But the M1 Ultra model is a bit heavier, with a full two pounds of additional weight. Our M1 Max-powered review unit weighs 5.9 pounds, which isn’t bad for a system that is actually made out of a block of aluminum. The cooling system not only accounts for much of the Mac Studio’s height, but it’s also the source of a lot of the weight. Apple boasts that it has more than 2,000 perforations, but there’s probably not a huge performance benefit to having more tiny holes, even if it does look kind of cool. (More on processor and configuration options later.)Īdditionally, the Mac Studio has active cooling, with a double-sided blower and ventilation that draws cool air up from the bottom of the chassis and exhausts the hot air out through the ventilated back of the machine. It’s essentially two M1 Max systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) crammed into a single die, joined by UltraFusion, a silicon interposer that processes signals and communicates between the two halves to make the doubled-up CPU work as a single chip. The M1 Max isn’t new-it was already being offered in the MacBook Pro-but the M1 Ultra was announced alongside the Mac Studio, and isn’t yet offered on any other Mac. The Mac Studio has two processor options: the M1 Max and the M1 Ultra. As it stands, the only current Mac with better connectivity seems to be the highly configurable Mac Pro-but that’s a full tower desktop, with the option of adding additional graphics cards and connections over PCI Express. Compared to other Mac products, it’s one of the most comprehensive port selections offered.Įven as Apple has started adding ports to products like the MacBook Pro (which recently saw the return of HDMI and the SDXC card slot), it’s also slimmed down the selection on products like the 24-inch iMac, which offers just four Thunderbolt 4 ports and a standard Gigabit Ethernet connection. On the back of the small machine, you’ll find four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10Gbps Ethernet jack, dual USB Type-A ports, a single HDMI output, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the front, the Studio has two USB-C ports (on the M1 Ultra configurations they’re actually Thunderbolt 4 ports) along with an SDXC card slot, which supports SD 4.0 and UHS-I and UHS-II, the ultra high-speed bus interface used by higher-performance cards. (I won’t be surprised if some enterprising accessory makers start selling a look-alike transparent stand for the Studio that echoes the G4 design.)
It also looks a heck of a lot like the square internal chassis of the PowerMac G4 Cube, just without the clear acrylic that Apple’s designers loved so much at the time. It also trades the mini’s black plastic rear panel for a design that sets the ports flush with the aluminum chassis, for a seamless unibody construction.Īnd the Mac mini isn’t the only past Apple product that seems to have been referenced in the new Mac Studio’s design. It’s taller-3.7 inches to the Mac mini’s 1.4 inches-and the rear IO panel has a different port selection. Viewed from above, the Studio looks a bit like an app icon rendered in 3D.īut it’s also very different. It has the same extruded aluminum construction of the mini, from the 7.7-by-7.7-inch footprint to the mirror-polished Apple logo on the top. First, the familiarities: It looks like the Mac mini. The look of the Mac Studio is at once familiar and revolutionary. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security SoftwareĪ Whole New Mac: Design, Ports, and Cooling.