Apple Mac Studio Review
Apple Silicon is delivering on its promise of increased performance and energy efficiency
A version of this review featured in the May 2022 issue of Sound On Sound magazine. Given that it wasn’t possible for the text to be published as written, it’s re-preproduced here its original, unedited form.
When the late Steve Jobs returned to Apple towards the end of the ’90s, one of his first decisions in resuscitating the Mac was to introduce a new and simplified product strategy. At the time, the company’s Mac product line was a sea of numbers and confusing contradictions, making it hard to differentiate what type of user each product was aimed at. To solve this problem, then-interim CEO Jobs described the process as going “back to business school 101”, resulting in a two-by-two grid to illustrate the four types of Mac products Apple would focus on going forward. There would be a desktop and notebook aimed at general consumers and education (one of Apple’s last remaining business verticals), and a desktop and notebook for professionals (essentially meaning creatives, the other market where Apple had retained some dominance).
This product grid initially saw a line-up of the iMac and iBook for consumers and education, joined by the PowerMac and PowerBook at the high-end. And it worked. In fact, the strategy worked so well that it remains largely the same to this day with a few modifications.
During the Mac’s transition from the PowerPC to Intel’s x86 architecture in 2007, Apple took the opportunity to refresh the original naming scheme. In keeping with the now iconic iMac brand, all Macintosh computers would now feature Mac in the product name, and the word ‘power’ would be exorcised and replaced with the more ambiguous sounding ‘pro’. The iBook became the MacBook, whilst the PowerBook and PowerMac graduated to be known as the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro. And this ‘product grid’ strategy has arguably kept Apple focused for a quarter of a century, despite dropping the word ‘computer’ from its corporate identity and diversifying into mobile products like the iPhone and iPad.
However, there’s always been a conundrum hanging over the Mac line-up that Apple have never quite been able to solve: is there an overlooked gap between the mac Mini (not forgetting the iMac) and the Mac Pro into which another desktop Mac could fit? Something allowing for a little more design thinking than a regular Mac Pro, but without sacrificing performance to reach a price tag for the rest of us.
Back in 2000, Steve Jobs opened a new space in the product strategy to accommodate the PowerMac G4 Cube, a stunning, fan-less PowerMac G4 miniaturised into what Jobs referred to as an eight-inch cube (it was actually 7.7 inches, to be precise) suspended in a clear plastic acrylic stand. However, the Cube ended up being too limited for professionals who could have afforded the purchase, and too expensive for the user who would have been a perfect fit for the specifications. The Cube was discontinued after just one year, although some of that effort in miniaturisation would presumably benefit the Mac mini four years later, which was conceived more as a way of broadening the Mac’s audience rather than carving out a new product category.
All of which leads us to the present day and a Special Event dubbed by Apple as “Peak Performance”. This alliteration illuded to the launch of what is unquestionably a new attempt to fill this perceived void between the iMac and Mac Pro: the Mac Studio. And this time, Apple might just have got it right by focusing on the room rather than the price.
Stu-StuStudio
The notion of a ‘Mac mini Pro’ (for want of a name) has long been rumoured, and at first glance you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s what the Mac Studio is. With its taller, super-ellipsoidal carapace extruded from a single piece of aluminium, the Mac Studio doesn’t stray too far from Apple’s modern design vocabulary or, indeed, the Mac mini’s current form. The width and depth of both the Studio and mini’s enclosures measure the same 7.7-inches squared (197mm), while the Studio’s 3.7-inch (95mm) height towers over the mini’s diminutive 1.4-inch (36mm) elevation and would therefore fit comfortably within 3U of rack space. If you haven’t noticed something about the dimensions, I think it’s safe to say Jobs would probably have approved.
With this extra height, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the Mac Studio weighs a little more than the Mac mini’s undemanding 2.6 pounds (1.2kg). Depending on how the device is configured, the Mac Studio weighs either 5.9 or 7.9 pounds (2.7 or 3.6kg). This is unusually light for desktop, and, with its solid metal appearance, in many ways I expected something a little heavier if anything! After all, this isn’t a notebook, and, if you consider a regular house brick weighs about five pounds (2.27kg), the lightest Mac Studio weighs just a little more! And yes, by invoking such a comparison is probably many reasons why I don’t work for Apple’s marketing department!
Just like the new MacBook Pro models, you’ll see the name of the product is once again laser-engraved on the underneath of the Mac Studio. However, unlike the MacBook Pro, of course, you’ll never see this once the Mac Studio in sitting on your desk, but its presence elicits a warm and fuzzy feeling when unpacking the system.
