 The Mac Studio, the rare Apple product that doesn't have Pro anywhere near its name. But make no mistake, this device is for pros. It's configurable with up to a 20-core CPU, a 64-core GPU, a 32-core neural engine, 128GB of unified memory, and 8TB of SSD storage. It has 6 USB-C ports, 2 USB-A ports, an HDMI, and an SD card slot. It can cost as much as $8,000. And Apple has been clear about the target audience. It's for video editors, photographers, audio engineers, people who need serious power and for whom a Macbook isn't going to cut it. And don't worry, we gave it to those folks. But first, the chip. There are basically two Mac Studio models you can buy, and they're pretty far apart in price. One starts at $19.99, and it includes the M1 Macs. Apple announced this chip last year, and it's one of the most powerful CPUs you can get. But for the past year, it's only been available in one machine, the Macbook Pro. Apple has finally put this chip in a desktop system, the Mac Studio, which is exciting news in itself. But we have the more expensive Mac Studio that includes Apple's brand new M1 Ultra. And this one starts at nearly $4,000. The M1 Ultra isn't a new chip exactly. Apple has essentially taken two M1 Macs and fused them together. They're not the first company to try something like this. AMD and Nvidia have both put out dual GPU cards in the past. But the difference is that the Ultra is not actually two GPUs. Thanks to a process called Ultra Fusion, it functions as one monstrous GPU with twice the CPU cores, twice the GPU cores, and twice the memory bandwidth. Now, Apple has made some very ambitious claims about how this franken chip will perform, using various fancy charts that it did not label in any particularly useful way. Most surprisingly, it told us that the M1 Ultra's performance would exceed that of Nvidia's RTX 3090 while using 200 fewer watts of power. But as we learned last year with the M1 Pro and M1 Macs, Apple's lofty graphic claims don't always pan out the way Apple says they will. So we set out to verify just how powerful this thing actually is. So the configuration that we have here has a 64-core GPU, 128GB of RAM, and 2TB of SSD storage. This is basically the most powerful Mac studio you can buy, and it's going to cost you $6,199. Now, I could run thousands of Google Docs on this and be very happy, but the reality is that I'm not at all the target audience for this device. So I carried this 8-pound computer around the Verge office, I plopped it down on various people's desks, and I watched them work. You know, as you do. No proxies, y'all. No proxies. Full-res playback. Only. Okay? Because that is the goal and the dream. What up, buds? Becca Farsaci, video director here at the Verge. My name is Andrew Marino. I am a podcast producer, audio engineer at the Verge. What's up, everyone? I'm Alex Castro, illustrator at theverge.com. I'm the lucky Verge employee that gets to use the $17,000 Mac Pro that we purchased and reviewed a few years ago. It's got a 3.2GHz, 16-core Intel Xeon W processor, two Radeon Pro Vega II graphic cards, 96GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. And on paper, it is a total beast. But in everyday use, I find it to be pretty laggy, especially in Adobe Premiere. Disappointed! So since I started my career, I've mostly been using MacBook Pros, almost exclusively. At home, I use a custom Frankenstein of a PC. It has an Intel i7 quad-core, 32GB of RAM, and a GTX 1080. And I have a 1070 in there. Sometimes I get to use it in certain softwares. Alright, so this entire review you're watching, I decided to edit on the Mac Studio M1 Max and M1 Ultra. This project is over 500GB of footage I shot on Sony FX3s at 422, 10-bit. And y'all, I am, uh, I'm pretty impressed. Generating P-files hella quick. Damn, okay. Check this out, y'all. Just kidding. It finished before I could show you. One of the things I was really impressed with was the oil brushes in Photoshop. Photoshop has this kind of graphics engine, brush engine, that calculates the wetness of certain paints and brushes. And it's supposed to blend different features of the brush, basically. On any other computer I've ever used, it's been super slow. You hope you get the effect that you want within five clicks, basically. Or else you're chugging along and waiting for things to load. But with this, it was actually happening in real time. Something I've only ever seen happen in, like, Procreate on the iPad Pro. I'm usually running multiple programs for podcasting at the same time. And that's where I see a lot of slowdown in my computer. So what