Apple has unveiled the refresh of its Mac Studio 2023 desktop computer. With the same design as last year’s model, the big news is the update of its SoC engine to powerful Apple M2 Ultra and Max.

If the Mac mini is aimed at the consumer market, Mac Studio wants to convince creative professionals who want to keep the small dimensions of these compacts, but with a leap in performance. And without having to scale to Mac Pro towers.

Mac Studio 2023, another of the many teams introduced at WWDC 2023, retains the basic design of the previous model and its aluminum chassis. It supports 8K monitors and can stream content to up to six Pro Display XDR monitors simultaneously.

The new version supports the latest connection technologies, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. It’s in the back four Thunderbolt 4 ports, 10 Gbe Ethernet LAN port, HDMI output and two USB-A ports. On the front there are two USB-C ports and a slot for an SDXC card.

Mac Studio 2023: much higher performance

As we said, the big novelty of the version lies in the new Apple M2 Ultra SoC. Basically, it’s two M2 Max matrices connected with Apple’s UltraFusion technology, with a 24-core CPU and up to 76-core GPU. Apple claims that a single system with this type of GPU can train machine learning workloads that discrete GPUs cannot handle due to memory limitations. We don’t know what NVIDIA will think…

Apple’s argument is that the M2 Ultra supports up to 192 GB of unified memory, 50 percent more than the previous Studio’s M1 Ultra. In total, it offers 800 GB/s of available memory bandwidth along with a 32-core neural engine with 134 billion transistors. Its storage capacity will increase to 8 Tbytes.

The second version of the new Studio connects the most modest M2 Max. Here, the starting base includes a 12-core CPU, up to a 38-core GPU, and up to 96GB of unified memory with 400GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Both should offer much higher performance than the 2022 model. Apple says Octane 3D rendering will be up to three times faster with the M2 Ultra compared to the M1 Ultra, and there should be a 50 percent increase in video processing speed in DaVinci Resolve. We’ll see.

Mac Studios will use the macOS Ventura operating system and will be updated to the new version after its release in September. They will be available from June 15. The base model equipped with M2 Max will be on sale for $1,999. And up from there; very high if you choose the M2 Ultra SoC and full memory and storage.