Apple is giving its high-end Mac Studio desktops a refresh this month, their first spec bump in almost two years. Considered on the time scale of, say, new Mac Pro updates, two years is barely any time at all. But Apple often delivers big performance increases for its Pro, Max, and Ultra chips from generation to generation, so any update—particularly one where you leapfrog two generations in a single refresh—can bring a major increase to performance that's worth waiting for.

It's the magnitude of Apple's generation-over-generation updates that makes this Studio refresh feel odd, though. The lower-end Studio gets an M4 Max processor like you'd expect—the same chip Apple sells in its high-end MacBook Pros but fit into a desktop enclosure instead of a laptop. But the top-end Studio gets an M3 Ultra instead of an M4 Ultra. That's still a huge increase in CPU and GPU cores (and there are other Ultra-specific benefits, too), but it makes the expensive Studio feel like less of a step up over the regular one.

How do these chips stack up to each other, and how big a deal is the lack of an M4 Ultra? How much does the Studio overlap with the refreshed M4 Pro Mac mini from last fall? And how do Apple's fastest chips compare to what Intel and AMD are doing in high-end PCs?

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Apple’s first Mac Studio refresh in nearly two years is a welcome update, injecting fresh life into two computers that were still getting by with M2 chips. But the company took a bit of a strange approach to the update, giving an M4-series Max chip to the lower-end Studio but an M3 Ultra chip to the high-end model.

These processors are both performance upgrades from the M2 Max and M2 Ultra, and the M3 Ultra is so huge that it should have no trouble outrunning the M4 Max despite its slightly older CPU and GPU architecture. But it’s still a departure from past practice, where Apple would keep the Studio’s chip generation in lockstep.

When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an “Ultra” tier. This is, as far as I can recall, the first time that Apple has said anything like this in public.

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Apple announced its first Mac Studio updates in nearly two years today, a few months after bringing the M4 and M4 Pro chips to the Mac mini.

As before, Apple offers a lower-end and a higher-end configuration of the Mac Studio. The lower-end model is pretty much what you expect: It gives you the same M4 Max processor Apple introduced in the high-end MacBook Pro last year. It has up to 16 CPU cores (10 P-cores, 4 E-cores), up to 40 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine.

The $1,999 base model comes with 14 CPU cores (10 P-cores, 4 E-cores), 32 GPU cores, 36GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. That model's RAM can't be upgraded until you step up to the fully-enabled M4 Max, which also gets you 48GB of RAM for $300. From there, the desktop can be upgraded with either 64GB or 128GB of RAM, same as the MacBook Pro.

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