The all-new Mac Studio will be released this Friday. Ahead of time, the first reviews and videos for the Mac Studio have appeared, giving us a closer look at the machine and its companion display.
The Mac Studio is more powerful than the larger Mac mini. The same M1 Max chip can be used for the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro and the new M1 Ultra chip can be used for the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro tower is priced at $12,999 and has a 28-core M1 Ultra chip.
Monica Chin is a reporter for The Verge.
My first stop was Becca Farsace, our video director who edited the entire video review of the Mac Studio and Studio Display (which you should go watch if you haven't already) on our Studio unit. I watched her work in Premiere and Media Encoder for hours, and even to my amateur eyes, it was clear that the Studio was flying. It was miles better than our two-year-old Mac Pro (which Becca uses for most of her work) at basically everything.
Becca was able to play 4K, 10-bit 4:2:2 footage from a Sony FX3 at full resolution in Adobe Premiere Pro at 4x speed with no proxies. It was lightning fast. On any other machine, she'd have had to be in half-resolution at most. There was also no lag between hitting the spacebar and stopping playback when playing footage at 2x or 4x speed, something she finds to be a big annoyance on the Mac Pro.
The back of the Mac Studio has a number of options for connecting to the internet, including four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports, one HDMI port, and one 10-Gigabit Ethernet port. There is a card slot on the front and two ports on the back for M1 Max and M1 Ultra configurations. The computer supports a number of technologies.
There is a show called Six Colors.
But that may be the point: this is a computer designed to be used, not to be looked at as a piece of art. When you choose to stick ports on the front of a computer—hey everybody, Apple put ports on the front!!—you are choosing function over form. That's the story of the Mac Studio.
Apple hasn't skimped on the Mac Studio when it comes to what a certain portion of its customer base wants—connectivity. I used the SD card on the front of the Mac Studio twice on the very first day I had it connected. I also plugged a keyboard into that front USB port. (My test unit was an M1 Max model, so those front ports were USB-C; on models with the M1 Ultra chip, they’re full-fledged Thunderbolt 4.)
And then there's the full array of ports on the back: Four Thunderbolt 4, two USB-A, HDMI, a headphone jack, and 10Gb Ethernet. While I didn't fill up all of those ports, I did transfer an array of cables and adapters from the back of my iMac Pro to the Mac Studio and didn't have to dig out a single adapter or find a USB hub to accommodate them.
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