Apple’s newest beast is an unassuming little critter called the Mac Studio

Can Apple have a device win its own event? Probably. If there was a single clear winner, it’d have to be the Mac Studio. The combination of Californian necromancy, an actual pact with dark forces, and far too many hours in the electrical engineering bay, the Mac Studio is a small machine with a big heart. A very big heart.

Specifically Apple’s newly-revealed M1 Ultra processor. There’s an M1 Max option in the offing, but it’s the Ultra you’ll want to keep your eyes on. If it does what Apple says it does, it’s a very exciting bit of tech indeed. Even if it looks like an accountant’s PC. They do say it’s the quiet ones you have to watch.

Mac Mini? How you’ve grown

Apple’s Mac Studio looks like the Mac Mini. Kinda chunkier, but broadly the same. It’s a box that you connect peripherals to. It’s powered by a wall cable. And it’ll smash any existing Apple machine to pieces without breathing hard if Apple is to be believed.

That’s the M1 Ultra, a gigantic 20-core CPU with 64 GPU cores and 32 neural engine cores, talking. But there’s also a highly engineered cooling system that might be actual air-bending. The company’s M1 chips tend to be super-efficient, but this box looks to be mostly fans and heat sinks. There’re loads of power under the hood, and most of the Mac Studio’s build looks like it’s trying to prevent a fire from breaking out.

Size doesn’t matter

Don’t let the size fool you either. The price (we’ll get to that) will stomp your dreams of owning one to paste, but they’re designed with serious power users in mind. The Mac Studio features four Thunderbolt 4 ports round back, dual USB-As, a full-sized HDMI, and a 3.5mm audio jack. Up front, dual USB-C ports and an SD card slot let users connect their high-end camera gear without fuss.

This little creature can do some amazing things. Like run up for four of Apple’s absolutely mad Pro Display XDR units at once. That’s not enough for you? Apple also claims that it’ll run eighteen (18) different 8K ProRes streams at the same time.

iMac? Toast. Mac Pro? Smoked. The Mac Studio is supposed to whip the pants off anything else Apple has made in recent years. Even the stuff with dedicated GPUs is apparently cooked. We’d love to test the claim, but we’re almost certainly never going to own one.

Why? Because it can be specced with up to 128GB of RAM and 8TB of storage. The price for entry? It starts at $2,000 (R30,500). Want one with an M1 Ultra processor? That’ll run your bank account at least $4,000 (R61,000). At that price, we’re not even expecting these to launch in South Africa. Oh, sure, one or two will come in, but you’re unlikely to see one sitting on a mate’s desktop. Unless your mate happens to work for Pixar, that is.