I've noticed with the Mac Studio is I wasn't even thinking about, is this going to slow down my computer? Is this taking too long to export? It all just kind of worked. So having a machine like this in my daily process would change everything, I feel like. Especially stuff like the Photoshop brushes actually working. It's a little feature set that's very hard to utilize in Photoshop unless you have a really good machine. And if you just had something like this, you could focus on quality over trying to save performance all the time. But performance isn't even the best part about this computer. No, no, no. If you're coming from the Mac Pro, you certainly have this dongle on the top of it. It's an SD card slot. But, boys, this right here? Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. Look at that. I'm tempted to say thank you, Apple, but come on. That was a huge miss on the Mac Pro. Above all else, I have this iLok dongle that is USB-A that I need to plug into a computer to run most of the software I'm using. So thank God it is on the Mac Studio. Here it is rendering a graphic in After Effects side by side with the 2019 iMac with the Core i9. Even to an amateur like me, the Mac Studio looks blazing fast. I asked all these creators for the biggest improvements they saw over their current systems, and they basically all said everything. Exporting, rendering, scrubbing, brushes, across the board, the experience was incredible. Our creators tried both the M1 Ultra and the M1 Max, and the general consensus is that the M1 Ultra was a bit faster. But it didn't necessarily feel $3,000 faster, and it certainly didn't feel twice as fast. These are both extraordinary chips, and while people love using the Ultra, everyone did feel that the Max would also be sufficient for their current work. A big part of that is that Adobe's Creative Suite is running way better on Apple's systems now than it ever has before. Premiere, Photoshop, Lightroom, and Media Encoder are all running natively on Apple's Silicon. And we're finally able to combine the absurd power of Apple's chips with editing software that's designed to run really well on them. The other huge benefit the Studio has over a MacBook is its massive Studio Display, and I know someone who has a lot to say about that. I'm one of the many display nerds here at The Verge, and I was really excited to dive into the Studio Display, which is basically the only other 5K display on the market right now besides the old and finicky LG Ultra 5. We have two Studio Displays, the standard $1599 model and the $1899 model with Apple's nanotexture matte glass, which I will say smudges the slightest provocation. Both have the stock stand. Adding height adjustment costs another $400 for some reason. Unfortunately, there isn't much to nerd out with on the display itself. It is very similar to the 27-inch iMac display that Apple sold for years and only just discontinued with the introduction of the whole Mac Studio line. The Studio Display is the same 27-inch size, the same 5120x2880 resolution, the same 218 pixels per inch, the same 60Hz refresh rate, and the same standard single-zone LED backlight. The only real spec difference is that Apple says the Studio Display now has a typical brightness of 600 nits versus 500 on the iMac, but in real-world use, that's pretty hard to see. Compared to Apple's other displays across the Mac, iPhone, and iPad lineup, the Studio Display is actually most notable for the things it doesn't have. Most high-end products all have displays that can produce true blacks in various ways. OLED screens on the iPhones, local dimming on the Pro Display XDR, and micro-LED display backlights on the MacBook Pro and iPad Pro. The Studio Display has none of that. It's a regular old LED backlight, and the darkest black it can produce is basically a very dark gray. Here's the local dimming test video we usually use. You can see how the Studio Display doesn't do any local dimming. The Studio Display is also notable for being an SDR display, with no HDR modes to speak of. Apple's high-end iPhones, iPads, and Mac laptops all support HDR, but the Studio Display tops out at 600 nits, and Apple doesn't offer an HDR mode in the software at all. Really, the only reason to chase after this display for the screen itself is if you desperately care about having a 5K display that can show macOS at pixel-perfect resolution with no scaling. Some of you care about that a lot, and $1600 sounds totally reasonable, considering the only other option is that buggy LG UltraFine that costs $1300. For those of you that don't