The M1 Max: A Test of Performance and Versatility

Last year, I had the opportunity to test the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip, which came bundled with a 10-core CPU and 32-core GPU. This setup was paired with 64GB of RAM, a substantial amount that's become increasingly common in modern computing. Although I'm not a high-end creative professional by nature, I've found myself shooting more videos and occasionally producing music for my own projects. The M1 Max performed admirably, providing seamless performance for tasks like 4K video editing and music production.

The performance of the M1 Max was comparable to that of the MacBook Pro tested last year, with one notable difference: the Mac Studio version was slightly faster, thanks in part to its improved cooling system. However, this is largely due to the fact that half of the Mac Studio's design is dedicated to cooling. The similarities between the two devices are striking, and it's clear that Apple has refined their approach to optimizing performance within a more compact form factor.

A New Product Line: The Mac Studio

However, the real excitement lies in the Mac Studio, which marks Apple's return to display technology with a new product line. Initially, I viewed the Mac Studio as a potential alternative to Apple's Pro XDR display, but it has since become clear that this is not simply a lower-cost option. Instead, it represents a distinct path forward for Apple, offering an affordable entry point into their ecosystem while still delivering impressive performance and features.

The Mac Studio itself is a compact, high-performance device that pairs the M1 Max chip with 64GB of RAM. Its design is sleek and modern, making it an attractive option for those looking to upgrade from a standard M1 MacBook or iMac. However, its true appeal lies in its potential as a centerpiece for a new product line, one that leverages Apple's expertise in display technology to deliver exceptional visual performance.

The Studio Display: A New Era of Display Technology

One of the most significant announcements surrounding the Mac Studio is the introduction of the Studio Display, which serves as a companion piece to the device. This 24-inch display boasts an IPS panel and a resolution of 5120 x 2880, making it an excellent option for creative professionals who require high-quality visuals for their work.

While the Studio Display falls short in terms of features compared to Apple's Pro XDR display, which offers HDR support and a variable refresh rate, it remains an attractive option for those seeking a more affordable entry point into professional-grade display technology. The Studio Display also introduces some innovative features, such as Center Stage, which uses advanced camera technology to create a seamless experience for video conferencing.

Center Stage: A Game-Changer for Video Conferencing

One of the standout features of the Studio Display is its incorporation of Center Stage, a feature that has become increasingly important in modern communication. This technology allows the display to adjust to your position and movement, ensuring that you're always at the center of the frame. I had the opportunity to test Center Stage with a few colleagues, and it performed impressively well, adapting seamlessly to our movements as we spread out or moved closer together.

The Future of the Mac Studio: Reservations and Expectations

While the Mac Studio is an impressive device, its true potential remains to be seen. As I see it, this product falls somewhere between a hypothetical new Mac Pro and standard M1 systems that many users have outgrown. The Mac Studio's price point, which starts at $2,499 for the base model, makes it more accessible to a wider range of users.

However, I'm reserving judgment on the M1 Ultra version of this product until I get hands-on experience with it. This will provide valuable insight into how Apple's latest technology integrates with their ecosystem and addresses the needs of professional-grade creative professionals.

