Apple Mac Studio M4 Max review: More powerful than ever

The Apple Mac Studio M4 Max ($1,999) is the new entry-level Mac Studio for 2025 and it continues the line's legacy of delivering big power in a small package.

These squat, silver boxes are a big deal because buying a Studio is the only way to get yourself a machine packing Apple's Ultra chips, the most powerful slice of Mac silicon currently available.

For the first time ever though, Apple is offering the Mac Studio with two different generations of chip. The entry-level $1,999 Mac Studio is powered by the M4 Max, while the more powerful $3,999 Mac Studio is the only Mac to ship with the M3 Ultra.

This can be a little confusing because while the Apple M4 chip is technically newer and more capable than the Apple M3 chip, the M3 Ultra is a bigger chip than the M4 Max. To oversimplify it, the M3 Ultra is like two M3 Max chips duct-taped together.

Still, while the Mac Studio M3 Ultra is technically more powerful than the M4 Max model, it's not yet clear if it's enough to justify the extra $2,000. Before these Macs launched we saw reports that the $3,999 M3 Ultra Mac Studio barely beats the $1,999 M4 Max in leaked benchmarks, and after testing our Mac Studio M4 Max review unit I'm inclined to believe them because our Mac Studio actually did even better in our tests than early leaks suggested.

It's good news for anyone who loves powerful Macs, and it helps cement the Mac Studio's place among the best computers on the market today. I'll show you why in this Mac Studio M4 Max review.

Apple Mac Studio M4 Max review: Cheat Sheet

• What is it? Apple’s most powerful desktop computer yet.
• Who is it for? Anyone who wants a Mac desktop more powerful than either the all-in-one ease of the iMac M3 or the even smaller footprint of the Mac mini M4.
• What does it cost? The Mac Studio M4 Max starts at $1,999/£2,099, while the Mac Studio M3 Ultra starts at $3,999/£4,199. Both can be upgraded with more power, RAM and storage for additional cost.
• What do we like? I like that even with all this power under the hood, it remains small and quiet. The upgrade to Thunderbolt 5 and the nice breadth of ports are also great to have.
• What don’t we like? I don't love that this $2,000 Mac comes with just 512GB of SSD storage since it's not upgradable after you buy (unlike comparable PCs). I also wish more games were optimized for Mac silicon to help take advantage of this beast's power.

Apple Mac Studio M4 Max review: Specs

Apple Mac Studio M4 Max review: The ups

The Mac Studio M4 improves upon what was already a great desktop Mac by upping the power on offer, and even the entry-level M4 Max model is plenty fast enough for a family PC or home office.

In many ways this box isn't very different from its predecessors, but there are a few notable strengths which stand out on this year's model.

Killer performance (except from the SSD)

Our Mac Studio M4 Max review unit feels plenty speedy as I'm using it to write this review, but I had to wait for the full testing results from our lab to understand how fast it can really crunch CPU workloads.

In day-to-day use it delivers indefatigable speed, and no matter how many apps or tabs I had open I had no trouble streaming music, writing on projects and watching videos from some of the best streaming services. I also had more fun than I expected gaming on this box, but more on that shortly.

First, I want to show you how our Mac Studio M4 Max ($3,669) performed in the Geekbench 6 CPU benchmarking test.

To help you understand how much faster it is than the old Mac Studio M2 Ultra ($6,199) I reviewed two years ago as well as a relatively recent Acer Predator Orion 5000 mid-range gaming desktop we recently tested with an Intel Core i7-14700K CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super GPU, 32GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD ($1,799).

This is far from a perfect comparison, but it's worth doing because the Acer has a fairly recent mid-range Intel Raptor Lake Refresh CPU inside, and while it can surpass the more expensive Mac Studio M2 Ultra from two years ago in terms of multi-core CPU performance the Orion can't match the speed of Apple's 16-core M4 Max chip.

But that's to be expected, given the Acer is a mid-range gaming PC that costs roughly half what it would run you to buy a Mac Studio M4 Max like the one we tested.

I think it's more interesting to look at how the CPU performance scores have climbed from the M2 Ultra to the M4 Max. Remember, the Mac Studio I reviewed two years ago cost roughly double what our current review unit does, because it came with the maxed-out M2 Ultra chip (24-core CPU, 76-core GPU) and 128GB of RAM.

