All new Mac Studio
M1 Ultra ‘headless’ Mac announced
With rumours circulating for months that Apple would unveil a new high-powered version of the Mac mini at its spring event, few could have predicted what was actually revealed: the all-new Mac Studio.
Looking like a pumped-up Mac mini to some, a reincarnation of the much-loved G4 Cube to others, the new Mac Studio is effectively a showcase for Apple silicon, with the mid-range model packing a brand new M1 chip – the M1 Ultra. Available with either a 20-core CPU and a 48-core GPU or a 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU, the M1 Ultra also includes a 32-core Neural Engine and support for up to 128GB of memory.
Apple says that that power enables the M1 Ultra to deliver 3.8x faster performance compared to a Mac Pro equipped with a 3.2GHz 16-core Intel Xeon W processor; up to 4.4x better graphics performance than a Mac Pro kitted out with the same CPU and an AMD Radeon W5700X GPU with 16GB of video memory; and
2.2x faster machine learning performance than a 3.6GHz
10-core Intel Core i9equipped iMac with AMD
Radeon 5700XT graphics.
More power options
While the base Mac Studio comes with a slightly more modest M1 Max chip at £1,999, every model in the line-up gets Wi-Fi 6 (aka 802.11ax Wi-Fi) and Bluetooth 5.0, plus four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports, one HDMI 2.0 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a 10Gb Ethernet port on the rear; plus two front-mounted USB-C ports and an SDXC memory card slot on the front, meaning you have to do a lot less ‘peeking’ around the back when plugging in an iPhone, iPad or other add-ons and accessories.
Accompanying the Mac Studio is the new 27-inch Studio Display (see page 9), plus new versions of Apple’s Magic Trackpad, Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad. All three accessories are available in a new black finish at £149, £99 and £199 respectively – or £20 more each than the same items in white. Apple has yet to launch a standard ‘tenkeyless’ Magic Keyboard in the same colour, or one without Touch ID included. The Mac Studio is available now.