For now, the Mac Studio represents an attractive option for those seeking a balance between performance, price, and feature set. As the market evolves and we see more products from Apple, I'll continue to monitor this product line closely, providing updates and insights as needed.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe mac studio is part of something very rare indeed a whole brand new product line from apple right now it consists of the mac studio mini desktop and the studio display so the real question is who is it for i've been able to spend some time with the new mac studio and studio display i will say about the mac studio it impressed me but it didn't surprise me and that's because the configuration that i tested is virtually identical to the 16-inch macbook pro that i tested late in 2021. they both have that m1 max chip it's a combination cpu and gpu apple silicon that's in all new macs and some new ipads and both of these devices are really targeted at creatives people who make uh videos they shoot they edit they're music producers maybe they make podcasts so that creative class that needs something more than just you know a standard mac mini which was kind of the go-to for many years for people who wanted to have let's say a computer in their recording studio the big difference of course is that a macbook pro is an all-in-one self-contained system you have the apple silicon you have the display the keyboard touchpad everything you just pack it and go whereas the mac studio it's a small desktop you could technically disconnect it put it in a bag and take it with you people did that with mac minis a lot over the years but it's really meant to be in one place connected to a separate display and a separate keyboard and a separate mouse or touch pad now it's interesting because even just a couple of months ago that m1 max chip was really the top dog when it came to apple's own ships they're trying over the course of a couple years to phase out intel chips phase in their own they started with the m1 then they added the m1 pro and m1 max well now for the mac studio yes they have the m1 max and that's the version i tested but they also have a new chip called the m1 ultra which is basically two m1 maxes stuck together so when you get a mac studio you can choose which base model you want for two thousand dollars you get the m1 max and for four thousand dollars you get the m1 ultra now my first inclination was to kind of write off that two thousand dollar m1 max version is not really ambitious enough for real creative pros and also to uh look at the four thousand dollar and one ultra version and say wow that's really expensive for something that is not upgradable you can't open up and put new parts inside and that audience that wants to spend that much maybe they're looking for a mac pro maybe they're waiting for the next version of the mac pro so this might not be the device for them but after talking to some other creatives i actually heard the opposite from some of them that the m1 max version of the mac studio or even the older version is exactly the kind of middle ground that they might be looking for if you were an aspiring filmmaker a developing music producer and you wanted to do more than you could with simply an m1 device like a macbook air or a mac mini then spending 2 000 or more on a mac studio and 1500 and up for the companion display actually seems like a reasonable investment if you're ready to step up but you're not quite in the mac pro territory yet and even if you are in the mac pro territory that's one of those devices that has not been updated from intel to apple silicon yet even though apple has teams that we're gonna have to come back later this year that's the real question mark hovering over all of this maybe even more interesting than the mac studio is the other new product it's paired with the studio display it's apple's first new display since the super expensive super fancy xdr and it has its own chip in it something that i don't think i've seen in a display before this has an a13 chip from apple the same thing that was in i think the iphone 11 and what that allows you to do is allows you to have a webcam built-in that does its own center stage that's the apple utility where the webcam can kind of zoom in and follow your face around while you're in a zoom meeting or a facetime call and it also does spatial audio and that's built right into the display and if you have a compatible computer plug it in and you'll be able to take advantage of those extra features now if you remember that xdr display the big professional apple display started at like five thousand dollars and you definitely needed the sold separately thousand dollar stand to go with it this is a more reasonable 1599 includes the stand although there are of course some stand upgrades you can pay extra for so far i have only tested the m1 max version of the mac studio not the m1 ultra version it's also interesting that that ultra version is actually heavier by about two pounds even though the cases are the same size and that's because it's got a heavier heat sink inside i think made of copper instead of aluminum in either case in both models about half the volume is just fans and cooling stuff anyway so there's a lot of that going on in here so besides the look it's a square with gently rounded corners there's actually not a lot in common between the old mac mini and the new mac studio i said initially that the studio was kind of like too many stacked on top of each other it's actually more than that the studio is about 3.7 inches high and the old mac mini is about 1.4 inches so it's actually taller than that even and of course huge price difference the mac mini starts at seven hundred dollars this guy two thousand dollars and up i'd almost kind of like to see an m1 pro version of the mac studio to give it even more in-between options for people now note that the configuration i tested is a few steps up from even that two thousand dollar base it adds uh 64 gigs of ram it's got two terabytes of storage and it's got the version of the m1 max with 32 graphic scores instead of 24. all that adds up to about 3 200 but you have to pick your upgrades carefully when you're ordering in the first place because this is a totally sealed system there are no user accessible parts inside you can't upgrade it after the fact unless you plug something in externally through one of the usb ec ports and that's probably the biggest sticking point for a certain type of potential mac studio purchaser if you're a real power