Review: Apple Mac Studio offers unbridled power in a small form factor
Apple‘s new Mac Studio is nirvana if you are a creative type wanting unbridled power, but you need cash to splash.
I was sceptical about Apple’s ability to come up with something genuinely new, notwithstanding some amazing upgrades over the years. But really new, like a new form factor.
Now Apple has with its M1 chip, and this innovation goes a step further with the Mac Studio desktop. It’s not just a new line of desktop computer, which is important enough. It’s the guts inside the machine and the software working with it where the excitement is.
Parallel to this is a renewed interest in desktop computers generally. In part, that’s probably due to the pandemic and people working from home. Personally, I comfortably use laptops on the go as I have for years, but the home desktop with its multiple high resolution screens and big array of ports remains my anchor point.
Things are changing with desktops. In 2022, apart from specialist gaming rigs, you don’t need a large desktop with a whirring fan sitting on the floor gathering dust or taking up space on the desk.
In the Windows realm, I own two tiny Intel NUC cube desktops for everyday use, one of which is as powerful as any business desktop I have used. They sit unobtrusively on desks.
Apple also has been revitalising the desktop. In 2018 it dusted off the almost forgotten Mac mini cube, and rebuilt it with a faster chip and respectable performance. This was followed in 2020 with the fifth generation Mac mini sporting Apple’s highly successful M1 processor, the first of its in-house designed processors called Apple Silicon that offers good performance at an affordable price.
You still need a screen, and your own keyboard and mouse, but the 2020 Mac mini starting at $1099 remains a bargain. (I added a $149 Satechi hub to get all the ports I need.)
While it looks like a Mac mini, the Mac Studio is an expensive desktop option for professional users such as video and music producers, graphics designers, and architects – anyone processing multiple streams of high quality or high resolution data in real time.
In terms of performance, it sits at the top of the tree, above the Mac Pro in Apple’s product pecking order. It also is the new option for upgrading 27-inch iMac customers. You buy a Mac Studio and a 27 or 32-inch Apple display, or bring your own. Mac Studio supports up to five external displays.
The Mac Studio occupies the same desktop area as a Mac mini but is twice as tall at 19.6cm, mainly due to its cooling system which includes 2000 perforations in its aluminium frame for ventilation. So far I haven’t noticed any fan noise.
The Studio offers plenty of fast connectivity options. On the back you get 4 USB-C style Thunderbolt 4 ports, Ethernet, 2 USB-A, HDMI and audio out.
Apple has at last acknowledged the convenience of having connections at the front with two USB-C ports and a full-sized SDXC card slot. The 2020 Mac mini had no front-facing ports.
There are two versions of the Mac Studio, one with a souped up version of the M1 chip called the M1 Max, and the other with a new M1 Ultra chip. The front-facing USB-C ports on the M1 Max version are rated at 10GB/second, on the Ultra it is Thunderbolt 4 which offers up to 40 GB/second bandwidth in both directions.
The M1 Ultra chip used for the first time is the source of excitement. It represents a breakthrough in chip technology that will influence the devices we buy.
Apple has been able to link two M1 Max chips so they behave as one, with twice the number of processors and graphics, twice the memory and memory bandwidth.
That’s not the same as joining two chips on a motherboard which would impact bandwidth.
Apple says it designed the M1 Max with interconnectors that can link more than 10,000 signals between chips so you don’t degrade the chip performance. Apple rates the interconnector speed at 2.5 terabytes per second.
Second, it has designed the interconnector so that the operating system and software on the Mac Studio thinks there is just one processor – one twice as powerful.
If you are not a hardware freak, the basic takeaway is that you can create amazingly fast processors by linking them together in this way. My question is why other chip makers who have been in business for decades haven’t achieved the same.
The outcome is a small cube computer with the M1 Ultra that’s more powerful than the big 2019 Mac Pro tower you’d lug around on a trolley. In a test on my review unit, an M1 Ultra studio with 128GB of memory, Geekbench 5 scored 23,946 for multi-core processor performance. The late 2019 Mac Pro had scored 19,954. So put the trolley away.
The other strand is the increasing number of software packages optimised for Apple’s M1 chips. Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Houdini FX, Vectorworks and Affinity Photo are some.
Apple demos show a Mac Studio running 14 simulators simultaneously in real time and impressive renders of multiple views of a complex 3D scene with a file of 60 GB. I played around with a 140 track file of Montero by Lil Nas X, disabling and reenabling groups of tracks and rearranging them while the song was playing in real time, and there was no noticeable delays.
For something new, to look at performance another way, I mined cryptocurrency with the Mac Studio (M1 Ultra chip). This was not straight forward but I eventually found an ethereum mining app that works with the M1 chip on GitHub.com. Fortunately UFD Tech had been down this road with the M1 Mac Pro in 2021 and had left instructions on creating a shell file and flagging executables, and joining an ethereum mining pool.
UFD Tech achieved a mining rate of 5.2 to 5.5 megahash per second, but with Mac Studio and the M1 Ultra chip, my rate was roughly 13.8 to 14.9 Mh/s, almost three times. There was a report of mining with the M1 Max chip at around 10 Mh/s, so the Ultra was a step up again.
My mining consumed GPU power of 18 Watt and overall package power of 39 Watt. This is very good given your typical PC desktop uses hundreds of watts of power and mining is an energy hungry activity.
However the Mac Studio isn’t designed to be a cryptocurrency miner, if you are thinking about this. You’d be better with specialist graphics cards with much faster hash rates.
At average NSW power rates, plugging in my data - the hashing power, consumption, and cost per kWh - to a crypto comparison site yielded a soberingly small projected monthly profit of $9.13. It would therefore take me 55 years to pay off a $6099 Mac Studio mining ethereum in this way. You’ll need patience. (You can partly blame our expensive power.) I am projected to earn 0.00017 ethereum per day.
Nevertheless, you can see how more powerful the Ultra chip is. It hardly raised a sweat while crypto mining. I could carry on with other work simultaneously.
There is a price to pay for this power. Mac Studio with the M1 Max chip starts at $3099. The Ultra version costs from $6099. The 27-inch Studio Display is $2499 while the 32-inch Pro Display XDR costs from $8499.
