Apple introduces a brand new Mac, the Mac Studio – TechCrunch

Apple announced a handful of new products in a pre-recorded online event. And the company announced a brand new desktop computer called the Mac Studio. It’s a small tower computer that looks a bit like two Mac Mini computers stacked on top of each other.

It has an SD card slot and two Thunderbolt 4 ports at the front. Half of the interior is occupied with the thermal system to keep the system cool during heavy load.

At the back of the device, you’ll find an additional four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10 Gbps Ethernet port, two USB Type-A ports, an HDMI port and a “pro” audio jack port. It supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.

The Mac Studio features Apple’s own systems on a chip, including the newly announced M1 Ultra. The M1 Ultra is an even faster variant of the M1 chip — it’s more powerful than the M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra. And this new chip lets you do a lot of things. For instance, you can connect up to four Pro XDR displays and a 4K TV.

The Mac Studio comes with an M1 Max or an M1 Ultra system on a chip, and Apple shared some performance charts for the Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra. With the M1 Max, you can expect 3.4x faster GPU performance compared to the Radeon Pro W5700X in the Mac Pro. You can expect a 90% jump in computing performance compared to the 16-core Mac Pro.

If you max out the existing Mac Pro, the M1 Ultra is supposed to be 80% faster than the fastest Mac Pro. And it supports up to 128GB of memory. The M1 Max is limited to 64GB of memory.

The Mac Studio with an M1 Max chip, 32GB of unified memory and 512GB of storage costs $1,999. The Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra chip, 64GB of unified memory and 1TB of storage costs $3,999. They’ll be available on March 18.