Apple Mac Studio (M2 Ultra, 2023) Review

With its new, more-powerful-than-ever M2 Ultra processor, Apple has not one but two flagship examples of its crack at silicon supremacy: an updated Mac Studio (which starts at $1,999 with M2 Max; $8,799 as tested with M2 Ultra) and a finally refreshed Apple Mac Pro tower. This review focuses on Apple's Mac Studio, but it's tough to talk about it without addressing the cheese-grater-shaped elephant in the room, precisely because it contains much of the same hardware inside.

As you'll soon see, 2023's revised Mac Studio brings serious heat for everything you'll throw at it, with an advantage over the competition in memory bandwidth, GPU core count, and—in some cases—price. For that, we once again grant the Mac Studio our Editors' Choice award for high-end desktop workstations. Just please start including the peripherals in the box already, Apple?

In his first look at the 2023 Mac Studio from WWDC, my colleague Brian Westover dubbed it the “Mac Pro Jr.” As I’ve dug into this gorgeous block of aluminum, the nickname has started to stick.

Why call it that? For starters, the Mac Studio is capable of housing the same new M2 Ultra processor, the same 192GB max capacity of Apple’s Unified Memory, and the same 8TB of maximum SSD storage as the new Mac Pro. Throw in the fact that the Mac Studio is a fraction of the Mac Pro’s size, all while containing most of the same components, and you have a miniature Mac Pro. (Considering the Mac Studio’s M2 Ultra likely has a far lower thermal ceiling than the Mac Pro’s, the analogy is even more apt.)

Of course, that’s not what you get on the ground level: The most affordable $3,999 M2 Ultra Mac Studio model comes with the 24-core chip in its 60-core GPU configuration, 64GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD. In contrast, the most basic ($1,999) model of the 2023 Mac Studio features the 12-core M2 Max processor with a 30-core GPU (configurable with a 38-core GPU for another $200), first seen in the latest MacBook Pro models. That starting price also includes 32GB of Unified Memory and a 512GB SSD.

The Mac Studio we’ve been loaned for review takes the upgrades to the max. That top-most Mac Studio configuration includes a version of the M2 Ultra processor with 76 GPU cores instead of “just” 60, and it tops out the memory and storage capacities to 192GB and 8TB, respectively. For all that, Apple wants $8,799. It’s worth noting that the Mac Studio starting prices have not changed year-on-year. That said, the highest configuration eclipses that of the previous generation's by $800, on account of the higher peak memory capacity.

Now, the actual port array on each Mac Studio chassis differs depending on whether you spent at least $1,999 or $3,999 to start. If you specify your configuration based on the $1,999 Mac Studio model with M2 Max inside, you’ll get the same four rear Thunderbolt 4 ports as before, plus two USB Type-A ports (5Gbps), an HDMI port (now enhanced to support 8K resolution), a 10Gbps Ethernet jack, and a 3.5mm headphone jack around the back. Up front, you’ll find the same SDXC card slot and two USB Type-C ports (10Gbps).

If you spring for the M2 Ultra option (at $3,999) as your configuration starting point, those two USB-C ports up front become two full Thunderbolt 4 ports, bringing the total Thunderbolt ports to six. Otherwise, the Mac Studio design remains unchanged. (I don’t think anyone was expecting it to evolve all that much, anyway.) The 2023 Mac Studio is just as tall as the 2022 M1 Ultra version, at 3.7 inches, and it weighs the same 7.9 pounds.

The similarity to the 2022 model, of course, also means that you can't crack the case on the Studio and upgrade anything inside. If you don’t like the fact that you can’t upgrade the Mac Studio after purchase, it's possible that the new Apple Mac Pro tower is a better option for you—or, in the interest of your bank account, a Windows workstation.

Also, keep in mind that the Mac Studio does not come with Apple’s Magic Keyboard or Magic Mouse in the box, which at these starting prices is simply off-putting.

No doubt: The M2 Ultra is the beefiest Apple Silicon processor yet. Comprising two M2 Max processors on a single die, connected by Apple’s UltraFusion packaging architecture, it's manufactured on Taiwanese fabricator TSMC’s second-generation 5-nanometer process. The union results in a massive total of 134 billion transistors, which ups the count by 20 billion from the M1 Ultra.

Putting two M2 Max chips together also allows the M2 Ultra to increase its peak memory capacity to that gigantic 192GB figure. Apple claims the M2 Ultra CPU is overall 20% speedier than the M1 Ultra; its claims around the GPU portion peg it at a 30% increase.