care, $1600 sounds ridiculous, and there are lots of other fascinating displays to think about, including a number of neat ultrawides and plenty of displays that support higher refresh rates. The other reason you might want to be thinking about spending $1599 on the Studio Display is the webcam, mic, and speakers, of which Apple is very proud. There's an entire A13 chip powering the audio and camera system here, same as the iPhone 11, and the camera itself is a 12 megapixel sensor with an f2.4 lens that's theoretically comparable to the front camera on an iPhone or iPad. There are six speakers, four woofers and two tweeters, and Apple says they support spatial audio. The mic and speakers sound great. You can adjust the three-mic array to do voice isolation or not in Control Center, and you'll sound as good or better on calls as any conference mics I've ever heard. The only reason you might need something better is if you're regularly recording podcasts or streaming to an audience on Twitch or something. The speakers are loud and deep, and better than any other built-in speakers you'll find. Here, take a listen. The bad part is that I have no idea what's going on with this webcam. Apple has a long history of producing amazing images with 12 megapixel sensors and A-series chips, and here... Well, this thing just looks bad. Actually, it looks bad in great light, like we have now, and downright miserable in low light. I've tried it on the Mac Studio and on my MacBook Pro running macOS 12.3, and no matter what, it produces grainy, noisy images with virtually no detail. I tried it in FaceTime, I tried it in Zoom, in Photo Booth, in QuickTime. You name it, it's the same image. Turning off the center stage feature that follows you around the room doesn't help. Turning portrait mode on and off doesn't help. I've obviously asked Apple about this, and the company is looking into it, but until there's an explanation, I simply wouldn't want to use this camera. The cameras on the M1 iMac and the M1 MacBook Pros are simply better, and the front camera on an iPhone is obviously better still. So that's the new Studio Display. If you're adamant about having a 5K display connected to your Mac, you'll think the price is in the realm of reasonable. If not, I think you're probably better off looking elsewhere. Hey everybody, it's Eli. I'm coming at you from the Studio Display the night before the review. This is the mic, this is the camera. It's still pretty sunny outside, I'm sitting in front of a window, and this is what it looks like. Now, through the course of the review, I've been asking Apple, what's up with the image quality? And just now, the night before the review, the company sent along a statement. I'm going to read it to you. We looked into the images you shared and discovered an issue where the system is not behaving as expected. We'll be making improvements in a software update. That's it. No timeline on when that update might arrive, no details on what it might improve. Now, the rule at The Verge has always been, we review what's in the box. We can't take into account the promise of a potential software update in the future. We just look at what we got. So, when that update comes out, we'll let you know. But for now, this is what this webcam looks like. Apple, in its keynote, claimed that the M1 Ultra would outperform NVIDIA's RTX 3090, the most powerful consumer desktop GPU on the market today. And I'm going to be honest, I have no idea where Apple is getting that. We ran Geekbench Compute, which tests the power of a system's GPU on both the Mac Studio and a gaming PC with an RTX 3090, a Core i9-10900, and 64GB of RAM. And the Mac Studio got destroyed. It got less than half the score that the RTX 3090 did on that test. Not only is it not beating NVIDIA's chip, but it's not even really coming close. On the shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark, the RTX was also a solid 30 frames per second faster. Now, the Mac Studio is not a gaming PC, and very few people are going to buy it to game. But the Tomb Raider is a GPU heavy program, and it's been used as a proxy for GPU performance for several years. If the Ultra can't keep up graphically here, it's not clear to me that there's anywhere where it will outclass the RTX 3090. On the other hand, in CPU performance, the M1 Ultra is in a class of its own. Compare this to our Mac Pro model with an Intel Xeon W, and across our CPU benchmarks, there was really no contest. The Xeon is outclassed. In fact, the Ultra was so dominant in Premiere that I could find very few higher scores in the Puget