To cool the inside of the system, Apple’s engineers have once again created a unique and innovative thermal architecture, parts of which can be observed from the outside of the Mac Studio. Using a double-sided blower (more commonly found in fireplaces), air is pulled in through the perforated circumference around the base of the enclosure and guided over the circular power supply to the chip’s thermal module. The warm air is then pushed out the back of the machine, through over 2000 precisely machined perforations, by a low-impedance rear exhaust. All of which means, they obviously put some thought into this!
What this really means is that, combined with the fact the M1-series of chips are already designed for energy efficiency, the system is barely audible. So much so, in fact, that according to tests compliant with the ECMA-109 standard (for “Declared noise emission values of information technology and telecommunications equipment”), the Mac Studio emits a Sound Pressure Level (SPL) of 15dB as measured from the operator’s position. This value was recorded twice: once, when the system was idle; and a second time when browsing the web wirelessly with six tabs open and rendering a mix of content.
To put this in context, if you remember those charts you were shown in high-school school physics, you’ll recall that 15dB is between the sound of calm breathing or leaves rustling (10dB) and whispering (25dB).
In my own usage, I don’t recall ever hearing any audibly obtrusive fan noise, even though the Mac Studio was placed on the desk in front of me. It simply didn’t seem interested in pushing any air though the system, whether I was running Geekbench tests or even when trying to play back the a complicated project. The only time I really got it going was running GFXBench, which throttles all the GPU cores on the chip in a manner that music and audio software does not. Some users have reported issues with persistent fan noise, but this didn’t seem to be a problem with the Mac Studio I was using. Certainly, I wouldn’t be afraid to use it in a live room with a musician.
And that’s all one really needs to say about the Mac Studio’s minimal acoustics and minimalist aesthetic; it’s the kind of object that would surely eeceive a courteous nod from Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. It’s pleasant on the eye, effortlessly steps back from the foreground, and, well that’s about it. There are no gimmicks: it doesn’t float, hover, or give the illusion of being suspended; and the set dresser on a cheap TV show can put aside the gaffer tape and now simply hide the Apple logo with a copy of 50 Shades of Grey or something.
Putting The A Back Into USB
There has been much consternation over the almost Tolkien-esque direction in which Apple has tried to push users when it comes to external connectivity. The company’s plan could very much be described as the ‘one cable to rule them all strategy’, which really began in earnest in 2015 when Apple released a MacBook offering just a single USB-C connector. This was barely acceptable on the consumer side of the product grid, let alone systems targeting professionals; and yet, with each passing year, we observed the disappearance of dedicated ports for HDMI, Ethernet, power, and USB-A-based connectivity, along with the SD card slot — all of which still feature heavily in daily workflows.
HDMI is useful for connecting to a primary or secondary display, since HDMI cables are cheaper and easier to find, and nearly all monitors and televisions offer an HDMI input. Ethernet is, well, Ethernet, and sometimes you just need the quality of service and bandwidth afforded by a wire. USB-A is obviously extremely handy for attaching a myriad of little things, from dongles to smaller audio and MIDI interfaces, iPhones, flash drives, and more. And even the SD card is useful for those using field recorders, not just for photographers.
Now, the world would be a better place if every peripheral had standardized around a USB-C connector, but we don’t live in that world, and not every company has been eager to follow Apple’s lead, as it were. Thus, we were condemned to requiring adapters for nearly everything, which wasn’t quite as bad for desktop users (as opposed to those with notebooks, since you had to remember to pack them) although it was still unseemly and added a few hundred pounds/dollars to the purchase.
As we’ve seen on the current Mac Pro and the new MacBook Pros introduced last October, Apple have been stepping back from trying to distill everything down to a single connector type. However, of all the Macs in Apple’s product line, the Mac mini has suffered the least from connector reassignment over its many iterations, and so it would make sense that Apple would use this as a starting point and build from that — rather than taking away from it. Which is exactly what the company’s engineers have done.
On the back of the Mac Studio, you’ll find four USB-C connectors supporting Thunderbolt 4, allowing for speedy data transfer of up to 40Gb/s, DisplayPort (up to 6K resolution), USB 4 (also up to 40Gb/s), USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s), and a maximum of 15W for supplying power to bus-powered devices. Joining the USB-C ports are two USB-A connectors — yes you read that right, Apple have included USB-A connectivity for MIDI interfaces supporting up to 5Gb/s, dongles, other input peripherals and anything else you might need it for. Although, to be fair, this isn’t the only Mac to include USB-A as both the Mac mini and Mac Pro also include two of these classic ports.
