Apple just concluded their first event of 2022 and we have a lot of new things to talk about. There are two new colors for iPhone 13 series. Then there is a new iPhone SE. The iPad Air now has an M1 chip inside it and a new color. However, the key highlight of the event is the new Mac Studio with M1 Ultra inside it and the new Studio Display.
The new Mac Studio is definitely made for a target audience and if you are a creative professional studio, this one is definitely going to excite you to the core.
To start with everything, there is a new Apple silicone called M1 Ultra. Think of this new M1 Ultra as two M1 Max chips combined together. If we talk about the M1 Max alone, it is already one of the fastest processors out there. So this new M1 Ultra behaves like a single big chip.
New Mac Studio
The new M1 Ultra has an insane 2.5TB/s of bandwidth between the two halves of the chip. Then the chip has 800GB/s of memory bandwidth for the combined thing. It can have 64GB of 128GB unified memory which is also quite insane. The talk about the new M1 Ultra chip is for another day. However, the only machine that will have the new M1 Ultra is the new Mac Studio.
Design and Specs
If we talk about the design of the new Mac Studio then you can think of it as two Mac minis stacked on top of each other. It has roughly the same7”X7” footprint but it is a lot thicker at about 3.7-inches tall.
That is still quite compact and can fit on most of the desks under most of the monitors easily. The design of the new Mac Studio is quite fascinating. It has perforations on the bottom which suck cool air and then half of the internal volume of this thing is dedicated to cooling. There are fans on the top of the Mac Studio that push out the hot air through the back.
The new Mac Studio with M1 Ultra has double the media engine and can play back 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 Video which is a crazy number for any device.
For connectivity, you get four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10Gb Ethernet port, two USB ports, an HDMI port, and a high impedance headphone jack. On the front, you have the SD card slot and two USB-C ports which will be Thunderbolt 4 with the new M1 Ultra.
Users can get the new Mac Studio with either M1 Max or M1 Ultra. The configuration for the new Mac Studio starts with M1 Ultra starts with a 20-core CPU, 48-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine. Users can also get a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra having a 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine. The Mac Studio with M1 Ultra comes with either 64GB or 128GB of Unified Memory and users can get up to 8TB of storage on this device. It also has WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 for seamless connectivity.
New Studio Display
Apple has also announced the new Studio Display that would go perfectly with the new M1 Ultra Mac Studio. This is a 27-inch 5K display and it is also basically a junior version of the Pro Display XDR. The display has 14.7 million pixels and 600 nits of brightness, a P3 wide color, and support for over one billion colors.
There is a nanotexture glass option for the new Studio Display. Then there is a webcam and speakers on this monitor. The webcam is the same 12-megapixel ultrawide camera that we have seen in the past. It has a built-in Center Stage and along with that, you also get a triple mic array.
For sound, you get a six-speaker setup with Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio. If the current speakers on the MacBook Pros are any evidence, the speakers on the new Studio Display will definitely be great.
This monitor has a dedicated A13 Bionic chip inside so that it could act as an advanced image signal processor for the webcam and noise reduction for the mic. The Studio Display comes with three USB-C ports and one Thunderbolt port at the back.
Pricing and Availability
Users can now order both Mac Studio and Studio Display and they will be available starting March 18. The new Mac Studio starts at a price of USD 1,999 and the new Studio Display starts at a price of USD1,599. The pricing depends on how you configure these devices.