This week Apple unveiled its new Mac Studio with M4 Max or M3 Ultra chips inside, and when it launches next week the M3 Ultra version will likely be the most powerful Mac desktop on the market.
I suspect it will also be one of the more confusing Mac launches in recent years because of the odd split in what chips you can get inside it.
See, the Apple M4 chip is technically newer and more capable than the older M3 chip, but Apple's "Ultra" chips are roughly twice as powerful as their "Max" counterparts. If you imagine the M3 Ultra as being two M3 Max chips duct-taped together, you're closer than you think to understanding the power difference.
So when it comes to the new 2025 Mac Studio, the M4 Max version ($1,999 to start) is actually less powerful and less expensive than the M3 Ultra version ($3,999 to start) even though there's a higher number on the chip.
It's simple enough once you look at the prices and core counts, but I still expect this to confuse some customers because of the way Apple has straddled the line between M3 and M4. And after reviewing the Mac Studio M2 and the original Mac Studio myself, I think there are a few other things you should think about before upgrading to a new Mac Studio M3 Ultra.
Reasons to buy
There are at least a few good reasons to drop upwards of $2,000 on a new Mac Studio this year, whether you're upgrading from an older Mac or buying your first Studio.
You want Thunderbolt 5
One of the big new upgrades that comes on all versions of the 2025 Mac Studio is the advent of Thunderbolt 5 ports on the back of the machine. That makes this the first Mac to get Thunderbolt 5 ports, which is a big deal if you care about high-speed data transfers.
The M4 Max model comes with four of them on the back, while the M3 Ultra version gets those plus an additional two on the front for a total of six Thunderbolt 5 ports.
The reason to care about Thunderbolt 5 is that it's a notable upgrade over the Thunderbolt 4 ports we got on prior Mac Studio models. Thunderbolt 5 has double the bandwidth capacity of Thunderbolt 4 (80 Gbps vs. 40 Gbps), which means it can push more data through in each direction than its predecessors.
That means you can do more with Thunderbolt 5 accessories than you could with Thunderbolt 4. You can use more external displays (up to 5 with M4 Max/8 with M3 Ultra) at higher resolutions (up to 8K), for example.
You can also send and receive big files faster (which is clutch for video editors), pull more power from external processors and provide more power when charging, all of which make Thunderbolt 5 a potentially meaningful productivity upgrade for a lot of people.
So if you're excited about the possibilities Thunderbolt 5 can provide you, it might be smart to upgrade to the new 2025 Mac Studio.
One caveat: Don't rush out to upgrade to Thunderbolt 5 just for 8K display support unless you're a professional creator trying to make 8K video.
While it's exciting that Thunderbolt 5 can support up to two external displays running at 8K resolution and a 60Hz refresh rate, the fact is that there just isn't a ton of 8K content available out there to stream right now. And while the best gaming PCs with the beefiest hardware can probably run games at 8K, even the Mac Studio M3 Ultra would probably struggle to run any game at 8K/60Hz.
You need an incredible video rendering machine
The Mac Studio has always been sold as an expensive Mac desktop for creators, providing exclusive access to Apple's beefy "Ultra" chipsets as well as high ceilings on RAM and storage for a hefty price.
The 2025 edition is no different, and while the $1,999 entry-level model looks to be perfectly serviceable as a PC, you could really turn it into a workhorse if you kit it out with all the storage and RAM it can handle.
If you can afford to really spend a lot on a new video rendering machine this year (or you can expense it), the Mac Studio M3 Ultra has the potential to be an absolute beast of a production machine. The base $3,999 model has the M3 Ultra chip sporting a 32-core CPU and an 80-core GPU, with 96GB of RAM and a basic 1TB of storage to start.
Spend more and you could get an even beefier M3 Ultra with a 32-core CPU (and the same 80-core GPU), up to 512GB of RAM and 16TB of SSD storage. That would cost you north of $14,000, but if you just need that sweet sweet half-terabyte of RAM and will figure out the storage later you could get it for under $10,000.
That's far too rich for my blood, but professional content creators might seriously consider dropping that much for a rendering machine like this, especially if Macs are already a key part of your workflow.
You're a Mac user going hard on AI
AI remains the tech industry's buzz word du jour, and Apple is keen to promote the Mac Studio M3 Ultra as a powerhouse for running large language models (LLMs) locally — that is, entirely on your device instead of dialing out to the Internet for assistance.
Now all modern Macs have some sort of nascent "AI" functionality in the form of Apple Intelligence, a collection of tools available across all Apple software that help you do things like summarize or generate text.
But if you want to download AI agents (like DeekSeek R1 or Meta's Llama) and run them locally on your machine, you need a PC with a lot of processing power, RAM and storage space. Yes, this does mean you can run your own AI chatbot if you want!
To date that's typically meant building a beefy gaming PC with a capable CPU and using a powerful discrete graphics card along with oodles of RAM. And while I can't say for sure how the Mac Studio M3 Ultra stacks up against the best gaming PCs in terms of raw power, I can tell you it looks to be a very capable AI machine that's significantly better than its predecessors at running local AI agents.
