Apple’s latest MacBook Air, Mac Studio put its new chips to good work

You can go wild and create a machine with 32GB of memory and 2TB of storage at $3900. Most people won’t need to, but it means you have an alternative to the MacBook Pro in a thin and light design. Thanks to the M4, all MacBook Airs can now connect to two external displays while using the built-in screen as well.

The MacBook Air is the default Apple computer for a lot of people, and though Apple notably doesn’t offer a new less-expensive model (in previous years it’s tended to hold on to one version with an older chip), the current version is so good that most people will never need to look at a MacBook Pro or a separate desktop machine. For those who use iPhones and other Apple products, MacOS has also become a no-brainer thanks to seamless settings sharing and copy-paste between devices, as well as features like Apple Intelligence.

The Air is a great machine for gaming too, with console-like performance. Running Rise of the Tomb Raider at maximum graphical settings and native resolution, the M4 managed a locked 30 frames per second without breaking a sweat. Bumping down to medium settings at Full-HD resolution got me 60fps, in all but the most effects-filled situations.

In the desktop space, Apple’s line-up of Mac Minis and Mac Studios presents a much less-clear array of choices than its MacBook Airs and Pros. The latest entry-level Mac Studio comes equipped with the beefy M4 Pro Max chip. But if you want to get really extreme with the specs, you’ll have to go for a model with the new M3 Ultra, which is what I’ve been testing.

The choice here is a confusing one on the surface, but it comes down to the workloads you’re targeting. You can configure the M4 Max with up to a 16-core CPU, a 40-core GPU and a 16-core neural engine, plus up to 128GB of unified memory that has bandwidth of more than 500GB per second. That’s a huge amount of capability for practically any creative work, and will cost between $3500 and $9350.

So why are the M3 Ultra versions more expensive? Especially since that chip has a 3 in the name instead of a 4? The chip is based on the older silicon, meaning the M4 Max may technically have a very slight advantage when it comes to single-core performance. But the M3 Ultra allows for a massive increase in core count – the number of processing units, which allow it to run more tasks simultaneously.

The top-end M3 Ultra has a 32-core CPU, 80-core GPU and 32-core neural engine, which you’ll note is double what the M4 Max is capable of. It has support for up to a stunning 512GB of memory, a fourfold increase, which has a bandwidth greater than 800GB per second. This is a machine that will cost between $7000 and $22,000.

Do most creative professionals need such a ludicrous build? Of course not. But this is Apple staking a claim to the same kind of workstations Nvidia is eyeing – desktop machines that require immense local AI power and huge GPU compute across as many cores as possible.

If you’re working with large language models with billions of parameters, or rendering 3D scenes or 8K video, or running a DNA sequencer (which is always an example Apple specifically calls out for some reason), this is a machine that can do it incredibly quickly without needing a connection to the cloud or a server, without even taking much room on your desk or making a lot of noise.

Benchmarks would indicate there are no commercial machines on the market that can touch the M3 Ultra for multicore processing. Even though the version with M4 Max isn’t nearly as powerful, it’s way more power efficient than Windows chips, including the latest Ryzens and Intels.

Loading

Externally, the Mac Studio is unchanged. It has an SD card reader and two USB-C ports out front (supporting Thunderbolt 5 on the M3 Ultra models), and on the back are four Thunderbolt 5 ports, a 10 gigabit Ethernet, two USB-As and an HDMI 2.1.

Of course, you’d never buy a machine like this for gaming, but you might like to stretch all those GPU cores for some fun after hours.

In my testing, the results are impressive, but as always with Mac games, it will depend on how they’ve been built and optimised. I set the demanding No Man’s Sky to high settings at 1440p with a 120 frames per second cap, and it achieved it very well with no further tweaking necessary.

At ultra settings and no cap, I got a fluctuation between 80 and 170, but tweaking the resolution scale or MetalFX settings helped. Most other native Mac games I tested had no trouble staying at 144 frames per second, with the notable exception of Baldur’s Gate 3, which at the highest settings didn’t like to get above 100.

Get news and reviews on technology, gadgets and gaming in our Technology newsletter every Friday. Sign up here.