Desktops and mini PCs · Apple Mac Studio

Apple Mac Studio Ultra

8owners with an opinion

86%of verdicts positive

2/1positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and noise; criticized for value.

What people wrote

Likes it

A Mac studio ultra with linux is the best computer I ever had. The only small thing that I miss is the copy/paste from iphone to the computer sync. It seems to me really that there is no going back to macOS any time soon. I don’t think I would still be able to “compute” on Windows.

Likes it

I've got an M1 Mac Studio Ultra with 64gb RAM, which I bought when it first released, i.e. not for LLMs at all. I'd love to have one of the newer generations with twice or quadruple the amount of RAM, but while it has no chance of running GLM 5.2, I've been able to run local, quantized LLMs like Qwen 3.6 using oMLX + Opencode pretty comfortably and productively.

Doesn’t like it

I run 4 Mac Studio ultras at work (they’re pricy when maxed out), for local-first AI dev services. But there’s a few things that make me want to switch to the Spark. Networking is the biggest one, the Macs have Thunderbolt and Ethernet, but if I run distributed inference with EXO over Thunderbolt; the drop in tokens/second is massive. These Sparks get RDMA and can stack nicely. The other big one is access to CUDA, MLX has come a long way but being able to have CUDA and GPU access in containers would simplify the stack so nicely. If I had a USB-C/Thunderbolt backplane it might compare, but scaling with the Spark is likely a lot more straightforward. I call the stack with Mac Studios “MacAIver” because it feels like a duct tape solution, but the Spark equivalent would likely be more elegant.

Neutral

I have a MacStudio Ultra with 64 GPU cores and 128 GB of RAM which I use it to play around with neural networks (among other things). I can create models larger than what I would be able to on consumer GPU cards but it isn't very fast. On average, I get about 20% of the speed of an RTX 3090.

Likes it

That laptop feels like liquid power. It's uncanny. Macbook Airs (way back when) felt sluggish. The MBA M1 changed that, it was "fine". These M2s are unexpectedly responsive on an ongoing basis. The MacBook Pro M1 Max is great (would be fantastic except they lost a Thunderbolt port in favor of legacy HDMI and memory card jacks), but you expect that machine to be responsive, so it's less surprising. The Studio Ultra, though, never slows down for anything. Still, if the Air could drive two external screens instead of one, I'd "downgrade" from the Max.

Likes it

You can get most of the way to hardening to CIS level 1 picking more up-to-date fork of these https://github.com/jamf/CIS-for-macOS-Catalina-CP . FWIW, CIS level 1 will mean people get locked out of their machines very frequently. Complex 15 character passwords with 3 retries from memory. So you need a half-decent MDM to unlock quickly. There is no half-decent MDM out there. Only shit ones but workable like Jamf. Also the username does't get auto-populated on login so the typo can be in username but the user assumes it is with password. Very fast way to get lock outs. To pass a full security review you might want to play with Google Santa. But that is intense. Also disabling things like AirDrop and biometric unlock is a productivity inhibitor. Disabling Bonjour can cause strange problems for some people (e.g. using Reflector 4). Basically I hate my mac that is hardened all the way so have a second machine (Mac Studio Ultra) in a more secure location that is less hardened and more pleasant to work with.

Likes it

For researchers, sure, but it's still quite an apples-to-oranges comparison. A6000 is ~$5k per card. I guess you're referring to something like an A100 on that other spec, which is $10k/card (for 40GB of memory). I do a fair bit of neural/AI art experimentation, where memory on the execution side is sometimes a limiting factor for me. I'm not training models, I'm not a hardcore researcher--those folks will absolutely be using NVIDIA's high-end stuff or TPU pods. 128GB in a Studio is super compelling if it means I can up-res some of my pieces without needing to use high-memory-but-super-slow CPU cloud VMs, or hope I get lucky with an A100 on Colab (or just pay for a GPU VM). I have a 128GB/Ultra Studio in my office now. It's a great piece of kit, and a big reason I splurged on it--okay, maybe "excuse"--was that I expect it'll be useful for a lot of my side project workloads over the next couple of years...

Likes it

My Mac Studio Ultra is completely quiet, even when I am using all 20 cores (my art generation tools sometimes maxes out the CPU). Compiling in release mode, and running, is often faster than my brain can realize it's already done. The last time I felt the machine was faster than I thought it to be was 1984 running Turbo Pascal on a PC/XT. No PC or Mac since then really felt insanely fast to develop on. Until this one. I run World Of Tanks, which runs in WINE emulator, which runs on Rosetta, and it's as fast as it was on my iMac. I have no clue how this works.

Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it

There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable. Apple won’t even give you a PCie slot on its $10k mac studio ultra to install a better network card or whatever.

Likes itDoesn’t say they own it

And yes, for context windows / cached context, the MacBook Pro with 128GB memory is a mind boggling laptop. The Studio Ultras are surprisingly strong as well for a pretty monitor stand.

Likes itDoesn’t say they own it

The Mac Studio is a very attractive offer for people doing audiovisual work on Macs. The price of 6K and even 8K video cameras is dropping through the floor, and working on that much raw data is demanding. The Ultra with all those 'neural engines' is a steal at four grand, if you need it.