The M2 Ultra consists of 24 CPU cores and either 60 or 76 GPU cores (it comes in two flavors), along with 800GBps of memory bandwidth, the last of which Apple claims is more than any PC processor today. (It’s certainly the case with our comparison systems.)

All of this helps widen the breadth of display support for the Mac Studio using M2 Ultra, increasing the maximum number of displays that can be connected at one time from five to eight—all at 4K resolution and a 60Hz refresh rate over DisplayPort via Thunderbolt 4. If you bring the display count down to six, then the panels can go up to 6K resolution at 60Hz. If you halve the connected displays from there, to three, they can all output up to 8K resolution at 60Hz.

If you need a faster refresh rate, you’ll need to use the included HDMI port, which can support up to 240Hz at 4K resolution. This connection also supports variable refresh rate, HDR, and multichannel audio.

Finally, the M2 Max and the M2 Ultra introduce Apple Silicon to the Wi-Fi 6E connection standard, while Bluetooth 5.3 is also included.

Ultimately, you’re looking at the most powerful Mac computer of this size ever produced, which is almost always the case with the latest Apple computer. However, this time, with it so close in spec to what will surely be the top-most Mac computer, full stop, the new Mac Pro, what’s usually marketing bombast sounds like a more legitimate claim.

Since we've gone over this M2 Ultra Mac Studio configuration intimately, let’s look at some competition. Naturally, for our test comparisons, I’ve included both CPU varieties (M1 Max and M1 Ultra) of the previous Mac Studio desktop. I've also pulled two powerful Windows workstations into the mix for some Mac vs. PC races. Those are the compact HP Z2 Mini G9 and the tower-style Lenovo ThinkStation P620 (2022), our Editors’ Choice award holders for mini workstations and high-end workstations, respectively.

The Z2 Mini G9 was tested with an Intel Core i9-12900K (which is clocked slightly faster and has a higher power ceiling than the standard Core i9-12900), 64GB of RAM, and an Nvidia RTX A2000 GPU. Meanwhile, our ThinkStation P620 review unit came with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX (an M2-dwarfing 64-core CPU with more memory bandwidth than the Intel), 128GB of RAM (also closer to the Mac Studio), and a higher-end Nvidia RTX A-series GPU.

While the HP Z2 Mini G9 we tested was “just” $3,000, the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 that crossed the PC Labs benches cost a whopping $16,905 at the time. So, we have a relative range of power levels and prices across the lineup.

Our first test is Cinebench R23, which uses Maxon’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene to test multi-core and multi-threaded processing. Here, the new Mac Studio outpaced the previous M1 Ultra model by nearly 18%—close to Apple’s claimed 20% CPU gains. However, the ThinkStation P620 trounced this figure by more than double, reflecting the massive core advantage of that Threadripper Pro chip, and shining some light on what you pay for there for highly core-count-sensitive work.

We followed it up with Geekbench 5.4.1 Pro by Primate Labs, which simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. In this test, the fresh Mac Studio achieved 17% and 27% higher scores over the M1 Ultra model in the multi-core and single-core benchmarks, respectively. While the ThinkStation wasn’t tested on Geekbench, the HP workstation came in far behind on multi-core performance, as was expected.

Then we have our real-world task tests, like HandBrake 1.4, which converts a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Here, the Mac Studio defeated the previous model by 16 seconds—definitely a noticeable difference—and practically ran laps around its PC competitors.

Next up: the benchmark-test utility PugetBench for Photoshop (by Puget Systems). It uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks. These range from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters—all run through Rosetta 2 emulation.

The Mac Studio managed the best Photoshop score for a Mac to date, but it was outclassed by the HP Z2 Mini G9 by more than 100 points. This could be due to the performance overhead of Rosetta 2 emulation or optimizations that favor Intel’s processors. Regardless, in this maxed-out configuration, this will be the best Mac desktop to date for carrying out complex Photoshop tasks.

In truly demanding content-creation apps, such as rendering a 3D image in Blender, the Mac Studio continued to outpace the previous (M1 Ultra) model. In Blender, it prevailed by 28% or 29%, depending on whether you're looking at the CPU- or GPU-stressing portion of the test. However, things got interesting against the ThinkStation P620: Its AMD 64-core CPU was able to fend off the Mac Studio by a significant margin on the version of the test that relied on the CPU, only for the system and its Nvidia RTX A6000 card to falter against the M2 Ultra’s 76-core GPU in the version of the test that leaned on the GPU.