Our modern M4 Max model, by comparison, costs half as much and has the mid-range M4 Max chip (16-core CPU, 40-core GPU) with 128GB of RAM. Yet it blazes past the old M2 Ultra Mac Studio in both our single-core and multi-core CPU tests.

The big takeaway for me here is that, at least in terms of CPU benchmarks, you get diminishing returns from investing heavily in upgrading the Mac Studio. Part of the reason I feel that way is that before the Studio launched we saw leaked Geekbench 6 benchmarks which suggested the M3 Ultra Mac Studio scores just a few hundred to a few thousand points higher than the cheaper M4 Max model on single-core and multi-core tests.

That's not much performance improvement for an additional $2,000, and the fact is our own Mac Studio M4 Max review unit scored even higher on these tests than the scores we saw leaking out before launch. So if the Mac Studio M3 Ultra can't deliver significantly better performance than the M4 Max model I'm reviewing, it's hard to see why it's worth the extra cash.

I'd be curious to speed-test the Mac Studio M3 Ultra's storage as well, because when we put our Mac Studio M4 Max review unit to the test I found some confusing and potentially disappointing results.

As you can see from the chart of results below, our Mac Studio M4 Max actually performed slower in the Blackmagic read/write tests than the 2023 Mac Studio M2 Ultra. Heck, it was neck-and-neck or slower than the SSD in our original Mac Studio review unit from 2022.

However, we did see consistent improvement in our own video editing test, which times how long the laptop takes to transcode a 4K video down to 1080p using Handbrake. The M4 Max Studio is significantly faster than the older models, so you can count on speedier-than-ever video edits.

Great Mac gaming

We had some hiccups with the Steam install on our Mac Studio M4 Max review unit that delayed our game testing efforts a smidge, so I don't yet have the full slate of video game benchmarks for you yet. But stay tuned, because I'll be running more tests throughout the week and updating this review with more numbers as I get them!

In the meantime, what I can tell you is that I've spent hours playing games and running tests on our Mac Studio M4 Max review unit and it's the best time I've had gaming on a Mac yet.

That's to be expected given how much more powerful this machine is than the old Mac Studio M2 Ultra, which was my last high-water mark for Mac gaming. And of course, games which aren't supported or well-optimized on macOS won't run well on this machine.

But I had a blast playing hits like Baldur's Gate 3 and No Man's Sky on this machine. And while I'm still working through our full suite of gaming benchmarks, I did have time to run Total War: Warhammer 3's benchmarking test on this machine with Ultra settings, and it ran beautifully at 1080p.

To give you a sense of how it compares to other recent Macs and recent gaming PCs, I charted its score against the recent Mac mini M4, the MacBook Pro 16-inch M4 Pro and that 2024 Acer gaming PC I mentioned earlier.

As you can see, there's no question the M4 Max chip and 128GB of RAM in our Mac Studio review unit are good enough for fast-paced gaming at 1080p. The Studio blows the recent M4 Mac mini and MacBook Pro out of the water in this game, but even a mid-range gaming PC that costs half as much can run circles around the Mac Studio M4 Max when it comes to demanding games.

Sadly we still can't run some of the games we use to benchmark systems (like Cyberpunk 2077) on Macs, so I can't provide full comparisons just yet. But with Cyberpunk 2077 coming to Mac we should soon have a better idea of how the new most powerful Mac desktop can handle one of the best PC games.

Thunderbolt 5 has arrived on Mac

The 2025 Mac Studio is the first of its line to upgrade to Thunderbolt 5, which can be a pretty enticing reason to upgrade if you like the idea of using a lot of external displays or a lot of high-speed, high-powered accessories.

Our Mac Studio M4 Max review unit has four Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back left and another two USB-C ports on the front, while the $3,999 Mac Studio M3 Ultra swaps out the two front-facing USB-C jacks for another pair of Thunderbolt 5 ports.

Frustratingly, the Studio's Thunderbolt 5 ports look identical to older Thunderbolt/USB-C ports and sport the same lightning bolt icon that marks Thunderbolt 4 ports, so it's tricky to remember which ports are which.

The reason you might care about upgrading to Thunderbolt 5 vs. Thunderbolt 4 is simple: it's more capable. While the USB-C ports on our Mac Studio M4 Max are capable of transmitting up to 10 GBp/second, the Thunderbolt 5 ports are theoretically capable of achieving up to 120GBp/second in certain conditions.