user if you're the kind of person who has a big desktop set up or you either have or wanted to get a mac pro the real appeal there is you can take last year's graphics card out and put a new one in your hard drive is getting too small you could take it out put a larger one in put a faster one in obviously in systems like this you can't do that it's also interesting to note that i took the 16-inch macbook pro and configured it the exact same way with the same amount of storage and ram and the upgraded m1 max chip and that came out to about 4 300 so that's the extra premium you're paying for getting everything in a very portable laptop package here you even have to buy the keyboard and touch pad or mouse separately and of course apple has a new variation on the magic keyboard and the magic mouse and the magic touchpad that magic keyboard with a number pad built in uh it's got a new gray and silver design 200 bucks the touchpad 150 and the magic mouse itself is 100. now as a long time mac user and an even longer time pc user i will say that touchpads especially that apple magic touchpad as just one of my favorite input devices of all time meanwhile the magic mouse is one of my least favorite i think that one of the biggest innovations in the mac studio is one of the most basic they took some of the ports and connections on the back and they moved them on to the front of the system for years not just apple a lot of computer makers have been hiding all their ports in the back on the sides uh it keeps it out of the way but it's also hard to get to them so i really like that they took two usb ports and the sd card slot and moved them right to the front of the system on the m1 max version of this they're just usb-c ports if you get the m1 ultra version for some reason they're also thunderbolt ports we've really come a long way from the nadir of mac design where sometimes we had systems that just want one usb port for the entire thing power accessories everything else i'm glad we don't live in that world anymore when it comes to benchmark testing i was not expecting anything radically different than what we got when we tested the m1 max last year in the form of a 16-inch macbook pro both the macbook and the mac studio had the version of the m1 max chip with 10 cpu cores and 32 gpu cores they both had 64 gigs of ram which is really a lot now i may not be a high-end creative pro all the time but during covet i've taken to shooting a lot of my own videos sometimes editing it usually in 4k i've certainly done plenty of music studio production i occasionally designed stuff for 3d printing in cad programs and i found of course that the performance between the m1 max and the macbook pro we tested last year and the m1 max and this new mac studio very very similar uh the mac studio version was actually a little bit faster which i attribute to the better cooling because again half of the whole thing is basically devoted to cooling but what we also have to talk about is the companion piece for the mac studio and that is the studio display which is by itself big news because it's apple's first new display in a long time i kind of originally saw it as a lower cost alternative to that pro xdr display and it is in some ways and it isn't in other ways at about sixteen hundred dollars it's certainly much more attainable than the five thousand dollar and up xdr but it also doesn't have all the same features doesn't have all the bells and whistles it's not quite a true pro level display in the same way that the xdr is that xdr has a mini led screen this is just a regular ips display the studio display does not support hdr content and it doesn't have that promotion variable refresh rate that some of the newer macbooks and ipads have it's basically a 60hz display and that's it looking at them side by side the studio display in the xcr there's actually a lot of good consistency in the color between the two going through the different reference modes but we're going to have a deeper dive into the studio display soon what i really liked about the studio display was some of those a13 tricks built in especially center stage which has become very useful on ipads especially if you're in a lot of web video meetings zoom meetings face time meetings like a lot of us are these days what center stage lets you do is you move around a little bit you reframe yourself and the camera does that for you it's actually shooting a very wide image and just kind of zooms in and pans within that image to keep you in frame i set it up i tested it with a few other people where we spread out and the the image zoomed out to capture all of us other people moved off it zoomed back in on me i moved in closer it kept up with me and back so it was actually very responsive worked very well and of course you won't be able to access any of that stuff if you plug this into a windows machine it should technically work as a monitor but number one you're not going to have access to any of the system controls because they're all software-based there are no buttons or anything anywhere on the studio display and of course you won't be able to use things like center stage so what are we left with apple would like you to think of the mac studio and studio display as a package they come together and you can get into that package it'll cost you at least thirty five hundred dollars probably more frankly but they are two products designed to work together and they have a lot of synergies between them of course once you start adding extras like more ram more storage space even the height adjustable stand on the studio display versus just the tilting one is an extra four hundred dollars so of course things can get more expensive very quickly but we're still in that in-betweener zone people who have outgrown a regular m1 system but they're not quite ready for a mac pro or they're waiting to see what the next mac pro is that's really the biggest question mark out there so i am reserving judgment in a way until we see what that next generation mac pro is because that truly is what the highest of high-end professionals are looking for i'm also reserving judgment on the m1 ultra version of this product until i get a chance to check one of those out and test it myself so that leaves us back here with the m1 max version of the mac studio and the studio display it falls somewhere in between a hypothetical new mac pro at some point in the future and the regular m1 systems you might have outgrown and i see this appealing mostly to people whose budget and whose needs again fall somewhere