Apple has announced the Mac Studio, a new desktop system that can only be described as a Mac mini on steroids. The newest member of the Mac…
In brief: The Mac mini is here to stay (for now), and so is the Mac Pro. However, Apple is adding a new member to the Mac family called Mac Studio, which is a new category that fits right between those two devices. It can be configured with either an M1 Max or M1 Ultra chipset, and if you pair it with the new Studio Display, it’s almost like a spiritual successor to the 27-inch iMac. Apple has announced the Mac Studio, a new desktop system that can only be described as a Mac mini on steroids. The newest member of the Mac family is aimed at professionals who are looking for something more compact than a Mac Pro, but also more powerful than the Mac mini. The base model Mac Studio is powered by Apple’s M1 Max chip that debuted in the MacBook Pro 14 and MacBook Pro 16 last year, but it can also be configured with a new chipset called the M1 Ultra. The Cupertino company claims this will be up to 50 percent faster than a specced-out Mac Pro, and far beyond even the fastest 27-inch iMac. The latter comparison is even more relevant, as the 27-inch iMac has seemingly disappeared from Apple’s online store. You can think of the M1 Ultra as essentially a pair of M1 Max chips fused together into a humongous chip. Apple has crammed no less than 114 billion transistors into it, which is more than three times the amount of transistors found in an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPU and an Intel Core i9-12900K, combined.
