How has Apple’s Mac Studio changed over the years?

Place the first-generation Apple Mac Studio next to the new M5 Ultra, and you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart by appearance alone. Apple has kept the same 7.7-inch square of aluminum, measuring 3.7 inches tall, for the fourth generation in a row. But what’s inside has fundamentally changed since the Studio’s inception in 2022.

This first-gen M1 Ultra clocked in at a paltry 128GB compared to the M5 Ultra’s 512GB, which also moves data at 1.2TB/s, almost 50% more than the M3 Ultra managed. Apple skipped the M4 Ultra due to hardware limitations. If you’re in the market for a new Mac Studio, you’ll pay more for the privilege: Apple raised prices on most of its hardware in June, with the entry-level Mac Studio M4 Max rising from $1,999 to $2,499 due to rising memory costs.

The original Mac Studio launched in March 2022 with Max and Ultra variants, the latter featuring an interesting party trick with its chip. Apple had glued two M1 Max chips together via an interconnect called “UltraFusion”, selling the result as M1 Ultra, 114 billion transistors behaving like a single processor. The M1 Max, on the other hand, had a 10-core CPU, 32GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD for $1,999.

Starting at $3,999, the M1 Ultra came with 20 cores and 64GB, expanding up to 128GB if you were willing to part with even more cash. On the back were four Thunderbolt ports, 10GB Ethernet, HDMI, two USB-A ports, two more USB-C ports, and an SD slot. Apple hasn’t touched this design or layout since.

Apple announced the refreshed second-generation Mac Studio lineup at WWDC in June 2023, with the overall design not gaining as 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 that to 24-core, 76-core GPU and 192GB at 800GB/s memory bandwidth, powered by over 134 billion transistors. Apple also (clumsily) announced at the same time its Apple Silicon Mac Pro with the same M2 Ultra chip, the same 192GB memory capacity, and an insane starting price of $6,999.

Apple left the Studio line alone for almost two years after the M2. But when the update was finally released in March 2025, it combined chips from two different generations of Apple silicon: an M4 Max as the newest chip and an M3 Ultra as the largest, with a 32-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, up to 512 GB of unified memory and 16 TB of storage, plus Thunderbolt 5 at 120 Gbps on both models.

Twelve months later, Apple discontinued the Mac Pro and told reporters there were no plans to make another one, leaving the odd little square as the biggest Mac money could buy. Then came the market-disrupting AI-powered memory shortage, leading Apple to raise the price of the M4 Max from $1,999 to $2,499 and the M3 Ultra from $3,999 to $5,299. It was and still is the largest price increase of any Mac in history, with Apple taking over Wall Street Journal say that she has never seen the price of a component increase so much, so quickly.

The new fourth-generation Mac Studio dropped unexpectedly and shockingly in August 2026. It’s a pretty strange month for a Mac-related product announcement, but according to The informationenterprise customers demanding more capable machines to run local AI models have forced Apple’s hand.

The Max and Ultra share the same generation of Apple silicon for the first time since 2023, with the M5 Max packing an 18-core CPU, a 32- or 40-core GPU with a neural accelerator in each core, and up to 128GB of memory starting at $2,499. Meanwhile, the M5 Ultra runs with 36 CPU cores, an 80-core GPU, and up to 512GB of memory starting at $5,499, although that version won’t be available until late October.

Opposite the M3 Ultra, Apple is pitching the M5 Ultra as a chip offering up to 4.3 times the AI ​​performance, 1.8 times the graphics performance, and 1.3 times the CPU, as well as up to twice the speed of storage and Wi-Fi 7 of Apple’s N1 networking chip. Cores have also changed shape, with the usual split between performance and efficiency giving way to so-called “super” cores running alongside performance cores. Line up all the generations of Mac Studio and you finally get an Apple chip roadmap that killed the Mac Pro, taking pole position as Apple’s most powerful computer.