Apple's 2025 Mac Studio Pairs New M3 Ultra With Thunderbolt 5 And A Memory Boost

Apple has just announced the new Mac Studio pro desktop, after testing for the M3 Ultra chip started two years ago. It's now being called the most powerful Mac ever made. Aimed at professionals working both at home and at studios, the new M3 Ultra chip provides a higher memory capacity, improved graphics, and advanced AI capabilities. Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus called the desktop a "complete game-changer," pointing out its 16TB of "superfast" storage and Thunderbolt 5 connectivity. 

In its official announcement of the Mac Studio, Apple stated that the M3 Ultra's performance is "two times faster" than the M4 Max, thanks to many record-breaking specs. The M3 Ultra has up to a 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores, which is the most CPU cores to ever be in a Mac, and up to an 80-core GPU, which is more than any previous Apple Silicon chip. The M3 Ultra also has over 800GB per second of unified memory bandwidth — it starts with 96GB of unified memory and can be configured up to 512GB, the most unified memory on any personal computer ever. 

Another major performance upgrade that comes with the M3 Ultra is Thunderbolt 5. According to Apple, Thunderbolt 5 allows the Mac Studio to reach up to 120GB per second data transfer speeds, which is "more than double" of the Thunderbolt 4. This is yet another feature that makes the new Mac Studio focused on productivity for professionals, providing faster data transfer speeds for external storage, docking, and hub solutions. Each Thunderbolt 5 port has a custom-designed controller on the chip.

The record-breaking GPU and unified storage appears to be aimed at improving the new M3 Ultra's AI functionality. Apple called the new Mac Studio a "powerhouse for AI," able to run "large language models with over 600 billion parameters entirely in memory." The computer was built with Apple Intelligence in mind, which provides professionals with writing tools, meeting transcriptions, tech support, and other useful features. Apple also highlighted the Mac Studio's ChatGPT functionality, stating that professionals have it integrated into Writing Tools and Siri to be more productive at work. The AI-powered Image Playground that's available on iPhones, was also mentioned, prompting Mac users to utilize this tool to stay efficient.

Mac Studio is coming out on March 12, but can be pre-ordered starting today. Mac Studios start at $1,999, but your specific configurations can increase the cost — the M3 Ultra chip boosts that price up to $3,999. Increasing the M3 Ultra's GPU and storage costs another $1,500, the max unified memory of 512GB is a whopping $4,000 extra, and the aforementioned 16TB SSD storage is another $4,600. When maxed out, the Mac Studio is over $14,000.