Systems database. It's beating Threadrippers left and right. It's beating almost everything. Our $12,000 PC with a 32-core Threadripper 3970X did slightly beat the M1 Ultra on Geekbench Multi-Core, but the Ultra was much, much closer to the Threadripper than it was to the Xeon. That's a really big achievement considering that the Mac Studio is small and nearly silent, whereas Threadripper PCs have way more cores, and they're massive and loud, generally. Part of this is that in CPU tasks, the M1 Ultra really is about twice as powerful as two M1 Maxes. On the Multi-Core benchmarks in Cinebench and Geekbench, the M1 Ultra was consistently getting double the scores of the M1 Max. Now, a double benchmark score doesn't always translate to double the performance in the real world. We ran a bunch of benchmarks in Python to simulate scientific use cases, and on almost every one, the Ultra's and the Mac's scores were very, very similar. And while the Ultra did outperform the Mac's in every real-world task we ran, it wasn't doubling its scores. There are clearly some bottlenecks here that aren't just based on throughput. At the end of the day, Mac Studio is still a full system with RAM, storage, and I.O., not just a chip. Apple also said that the Mac Studio would be able to support up to four Pro Display XDRs and a 4K TV at once. I couldn't find four Pro Display XDRs, but I did plug in one XDR, two Studios, one 4K Dell monitor, and a TV. It was very confusing, but it did work. So if you have four monitors and a TV lying around, that option is on the table. So I'm sure people are wondering whether the M1 Ultra is worth the upgrade over the M1 Max, and here's my honest answer. The Ultra is faster, but the difference won't be massive unless you are consistently running well-threaded workloads that scale to every available CPU core. Everyone else will need to decide how much a small performance improvement is worth. Ultimately, the professionals here saw it as a benefit, but not an essential upgrade. So what are the drawbacks here? The most obvious one is the price. This thing, as configured, is over $6,000, and that's a lot. But compared to the $17,000 Mac Pro we have, it's still a hell of a deal. The Mac Studio is faster than the Mac Pro, it's smaller, it has a better port selection, it uses far less power, and it's a fraction of the price. And there's also the matter of the GPU. If you want to play graphically intensive games or you're running a heavy computing load that relies on a heavy-duty GPU, the M1 Ultra is not the obvious choice. The scores it put up on those sorts of tests were not particularly impressive. These are all very legitimate reasons that the Mac Studio won't be the right computer for all kinds of people. Personally though, after having used the thing, I can't bring myself to care about them all that much. The most impressive thing about this product to me is that everything works. The Verge has been reviewing Apple computers for the past decade, and in many of those reviews we've said things along the lines of, this is a nice computer, but the software isn't ready. That was what we said about the Mac Pro back in 2020. It seemed to work fine, but the Adobe Creative Suite wasn't optimized for it, and people were turning over all sorts of glitches that broke their workflows. We ran into fewer, but still some issues with the first M1 MacBook Air when that came out, and that didn't happen here. What I did see was creator after creator being blown away by how much more they could get done on this machine. This is why companies innovate. This is why manufacturers like Apple put out slightly more powerful versions of the same computers, and this is why people keep buying them every year. It's so that people can make more and do more and make it and do it better. It's so the things we do, the things we watch and read, the things we love can all be better. Ultra Fusion is not a kooky new idea that Apple is wasting our time with. Companies have been trying to mush two GPUs into one for over a decade, and Apple finally did it. This computer is a historic achievement, but perhaps more importantly, the M1 Ultra is a glimpse at the future, because we all know that at some point there's another Mac Pro coming, and I'm quite excited to see what Apple Silicon can do in a truly high-end system. Can I just say one more thing? Apple keeps calling displays like this edge to edge, but y'all, there is a half inch of bezel here. I'm looking right at it. A half inch of bezel. Now, I care about you, and I know you're excited, but this has to stop. Words have meanings.