between those two extremes if you want to read our full review of the mac studio and studio display find out more links are right down there in the description belowthe mac studio is part of something very rare indeed a whole brand new product line from apple right now it consists of the mac studio mini desktop and the studio display so the real question is who is it for i've been able to spend some time with the new mac studio and studio display i will say about the mac studio it impressed me but it didn't surprise me and that's because the configuration that i tested is virtually identical to the 16-inch macbook pro that i tested late in 2021. they both have that m1 max chip it's a combination cpu and gpu apple silicon that's in all new macs and some new ipads and both of these devices are really targeted at creatives people who make uh videos they shoot they edit they're music producers maybe they make podcasts so that creative class that needs something more than just you know a standard mac mini which was kind of the go-to for many years for people who wanted to have let's say a computer in their recording studio the big difference of course is that a macbook pro is an all-in-one self-contained system you have the apple silicon you have the display the keyboard touchpad everything you just pack it and go whereas the mac studio it's a small desktop you could technically disconnect it put it in a bag and take it with you people did that with mac minis a lot over the years but it's really meant to be in one place connected to a separate display and a separate keyboard and a separate mouse or touch pad now it's interesting because even just a couple of months ago that m1 max chip was really the top dog when it came to apple's own ships they're trying over the course of a couple years to phase out intel chips phase in their own they started with the m1 then they added the m1 pro and m1 max well now for the mac studio yes they have the m1 max and that's the version i tested but they also have a new chip called the m1 ultra which is basically two m1 maxes stuck together so when you get a mac studio you can choose which base model you want for two thousand dollars you get the m1 max and for four thousand dollars you get the m1 ultra now my first inclination was to kind of write off that two thousand dollar m1 max version is not really ambitious enough for real creative pros and also to uh look at the four thousand dollar and one ultra version and say wow that's really expensive for something that is not upgradable you can't open up and put new parts inside and that audience that wants to spend that much maybe they're looking for a mac pro maybe they're waiting for the next version of the mac pro so this might not be the device for them but after talking to some other creatives i actually heard the opposite from some of them that the m1 max version of the mac studio or even the older version is exactly the kind of middle ground that they might be looking for if you were an aspiring filmmaker a developing music producer and you wanted to do more than you could with simply an m1 device like a macbook air or a mac mini then spending 2 000 or more on a mac studio and 1500 and up for the companion display actually seems like a reasonable investment if you're ready to step up but you're not quite in the mac pro territory yet and even if you are in the mac pro territory that's one of those devices that has not been updated from intel to apple silicon yet even though apple has teams that we're gonna have to come back later this year that's the real question mark hovering over all of this maybe even more interesting than the mac studio is the other new product it's paired with the studio display it's apple's first new display since the super expensive super fancy xdr and it has its own chip in it something that i don't think i've seen in a display before this has an a13 chip from apple the same thing that was in i think the iphone 11 and what that allows you to do is allows you to have a webcam built-in that does its own center stage that's the apple utility where the webcam can kind of zoom in and follow your face around while you're in a zoom meeting or a facetime call and it also does spatial audio and that's built right into the display and if you have a compatible computer plug it in and you'll be able to take advantage of those extra features now if you remember that xdr display the big professional apple display started at like five thousand dollars and you definitely needed the sold separately thousand dollar stand to go with it this is a more reasonable 1599 includes the stand although there are of course some stand upgrades you can pay extra for so far i have only tested the m1 max version of the mac studio not the m1 ultra version it's also interesting that that ultra version is actually heavier by about two pounds even though the cases are the same size and that's because it's got a heavier heat sink inside i think made of copper instead of aluminum in either case in both models about half the volume is just fans and cooling stuff anyway so there's a lot of that going on in here so besides the look it's a square with gently rounded corners there's actually not a lot in common between the old mac mini and the new mac studio i said initially that the studio was kind of like too many stacked on top of each other it's actually more than that the studio is about 3.7 inches high and the old mac mini is about 1.4 inches so it's actually taller than that even and of course huge price difference the mac mini starts at seven hundred dollars this guy two thousand dollars and up i'd almost kind of like to see an m1 pro version of the mac studio to give it even more in-between options for people now note that the configuration i tested is a few steps up from even that two thousand dollar base it adds uh 64 gigs of ram it's got two terabytes of storage and it's got the version of the m1 max with 32 graphic scores instead of 24. all that adds up to about 3 200 but you have to pick your upgrades carefully when you're ordering in the first place because this is a totally sealed system there are no user accessible parts inside you can't upgrade it after the fact unless you plug something in externally through one of the usb ec ports and that's probably the biggest sticking point for a certain type of potential mac studio purchaser if you're a real power user if you're the kind of person who has a big desktop set up or you either have or wanted to get a mac pro the real appeal there is you can take last year's graphics