Of course, I won't know for sure how good this Mac is at AI workloads until we get one in to test and review ourselves. But according to Apple, the Mac Studio M3 Ultra is capable of generating tokens up to 16.9x faster than the old Mac Studio M1 when running an LLM locally in LM Studio. Not a huge surprise when you consider the Mac Studio M1 launched three years ago, but there you go!
Reasons to skip
I've used and reviewed every Mac Studio to date, so I know that while these pint-sized powerhouses excel in some areas they aren't the best in others. Here's two good reasons why I wouldn't rush out to buy a new Mac Studio M3 Ultra.
You want a bargain
The Mac Studio has reliably been the most powerful Mac desktop you can buy for years now, but that doesn't mean it's the best value if you just need a powerful PC.
No, if I needed to get the most computing power for my money in 2025 I'd be looking to build a Windows PC or buy a pre-built gaming PC from the likes of Alienware or Corsair. Let me walk you through why.
First and foremost, I think we're seeing diminishing returns on Apple's M-series chips. The original M1 chip was a revolution in terms of performance and power efficiency, but with each new generation we seem to see increasingly smaller upgrades in speed and battery life.
And thanks to leaked Geekbench 6 benchmark results which suggest the $3,999 M3 Ultra Mac Studio barely beats the $1,999 M4 Max model in terms of CPU performance, I think we're about to see the smallest leap forward yet.
Benchmark | M3 Ultra | M4 Max |
Geekbench 6.4 single-core | 3,221 | 3,884 |
Geekbench 6.4 multi-score | 27,749 | 24,445 |
So while the M3 Ultra is no doubt the most powerful chip Apple's ever put in a Mac, I don't know that it will be worth the high cost if you're just upgrading from an earlier edition of the Studio.
While the leap to M4 Max/M3 Ultra and the advent of Thunderbolt 5 should definitely feel like a revelation if you're currently using a Mac mini or the old Mac Studio M1, I think I'd have a hard time arguing anyone with a Mac Studio M2 or newer upgrade to this model.
And if you just want the most powerful PC possible and don't care if it's Mac or Windows, there's a strong case to be made that you should build or buy a gaming PC with all that money instead.
For example, right now I can get a new Alienware Aurora R16 (one of the best gaming PCs you can buy) starting at just over $4k. So for roughly the same price as a Mac Studio M3 Ultra I can get a PC with an Intel Core i9 14900KF CPU, a top-of-the-line Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, 64GB and a 2TB SSD.
That Alienware PC will no doubt sound like a jet engine compared to the whisper-quiet performance of the Mac Studio, but it will likely also deliver comparable performance and give you more options to expand and upgrade down the road than any Mac.
You want to play games
When I reviewed the Mac Studio M2 Ultra I called it the best Mac for gaming, and I meant it: I've never seen games like No Man's Sky or Shadow of the Tomb Raider run better on any Mac I've used.
iI you just want to have a great time playing No Man's Sky in 5K, skip the pricey Mac Studio and build yourself a great gaming PC instead.
I expect the Mac Studio M3 Ultra will be an even more capable gaming machine, which is good news if you're a Mac fan with deep pockets who loves games. But if you're not married to macOS and want the best gaming performance possible, there's no way the Mac Studio M3 Ultra is going to deliver that.
I know because even the maxed-out $6,199 Mac Studio M2 Ultra that Apple sent us for review struggled to run many games well. While games optimized for Apple silicon (like many modern Assassin's Creed and Resident Evil titles) tend to run pretty well on these machines, they just can't hold a candle to the performance of gaming PCs that cost the same or less.
Our $6k Mac Studio M2 Ultra had a hard time running Borderlands 3 at a steady 60 frames per second in 1080p resolution, for example, while an Alienware Aurora R15 gaming PC that cost nearly $2k less was able to easily run the game at over 4x the framerate (257 fps @ 1080p).
The performance disparity will differ depending on what games you play, of course, but I'm confident that no matter what titles you enjoy they'll run better for cheaper on a Windows PC than they will on a new Mac Studio M3 Ultra.
Outlook
If you've made it this far, you know that the value proposition of the new Mac Studio M3 Ultra is the same as its predecessors: lots of Apple silicon power in a silver cube that runs quiet and is easy to fit into your desk.
And frankly, I've always loved that aspect of the Mac Studio's design. It's like a taller Mac mini with muscle — if Jason Statham played the Mac mini in a movie, The Rock would play the Mac Studio.
So while the new Mac Studio likely won't offer a better bargain or more gaming potential than its predecessors, I think it's a potentially compelling purchase for content creators and anyone who needs big computing power in a Mac. Whether you're interested in coding apps or running local AI agents in macOS, I could see this box-shaped beefcake being worth the high price.
But if you just want to have a great time playing No Man's Sky in 5K, skip the pricey Mac Studio and Apple Studio Display and build yourself a great gaming PC instead.
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