With the combination of ports and the graphics processing capabilities of the M1 Max or Ultra chip, it’s possible to connect a maximum of five external displays to the Mac Studio, pushing nearly 90 million pixels! Each of the four Thunderbolt 4 ports can be used to drive a display with a maximum 6K resolution, such as Apple’s own Pro Display XDR, and there’s also an HDMI port (like the mini and the 2021 MacBook Pro models) that supports an additional 4K display. This latter port is useful if you want to use a separate display, like a TV, to show picture if you’re working on a project with video assets.
Despite the Mac Studio being a wired desktop in a wireless world, it features the same wireless networking capabilities as the MacBook Pro with support for Wi-Fi 6 (technically known as 802.11ax, which is compatible with the earlier 802.11a/b/g/n/ac standards) and Bluetooth 5.
Back in the wired world of networking, there’s get a 10Gb Ethernet port as standard; and the only thing better than a single 10Gb Ethernet port would be if there were two that could be bonded together. Admittedly, this would be of greater importance to those with studios in audio post-production facilities, and in these situations the Mac Studio would thrive in having access to as much bandwidth as possible. The Mac Pro offers dual-10Gb Ethernet networking, and it would have been nice if this had carried through to the Mac Studio.
And finally, completing our tour of the Mac Studio’s rear, and very much in the category of ‘last but not least’, is the 3.5mm audio jack for attaching headphones or active speakers. As with the most recent MacBook Pro models, this audio output supports both high-impedance headphones and a true line output, which, again, is progress of a kind.
Front-Facing Phineas
Before we take a closer look inside the Mac Studio, it’s worth taking a brief moment to discuss what’s included (and what isn’t) on the front-facing side of the system. If you think back to the cheese-grater Mac Pro — and PowerMac G5 before it — of which the “MacPro5,1” model is often regarded as the gold standard pro users swear by and at, there was quite bit of useful front-facing functionality. There were both USB and FireWire ports throughout the various models, with the MacPro5,1 inheriting the configuration from the MacPro4,1 iteration: two pairs of USB-A and FireWire 800 ports. These were complemented by the headphone jack, and a power button located next to the power indicator LED.
Where the last two Mac Pro generations in their standing form did away with front-facing ports, the Mac Studio sees them restored with two USB-C connectors. One important thing to keep in mind is that Thunderbolt 4 is only supported via these front-facing USB-C connectors on the Mac Studio models featuring an M1 Ultra chip. The configurations with an M1 Max chip only deliver USB 3.1 Gen 2 with the usual 10Gb/s speed. Although it would be a shame if this decision was made solely for the sake of price differentiation, it’s possible the M1 Ultra might be needed to support additional Thunderbolt buses since it essentially comprises two M1 Max chips and therefore two Thunderbolt controllers.
The front of the Mac Studio also features a UHS-II SDXC card slot — what a brilliant idea! — and a power indicator LED. However, what it doesn’t offer is the headphone jack and the power button.
Why Apple couldn’t put the headphone jack on the front is, like most things in life, beyond my comprehension — especially since the card slot is finally in a sensible place for a desktop Mac. When you want to plug headphones into a system that’s designed to be situated on your desk, where would it be easiest to connect them? The back, obviously. (Although, this is also the case with the Mac Pro, which is even more of a cumbersome endeavor.)
A slightly larger locational faux pas concerns the power button. Remember when it used to be on the front of a Mac Pro next to the power indicator? On the current model, the Tower enclosure’s power button is on the top of the computer (along with the USB-C-type Thunderbolt ports), which is at least situated next to the indicator LED. However, like the Mac mini, the Mac Studio’s power button is located to the rear left-side, and this could be a real pain.
If the Mac Studio is sitting on a relatively clear desk, like an iMac, the power button’s placement is less of an issue; and, to be honest, I didn’t even touch the power button after powering on the Mac Studio whilst writing this review. I rarely power down a computer, leaving them to go to sleep of their own accord. Nevertheless, where the power button is situated could quickly become frustrating in professional environments with machine rooms, for example, if a Mac Studio isn’t easily accessible because it’s wired into a rack shelf alongside another Mac Studio.
