power efficiency. In our Handbrake CPU video encoding test, the Ryzen 7950X gets the job done faster, but it uses twice as much power to do the same work. Intel's i9-13900K at its default power settings uses four times as much power to eke out a 10 percent speed improvement. For both processors, you can lower their power use to make them more efficient—in this scenario, the Ryzen actually runs a little faster because it's running cooler, while Intel's chip falls a bit behind the M2 Ultra—but they're still using more than twice the power to achieve similar performance.

That power efficiency also means the Studio runs incredibly quiet—not once during all my testing or day-to-day use of this machine did I hear its fan spin up audibly, which is definitely not the case for my heat-venting PC testbed.

The M2 Ultra's average power consumption is up a little bit compared to the M1 Ultra, which has been consistent across the entire M2 generation. But the speed increases help to even things out; the total amount of power you'll use to accomplish a set amount of work remains remarkably even across the entire Apple Silicon range, from the M1 all the way up to the M2 Ultra (with exceptions made for the MacBook Air, where the fanless design drives power consumption even lower to keep heat under control at the expense of some speed).

Pro in all but name

The Mac Studio's name is embossed on the bottom. No one will ever see it, but you'll know that it's there. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

There will always be people who are upset about the appliance-like, non-upgradeable nature of Apple's desktops, especially in the Apple Silicon era, where basically nothing inside the machine can be upgraded after the fact. Upgrading components used to be an easy way to squeeze a few more years out of an aging Mac Pro tower, and in an ideal world, it would still be something that Apple supported and encouraged.

But even the Mac Pro can't really be upgraded in that way anymore, which makes the M2 Ultra version of the Mac Studio the one that most pros should buy. It's expensive—it's hard to spend $4,000 on a consumer desktop PC, even one with a top-tier CPU and GPU in it—but what you get is a powerful-but-tiny Mac that's quieter and more power efficient than any PC you can buy or build.

Apple Mac Studio M2

Starting from $1999 at Best Buy Starting from $1999 at Apple

This review has mainly focused on the M2 Ultra version because that's the one we tested, but if the price is a concern, the M2 Max version remains a great option. If the M2 Ultra version is a Mac Pro replacement, the M2 Max version is more like the old 27-inch iMac—not Apple's best or most powerful desktop but one with more than enough power for most creative work. You should also strongly consider buying this version of the Studio rather than the M2 Pro Mac mini if you want 32GB of memory. The Studio gives you more GPU cores and more ports for the exact same money, at least if you're looking at the $1,999 version of the mini with the fully enabled M2 Pro.

The good

A small, fast, efficient desktop that's a great showcase for Apple Silicon
Good port selection
Ports on the front
Whisper-quiet
Mac Pro-tier performance for $3,000 less than an equivalently configured Mac Pro
$2,000 M2 Max version is faster than the $2,000 version of the Mac mini

The bad

Steep RAM and storage upgrade prices
Doubling of hardware resources in M2 Ultra vs. M2 Max doesn't always mean double the performance
M2 Ultra config, in particular, is still pricey compared to anything other than the Mac Pro

The ugly

No internal expandability

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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