card out and put a new one in your hard drive is getting too small you could take it out put a larger one in put a faster one in obviously in systems like this you can't do that it's also interesting to note that i took the 16-inch macbook pro and configured it the exact same way with the same amount of storage and ram and the upgraded m1 max chip and that came out to about 4 300 so that's the extra premium you're paying for getting everything in a very portable laptop package here you even have to buy the keyboard and touch pad or mouse separately and of course apple has a new variation on the magic keyboard and the magic mouse and the magic touchpad that magic keyboard with a number pad built in uh it's got a new gray and silver design 200 bucks the touchpad 150 and the magic mouse itself is 100. now as a long time mac user and an even longer time pc user i will say that touchpads especially that apple magic touchpad as just one of my favorite input devices of all time meanwhile the magic mouse is one of my least favorite i think that one of the biggest innovations in the mac studio is one of the most basic they took some of the ports and connections on the back and they moved them on to the front of the system for years not just apple a lot of computer makers have been hiding all their ports in the back on the sides uh it keeps it out of the way but it's also hard to get to them so i really like that they took two usb ports and the sd card slot and moved them right to the front of the system on the m1 max version of this they're just usb-c ports if you get the m1 ultra version for some reason they're also thunderbolt ports we've really come a long way from the nadir of mac design where sometimes we had systems that just want one usb port for the entire thing power accessories everything else i'm glad we don't live in that world anymore when it comes to benchmark testing i was not expecting anything radically different than what we got when we tested the m1 max last year in the form of a 16-inch macbook pro both the macbook and the mac studio had the version of the m1 max chip with 10 cpu cores and 32 gpu cores they both had 64 gigs of ram which is really a lot now i may not be a high-end creative pro all the time but during covet i've taken to shooting a lot of my own videos sometimes editing it usually in 4k i've certainly done plenty of music studio production i occasionally designed stuff for 3d printing in cad programs and i found of course that the performance between the m1 max and the macbook pro we tested last year and the m1 max and this new mac studio very very similar uh the mac studio version was actually a little bit faster which i attribute to the better cooling because again half of the whole thing is basically devoted to cooling but what we also have to talk about is the companion piece for the mac studio and that is the studio display which is by itself big news because it's apple's first new display in a long time i kind of originally saw it as a lower cost alternative to that pro xdr display and it is in some ways and it isn't in other ways at about sixteen hundred dollars it's certainly much more attainable than the five thousand dollar and up xdr but it also doesn't have all the same features doesn't have all the bells and whistles it's not quite a true pro level display in the same way that the xdr is that xdr has a mini led screen this is just a regular ips display the studio display does not support hdr content and it doesn't have that promotion variable refresh rate that some of the newer macbooks and ipads have it's basically a 60hz display and that's it looking at them side by side the studio display in the xcr there's actually a lot of good consistency in the color between the two going through the different reference modes but we're going to have a deeper dive into the studio display soon what i really liked about the studio display was some of those a13 tricks built in especially center stage which has become very useful on ipads especially if you're in a lot of web video meetings zoom meetings face time meetings like a lot of us are these days what center stage lets you do is you move around a little bit you reframe yourself and the camera does that for you it's actually shooting a very wide image and just kind of zooms in and pans within that image to keep you in frame i set it up i tested it with a few other people where we spread out and the the image zoomed out to capture all of us other people moved off it zoomed back in on me i moved in closer it kept up with me and back so it was actually very responsive worked very well and of course you won't be able to access any of that stuff if you plug this into a windows machine it should technically work as a monitor but number one you're not going to have access to any of the system controls because they're all software-based there are no buttons or anything anywhere on the studio display and of course you won't be able to use things like center stage so what are we left with apple would like you to think of the mac studio and studio display as a package they come together and you can get into that package it'll cost you at least thirty five hundred dollars probably more frankly but they are two products designed to work together and they have a lot of synergies between them of course once you start adding extras like more ram more storage space even the height adjustable stand on the studio display versus just the tilting one is an extra four hundred dollars so of course things can get more expensive very quickly but we're still in that in-betweener zone people who have outgrown a regular m1 system but they're not quite ready for a mac pro or they're waiting to see what the next mac pro is that's really the biggest question mark out there so i am reserving judgment in a way until we see what that next generation mac pro is because that truly is what the highest of high-end professionals are looking for i'm also reserving judgment on the m1 ultra version of this product until i get a chance to check one of those out and test it myself so that leaves us back here with the m1 max version of the mac studio and the studio display it falls somewhere in between a hypothetical new mac pro at some point in the future and the regular m1 systems you might have outgrown and i see this appealing mostly to people whose budget and whose needs again fall somewhere between those two extremes if you want to read our full review of the mac studio and studio display find out more links are right down there in the description below\n"