The only professional Mac that Apple seem to have mostly got right in this respect is when the Mac Pro is ordered with the Rack enclosure. Given that the top and rear of the computer are either inconvenient to reach, obscured, or both when mounted in a rack, the front of the computer places the pair of USB-C Thunderbolt ports to the right side, and the power button and indicator LED to the left. And you’re probably not going to need to plug headphones into a rack-mounted computer in any case.
Apple Inside
When Apple launched the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models near the end of 2021, it was revealed they were to be powered by two new chips joining the M1 family: the M1 Pro and the M1 Max.
The M1 Pro was a natural evolution from the original M1 chip Apple launched the year before. Where the M1 had an eight-core CPU comprising four performance and four energy cores, the M1 Pro builds on the M1’s foundations to offer either an eight or 10-core CPU (of which two are efficiency cores). And, perhaps even more impressively, the M1 Pro doubled the numbers associated with the GPU and Unified Memory. The number of GPU cores went from seven or eight to 14- or 16 cores, while the largest amount of Unified Memory grew from 8- or 16GB to 16- or 32GB with 200GB/s bandwidth.
In addition to the quantitative CPU, GPU, and Unified Memory improvements, the M1 Pro also introduced the so-called Media Engine — to do for video encoding and decoding what the Neural Engine had done for machine learning. The Media Engine is built on the M1’s image signal processing and media encode/decode engines, adding capabilities that were previously only available to Mac Pro users with an Afterburner card. It provides hardware acceleration for H.264, HEVC (H.265), ProRes, and ProRes RAW video codecs, using a video decoding engine, a video encoding engine, and a dedicated decode and encode engine for handling ProRes.
The M1 Max represented another engineering leap, building on the M1 Pro’s more powerful architecture and again increasing the number of GPU cores to 24 or 32, and doubling both the memory bandwidth and the capacities of Unified Memory available, to a rate of 400GB/s and amounts of either 32- or 64GB respectively. The Media Engine was also boosted with the addition of an extra video decoding engine, and another ProRes decode and encode engine.
The reason for recapping some of these chip specifications from the MacBook Pro is because the M1 Max chip is used for the base Mac Studio model, with 32GB Unified Memory and a 24-core GPU. This can be upgraded to an M1 Max with either 64GB Unified Memory, a 32-core GPU, or both. However, should you want yet more performance, Apple also took the opportunity to unveil the fourth and what was described as the last member of the M1 family — the M1 Ultra — which can be ordered with higher-end Mac Studio configurations.
The M1 Ultra offers twice the capabilities of the M1 Max by literally putting two M1 Max chips together in the M1 Ultra’s packaging, making use of a hitherto unannounced feature of the M1 Max Apple have baptised as Ultra Fusion. And although this sounds like a marketing term that would be more at home in a Gillette commercial, for Apple, Ultra Fusion a new interconnect technology that acts as the glue to make two M1 Max systems appear as a single system to the computer, all while preserving the benefits of Unified Memory.
In many ways, this approach is analogous to the days where high-end desktops — such as certain models of Apple’s own PowerMac G5 and the first Mac Pro — borrowed from the server world to put more than one processor on the computer’s motherboard. However, rather than putting two M1 Max packages on a motherboard, which would have increased the latency between them and forced software developers to write specific code to take advantage of such a configuration, Apple instead chose to put all the silicon in a single package.
Combining the systems and memory into one package wouldn’t have in and of itself solved all of Apple’s problems, however. so a touch of superabundance was also required. While there’s always going to be latency within a circuit, Ultra Fusion offers so much bandwidth that the amount of latency falls well below where it would ever cause a problem in allowing two M1 Max chips to act as one. So, how much bandwidth is that, I hear you ask? Well, given the length of the universe is about 94 billion light years, it’s roughly 2.25 x 10–14b(m s) — bits per meter second!
There’s a great deal more to say about the M1 Ultra, but some of the details would be beyond the scope of this review and would be more at home in a magazine called System On System. Also, I haven’t had chance to run any tests on an M1 Ultra yet, but hopefully I’ll get the chance to report back when I do.
What The GPU?
Although the M1 Max and Ultra’s CPU cores make the most significant contribution to performance when running music and audio software, the silicon also includes GPU cores designed to proffer the best possible performance for the Metal graphics and compute API. These cores are essential when running 3D modelling and rendering applications, or anything involving image and video processing, and benefit applications that render their user interfaces with Metal. For example, Steinberg specifically announced Metal support with the release of Cubase 11, which is why Mac users should have noticed Cubase’s interface becoming noticeably snappier and more responsive.
