Put the first-gen Apple Mac Studio next to the newly released M5 Ultra, and you'd struggle to tell them apart on looks alone. Apple has stuck with the same 7.7-inch square of aluminum, standing at 3.7 inches tall, for the fourth generation in a row. But what's inside has changed fundamentally since the Studio's 2022 inception. That first-gen M1 Ultra topped out at a paltry-by-comparison 128GB versus the M5 Ultra's 512GB, which also moves data at 1.2TB/s, nearly 50 percent higher than what the M3 Ultra managed.
The original Mac Studio launched in March 2022 with Max and Ultra variants, the latter featuring a neat party trick with its chip. Apple had glued two M1 Max dies together via an interconnect it called "Ultra Fusion," selling the result as the M1 Ultra, 114 billion transistors behaving as one processor. The M1 Max, meanwhile, had a 10-core CPU, 32GB of memory and a 512GB SSD for $1,999.
Apple announced the refreshed second-gen Mac Studio lineup at WWDC in June 2023, with the overall design not gaining so much as a single port. The M2 Max launched with a 12-core CPU, up to a 38-core GPU and 96GB of memory, with the M2 Ultra doubling all of that to 24 cores, a 76-core GPU and 192GB at 800GB/s memory bandwidth, powered by more than 134 billion transistors.
Apple left the Studio lineup alone for nearly two years after the M2. But when the update finally dropped in March 2025, it paired chips from two different generations of Apple silicon: an M4 Max as the newer chip and an M3 Ultra as the bigger one. The new fourth-gen Mac Studio unexpectedly dropped in August 2026 with both the Max and Ultra sharing the same generation of Apple silicon for the first time since 2023, driven by enterprise demand for running local AI models.
Source: Engadget · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing