Review: Mac Studio Shows Us Why Apple Left Intel Behind

Apple Silicon Macs got more and more interesting as we went deeper. The MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini looked and felt exactly like the Macs they replaced, only with better performance and much longer battery life. The 24-inch iMac and 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros were throwbacks to the colorful iMac G3 and titanium PowerBooks from two decades ago. And here we come to Mac Studio, the first all-new Apple Silicon Mac.

Studio reminds me of a few Macs we’ve seen before – it’s sort of a Mac Pro with a PowerMac G4 Cube trash can. It borrows elements from the Mac Pro and Mac mini, but does not replace either. It’s both a glimpse of what’s possible now that Apple is leaving the Intel era behind, and yet another confirmation of the Mac’s commitment to being a powerful and flexible platform for getting work done.

It’s not exactly the mythical “xMac”midrange workstation of yesteryear, but it’s as close as we’ve ever gotten. This is an exciting place.

See and feel

Rumor has it that the Mac Studio is “a more powerful Mac mini”and that’s not a bad way to appreciate its design. The Studio takes up the same 7.7-square-inch footprint as a 12-year-old unibody Mac mini, but it’s 3.7 inches tall instead of 1.4 inches tall. That makes it just over two and a half Mac minis tall. (If you’re using it with one of the Apple Studio displays, there’s a little more than an inch of clearance between the bottom of the monitor and the top of the Mac, depending on how the screen is tilted.)

These days, especially after Apple Silicon, the current mini design is hard to live up to its size, but there’s no wasted space in the Studio. The base of the computer contains a built-in 370W power supply – no external block required, good transfer from a mini machine, and the base and back of the machine are mainly for ventilation grills for its tall dual-fan cooler. The actual computer part, according to Apple’s detailed images, is a single thin board sandwiched between them.

The heatsink that Apple uses for the Studio cooling unit is made of aluminum in the Studio M1 Max and copper in the M1 Ultra – the copper heatsink adds two pounds to the computer’s weight and you’ll notice the difference right away. when you pick them up.

But in both cases, the size of the cooler and the energy efficiency of Apple’s chips make the Studio almost silent no matter what you do with it. My Intel and AMD air-cooled systems revved up loudly when doing lengthy video encoding jobs or playing games, but the Studio fans were never audible. And both versions of Studio will get warm to the touch when they’re hard at work, but neither will ever feel uncomfortably hot to the touch, which can sometimes be a problem with Intel Macs.

Another thing about the Mac mini in Studio is that it’s a “BYODKM “case, with no display, keyboard, or mouse included. Apple will be selling you silver and black versions of all of its Magic accessories, including the TouchID keyboard and a version of the Magic Trackpad with slightly more rounded corners. But you can also continue to use any accessories you use with your current Mac (in my case, the Mac-layout Varmilo VA87M mechanical keyboard and the original Magic Trackpad 2).

Ports, ports, ports

Performance is an important part of Mac Studio’s appeal, and we’ll take a closer look at it shortly. But ports are just as important.

The back of the Studio has the same number and type of ports as the 2018 Intel Mac mini, plus or minus some protocol upgrades. You get four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port, two 5 Gb/s USB-A ports, one HDMI port, and a headphone jack.

But now there are ports on the front of the machine, something Apple has resisted on all of its computers except the Mac Pro. The Studio M1 Max has two 10Gb/s USB-C ports and a UHS-II SDXC card reader. On the M1 Ultra version, the addition of a second M1 Max SoC allows the front ports to be used as full 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4 ports, just like the rear ones.

Even if your job doesn’t require the full power of the M1 Max or Ultra, the I/O count makes the Studio more suitable for all sorts of workloads than the M1 Mac mini. The Studio can connect to five displays at once, compared to two for minis (and up to four of those can be 5K Studio displays, not just one for minis). And you can set up a multi-monitor array while still leaving enough ports for external storage or other accessories (external GPUs are not supported, as with other Apple Silicon Macs).

External extensibility is important because Studio’s internals cannot be upgraded after you buy it. There’s no way to add RAM or internal storage, so you’ll have to rely on externally connected USB drives or Thunderbolt drives if you need a fast PCIe scratch drive for photo or video work, or a large hard drive array for archiving old projects—or even if you just prefer not to pay higher than usual Apple prices for SSD upgrades.