When you picture a workstation, it's often a tower PC, something bulky to accommodate the components and cooling you need to edit video, render 3D images or process thousands of photos. But the recently refreshed Mac Studio (starting at $1,999, $6,799.99 as tested), offers the power of a workstation in a tiny, quiet box that fits easily on your desk.
The Studio also happens to be the home of the M2 Ultra, Apple's most powerful chip (the lower-end configurations come with M2 Max). It's rare that we test pre-built workstations, but when we got the opportunity to test the Mac Studio we took it as a chance to get a sense of what the 24-core CPU and 76-core GPU can do.
The short take: If you're a Mac user that needs a lot of power, we think you're going to come away impressed. The M2 Ultra delivers some significant improvements over Apple's other chips. But if you need expansion, the Mac Studio may not fit your bill, as it's not upgradeable. Those users may want to consider the Mac Pro, which also comes equipped with the M2 Ultra, but in a bigger case that includes PCIe slots to add sound cards, storage cards, and more.