And in standard use Thunderbolt 5 is specced to offer double the bandwidth capacity of Thunderbolt 4 (80 Gbps vs. 40 Gbps), which means it can move more data faster than its predecessors.

The practical payoff is that you can use a higher number of more capable displays via Thunderbolt 5 than Thunderbolt 4, for example, our Mac Studio M4 Max is rated to support up to five external displays (4 @6K/60Hz via Thunderbolt 5, 1 @4K/144Hz via HDMI) while the upgraded M3 Ultra model can supposedly support up to eight (at 6K/60Hz or 4K/144Hz) at once.

Alternatively, our M4 Max review unit can support a single 8K/60Hz display while the M3 Ultra version can support up to four 8K/60Hz displays. So if you really want to be future-proofed against a potential 8K future, the new Mac Studio has you covered.

If I were considering buying one of these Macs in 2025, I'd be more excited about the potential to build the ultimate workstation by investing in a great Thunderbolt 5 dock, along with a good display (honestly, I can live without Thunderbolt 5 speeds for my display needs) and a great Thunderbolt 5 external SSD for moving big files around fast.

And frankly, Thunderbolt 5 gear is still pretty sparse on the market despite the fact that the standard debuted in 2023. While you can buy 8K displays and 8K TVs right now, the fact is that 8K content only started arriving in small doses in 2023, and it's still very rare in Mac apps and streaming services.

So while it's great to get Thunderbolt 5 ports on the most powerful Mac desktop for the first time, it's not a great reason to upgrade unless you're really excited about investing in a lot of Thunderbolt 5 accessories.

Apple Mac Studio M4 Max review: The downs

The Mac Studio M4 Max is a great value in a lot of ways, but there is one drawback to buying one.

Max power ain't cheap

I generally like the Mac Studio M4 Max because it's fundamentally not much different from the original Mac Studio, which I also loved because it heightened the appeal of the Mac mini by filling the svelte silver box with more powerful hardware.

This year I like the basic model even more because, as you can see from our initial testing above, the mid-range M4 Max model with 128GB of RAM delivers a big jump in performance over older models.

The issue is, Apple has not sent us the maxed-out Mac Studio M3 Ultra model and I haven't seen any meaningful performance benchmarks yet to gauge whether it's worth upgrading to over the initial $1,999 M4 Max model. So while I like the 2025 Mac Studio, I'm a little leery about recommending you upgrade it much over the initial price of entry.

While some extra cores, RAM and storage are valuable upgrades, I think if you pay the extra $1,999 for the Mac Studio M3 Ultra upgrade you might be wasting your money.

While I'll have to wait until we get a chance to test one ourselves to be sure, the incredible CPU performance I've seen out of our Mac Studio unit makes me feel like most people would be just fine with the entry-level M4 Max model. Paying $2,000 or more to get the M3 Ultra edition might be exciting, but I don't think you'll get enough more performance to be worth the added expense.

Apple Mac Studio M4 Max review: Verdict

I'm starting to feel a bit like a broken record, because the story of the 2025 Mac Studio is the same I told about the previous models—you get more raw power than I've ever seen in a Mac that runs quiet and is easy to fit into your desk arrangement.

That's why I've always loved the Studio: it feels like the power user's Mac desktop. The iMac and the Mac mini have their appeal, but if you're going to build a setup for editing images or working with audio/video the Mac Studio seems like the MacDaddy of workstations.

And with the advent of Thunderbolt 5 and the M4 Max, I think the 2025 Mac Studio offers a more compelling reason to upgrade than its predecessors. This is the first Studio to support the standard, which means it's the most capable Studio yet if you want to build a multi-monitor setup and start moving big files around fast.

My only reservations are about the value proposition of upgrading to the M3 Ultra edition. As you can see from our gaming tests, the 2025 Mac Studio hasn't radically shifted the narrative of desktop Mac gaming, but the M3 Ultra has the potential to run even demanding titles like Cyberpunk at good to great framerates. But will it be worth the ridiculously high upgrade cost?

We'll have to wait and see, but I'm sure of one thing: the Mac Studio M4 Max is the most powerful Mac to date, and it still looks great on a desk.