While you wouldn’t expect applications like Cubase, Pro Tools, Logic Pro, and others to tax the graphics processing power of the M1 Max or Ultra in quite the same way as more visually intensive software like AutoCAD, Maya, Unreal Engine, and so on, that doesn’t mean you won’t see any benefit from the GPU. Using Cubase 12 as an example (because it’s easy in Cubase’s Preferences to toggle whether the GPU is employed for the user interface by the application), you can see from the graph that off-loading the rendering within Cubase from the CPU to the GPU makes quite a difference to the CPU load.
We Benchmark At Sunrise!
To understand the performance that’s achievable with these superlative things specifications, it was time to experiment with some benchmarking. As usual, I began with Primate Labs’ Geekbench to see how the M1 Max-based Mac Studio compared with similar machines and chips I’ve tested. Running the CPU Benchmark for Apple Silicon, the Mac Studio with M1 Max achieved single- and multi-core scores of 1769 and 12433 respectively.
As you can see from the chart, the Mac Studio with M1 Max performs in the same ballpark as my 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max processors, and it’s particularly interesting is that an ARM-based CPU core performs roughly the same across all M1-based silicon. You can also see that the M1 Pro and Max-based Macs nudge just ahead of the performance you’d get from an older iMac Pro or a newer 27-inch iMac. And the Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra performs satisfyingly better than the current 24-core Mac Pro. The biggest difference between these two systems? Oh, about $8000!
Moving on to something more musical, I had to do a relatively quick Atmos mix in Pro Tools while I was writing this review. So I loaded up the Mac Studio with the requisite software: Pro Tools Ultimate (with Carbon), the Dolby Atmos Renderer with its Core Audio driver, and the usual truckload of plug-ins from iZotope, Nugen, Sonnox, Sound Particles, Sound Toys, and so on. Everything went swimmingly well, and it was only after a few days I remembered that all these ones and zeroes were intended for Intel-based Macs and were running here with the aid Rosetta 2! So far so ARM.
Unlike political science, though, data isn’t the plural of anecdote, and it’s hard numbers that reveal what’s really going on. However, quantifying how much performance the Studio can bring to your studio (as with any computer) is a difficult task, especially since numbers of tracks and plug-ins don’t really tell you all that much. With modern systems capable of running vast numbers of plug-ins and tracks, knowing the maximum number of tracks reached was 911, and that you could run 420 instances of TheMakeItBetterPlugin™ rather than 421 isn’t that useful either. And if you factor in the demise of projects using only mono and stereo channels, not to mention the performance metering in most music and audio software is woefully inadequate — a subject for another day — you have the perfect recipe for a migraine.
To put the Mac Studio through its paces, I wanted to use a real-world session that anyone could download in order to gauge relative performance against other systems. Thankfully, to avoid the legal quagmire in making a real-world session available, Netflix conveniently host a selection of what the company terms as ‘Open Content’. This is available for download, with the goal of providing “a common reference for prototyping bleeding-edge technologies within entertainment, technology and academic circles without compromising the security of our original and licensed programming”.
Of the open content titles, Sol Levante includes two example Pro Tools Sessions representing an excerpt from the final mix and the finished master. So, if you want to follow along, download the Final Mix Session from opencontent.netflix.com, which is compressed into an 11.4GB zip file. Although, something to keep mind, though, is that this Session is mixed in Dolby Atmos, so you’ll need to be running Pro Tools Ultimate on a Mac with the Dolby Atmos Renderer. Trials of all the software required are available, including Avid’s Pro Limiter, Multi-Band Dynamics, and Subharmonic plug-ins, along with ReVibe II.
Loading this Session on the Mac Studio, it was initially disappointing that the moment I began playback Pro Tools gave me a dreaded AAE -9173 error: “Pro Tools ran out of CPU power. Try deactivating or removing native plug-ins.”. Bugger. Even though the internal storage is easily fast enough to play back the required audio, I tried enabling the disk cache so that all the audio data was preloaded into memory, but as was predictable: still no joy.
To put what I was trying to play back in perspective, in terms of plug-ins the Session contains 199 instances of Channel Strip, plus 49, 42, and 4 instances of Pro Limiter, Pro Multi-Band Dynamics, and Pro Subharmonic respectively, not forgetting 23 instances of ReVibe II. That makes for a total 317 inserts; and, if that doesn’t sound like all that many, consider this is over a mixture of mono, stereo, quad, 5.0, 7.1 and 10.1.2 channel configurations. So the total number of mono streams being processed by the aforementioned plug-ins is 638! (Along with many unprocessed streams I didn’t include.) And all of this was running natively, as I was routing 93 outputs via the Dolby Bridge virtual audio device to the Dolby Atmos Renderer on the same system as Pro Tools!
