Mac Studio (M4 Max, M3 Ultra) Review Roundup [Video]

Early reviews of the new Mac Studio (M4 Max and M3 Ultra) have arrived ahead of the desktop's official release on March 12, 2025.

Mac Studio starts at $1,999 (U.S.) and $1,799 (U.S.) for education. Additional configure-to-order options are available.

You can learn more about the new Mac Studio here:
● Apple Announces New Mac Studio With M4 Max and M3 Ultra


You can pre-order the new Mac Studio here:
● Mac Studio (BH Photo Video)

Check out our review roundup below!




The Verge
The M3 Ultra chip is overkill for many. If you need this level of power, you already know exactly how you'll get the most from it. It's for visual effects artists and animators. It's for professionals doing ambitious audio and video production work. Are you regularly crunching big medical datasets? Maybe you can use all those cores and memory to their fullest potential. And as AI development continues to flourish, the kitted out configurations with 256GB or 512GB of memory could prove appealing to anyone interested in running sophisticated LLM models locally on their machine.



CNET
As you'd expect, the Studio is pretty comfortable with things you might use it for, such as heavy video editing or using local AI models. I used a 70B Llama model run locally (roughly 50GB) which wasn't bad for text chats -- it got a little slower as time went on, but it was never slow -- I'm not a programmer and only had a few days so really couldn't stress the system as much as I would have liked. The same goes for some basic 8K video editing in Premiere Pro, with real-time playback of sequences with auto-reframe. I'm not sure either would have been as smooth with the 96GB memory configuration, but 128GB was definitely comfortable.


ArsTechnica
Do you need the best GPU you can get and more than 128GB of RAM for some reason? Do you also want multiple ProRes video encoders? These are the things the M3 Ultra gets you. Almost any other power user, whether you're hoping to play some games, do app development, or run a bunch of virtual machines or Docker containers, will be better served by either the M4 Max Mac Studio or, in cases where you want a good CPU but don't particularly care about playing games, the M4 Pro Mac mini.


Wired
On the industry standard Geekbench 6 test, CPU performance was up 17 percent over the aforementioned MacBook Pro, while GPU performance was up a blistering 67 percent. I measured similar score upgrades when testing with Cinebench 2024. This GPU one-upmanship was a common theme throughout my testing. Image and video rendering was blazing, as were other highest-tier graphics and gaming tests I ran—all smooth and unstuttering. As well, on-device tests using Apple Intelligence, namely AI image generation, were far faster than anything I've done using online tools. While these two systems are not exactly apples to apples, the step up from the M4 Pro to the M4 Max was as impressive as any generational upgrade I've encountered in recent memory.


TechRadar
What I could see, however, is that the real value of the new Mac Studio lies in its potential to speed up creative workflows. If you can create, code, compile and more, so much more quickly, it means projects can be completed more quickly. This could in turn reduce costs for large-scale businesses, and it also allows professionals to take on more clients. Even with the lowest memory configuration for the M3 Ultra model, 96GB, there's plenty of headroom to run multiple tasks simultaneously, which again potentially makes a huge difference to productivity.


Tom's Guide
My only reservations are about the value proposition of upgrading to the M3 Ultra edition. As you can see from our gaming tests, the 2025 Mac Studio hasn't radically shifted the narrative of desktop Mac gaming, but the M3 Ultra has the potential to run even demanding titles like Cyberpunk at good to great framerates. But will it be worth the ridiculously high upgrade cost? We'll have to wait and see, but I'm sure of one thing: the Mac Studio M4 Max is the most powerful Mac to date, and it still looks great on a desk.


Dave 2D



Matthew Moniz



Karl Conrad



Nikias Molina