Finally, though it's something of an academic exercise with a near-$9,000 machine, we ran this Mac and the other Studios through a series of browser-based performance tests. First is JetStream 2, which puts the system through 64 JavaScript and WebAssembly benchmarks. Then we run WebXPRT 3 from Principled Technologies, which includes HTML tests and more JavaScript throughput benchmarks. At last, we have Basemark Web 3.0, which further tests for performance with various JavaScript plug-ins and other web tools, but notably includes WebGL 2.0 testing for web graphics performance testing.

In these particular benchmarks, we saw the newest Mac Studio outperform the M1 Ultra model by anywhere from 15% to 31%, so expect a smooth and up-to-date web browsing experience from the Mac Studio. (Naturally…considering it costs several times more than most mortgages.)

All told, from our testing here, the Mac Studio is able to chew up just about any multimedia-production and 3D-content-rendering task you've got on hand. (Apple also claims to have further boosted the M2 Ultra’s improved 32-core Neural Engine, which is now claimed to be 40% faster. This will become more relevant as local-processing AI apps and services continue to grow in use and influence.)

While the AMD Threadripper Pro-equipped ThinkStation gave the M2 Ultra a worthy fight, Apple’s chip simply won out in more of our tests, which is particularly interesting considering how the two are priced. However, it’s important to note that we do not run Mac-comparable benchmarks for the intensive professional/scientific tasks and apps (like AutoCAD and Solidworks) used by advanced ISV-compliant workstations. This comes down to limitations in our benchmark suite, as well a lack of compatibility between Mac and PC in many pro-grade benchmark tests.

Regardless, it seems that, as it may in the laptop world, the Mac vs. PC debate is set to get interesting in the near future for desktops, too.

We first begin graphics testing with the cross-platform 3DMark Wildlife Extreme, running in Unlimited mode—higher numbers are better. Here, the graphics performance predictably increased by a considerable amount: about 24%, in line with Apple’s claim of its 30% GPU performance gains over the M1 Ultra Mac Studio.

Next up: GFXBench 5, a cross-platform test we use to compare performance across Windows and Mac. It stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, which are rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better, and the story is the same here: The M2 Ultra performed roughly 30% and 42% better than its predecessor in the Aztec Ruins and Car Chase tests, respectively.

Of course, every game-starved Mac fan wants to know: Can the Mac Studio with M2 Ultra really game? Silicon aside, the Mac is much more limited in its library of games, and in terms of games with repeatable, built-in benchmark tests, than Windows PCs are.

So, we ran the established Rise of the Tomb Raider test to get a sense of what the M2 Ultra Mac Studio can do in real-time rendering at 1080p resolution. The results were excellent, if unsurprising, with the Mac Studio able to run the game at 170fps at high settings.

For the games that are available for Mac, it's safe to say that the Mac Studio is probably the absolute best Mac to play them on. However, stay tuned for macOS Sonoma this fall, which is when Apple will launch a new Game Mode feature that promises to optimize CPU and GPU performance when games are active, as well as reduce latency from Bluetooth accessories.

With all that in mind, it’s admittedly silly to purchase a system like this for gaming exclusively. However, if you’re looking for the option with this super-powerful desktop you picked for more important reasons, know that it’s possible to game on this Mac…just far from recommended as its primary purpose!

We've come to expect Apple to outdo itself on an almost annual basis, at this point, and the new Mac Studio does nothing to change that cadence. Markedly better than the M1 Ultra Mac Studio in every performance metric (plus upgraded with faster Wi-Fi), this year's model is so powerful that even Apple's new Mac Pro tower flagship desktop doesn't come with a better processor, but rather the same very chip. While the Mac Pro will likely have far greater thermal headroom and therefore perform better, it appears you're getting a lot of that power here in a much smaller and much more affordable package (considering the Mac Pro starts at $6,999).

"Affordable" is relative, of course, up here in the stratosphere. As you've seen in the benchmark results, this sub-$9,000 workstation can outperform a nearly $17,000 PC product in all but a few edge cases throughout our testing suite. However, remember that we have not been able to test the Mac Studio on core ISV-grade professional benchmarks, and so we cannot speak to that end of its relative value. But these results are promising. Apple often takes a fair share of slings and arrows on pricing, but the latest Mac Studio is starting to challenge that narrative. For keeping a tradition of bleeding-edge performance and beginning to buck the trend on value, we give the 2023 Mac Studio our Editors' Choice award among high-end workstations.

Apple's 2023 Mac Studio, tested with the M2 Ultra, handily outdoes its predecessor while challenging the workstation competition on both power and price.

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