Therefore, I followed Pro Tools’ helpful suggestion and began removing — in a not particularly surgical manner — the inserts used by Tracks within seven of the Folders. This left 283 mono streams of processing, with 151 instances of Channel Strip and 26 instances of Pro Multi-Band Dynamics. After this, the Session played back fine with approximately 77 percent usage, as reported by Pro Tools’ slightly dubious CPU Total meter in the System Usage window.
Mac vs. Mac
For comparison, I decided to see how the Mac Studio compared to the last Intel-based iMac Apple shipped, which was discontinued on the same day as the Mac Studio was announced. The iMac had the same 64GB memory (but obviously not in a Unified configuration) with a 3.6GHz 10-core Intel Core i9 processor, with AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT graphics with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. This played back complete fine, of course, with Pro Tools reporting around 58 percent CPU usage. And, playing back the less-demanding Session with fewer inserts, averaged about 15 percent.
Of course, the big caveat to this outcome is that at the time of writing, an Apple Silicon-native version of Pro Tools wasn’t available, so the Mac Studio would be starting with quite a high handicap if this was a game of golf. However, there are a few points to consider. Firstly, a cursory look at the numbers would indicate that Rosetta 2 is placing a greater burden on the system than the load observed with equivalent software. This would indicate that, due to the way Pro Tools’ native audio engine distributes itself across cores (and whether or not it usefully differentiates between performance and efficiency cores), the Session might still have problems even if an Apple Silicon-native version of Pro Tools was available.
As a footnote, somebody I know from spending time at a well-known audio post-production facility in Marin County, California, did have access to a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra, and apparently it played back just fine. However, he also had no problems running it on a 5,1MacPro with 12-core 2.66GHz Xeon, and the M1 Ultra-based machine actually reported higher CPU usage. He was using a buffer size of 32 samples on his machines, whereas I was running with a more generous 1024 samples. Therefore, until Avid releases an Apple Silicon-native version of Pro Tools, we won’t be able to truly know what kind of performance advancement there might be.
One Pro Step For Apple, One Ultra Leap for Apple Silicon
In many ways, the Mac Studio could be considered an upgrade from the Mac Pro introduced in 2013. Apathetically referred to as the ‘trashcan’, this infamously unpopular ‘pro’ Mac arguably overstayed its welcome, never received an update, and was finally put out of our misery in 2019 with the unveiling of a brand-new, fully redesigned model. Therefore, its perhaps ironic that, with the passage of time, the idea of only having external connectivity doesn’t seem nearly as incongruous or frustrating as it did nearly a decade ago. The G4 Cube was just too little, too soon.
The Mac mini was initially assumed to be the heir apparent to the Cube; but, as mentioned earlier, the Mac mini was never designed to make the product line more diverse. In essence, it was a way of Apple selling more Macs to users of other operating systems rather than trying to fit in-between the iMac and the Mac Pro. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Apple never thought the Mac mini would achieve such longevity in the first place. Whereas, with the Mac Studio, it’s clear Apple wants it to be the start of a new chapter in the Mac’s history. And why not?
Whether or not you think Apple cracked the problem of a desktop Mac that sits alongside its three older siblings, it’s hard to contemplate what the company could have done differently to make the Mac Studio warrant a space on the product strategy grid. And perhaps the more important question for anyone reading this review is: should I buy one? Which could be further sharpened with the addition of another word: should I buy one yet?
The answer to this question, as you might expect, very much depends on the software you want or need to run. Although most music and audio applications are now available in native, Apple Silicon versions, that’s not to say developers have figured everything out concerning this new hardware platform. Porting a version of an existing application to run natively on Apple Silicon-based systems, for example, is different than the process of optimising an application to make it as performant as possible on a new hardware platform. Therefore, you might not observe significant gains performance until developers fully acclimatise and learn some new tricks.
Obviously, the fact that playing back a large, real-world Session worked better on a high-end iMac from two years ago than the M1 Max-based Mac Studio was disappointing. And therefore, right now, without the availability of a native, Apple Silicon version of Pro Tools to throw into the mix, it would be impossible to recommend a Mac Studio for seriously high-end Pro Tools users working on demanding projects. If your requirements are more modest, as in my own personal example, and the plug-ins you need are compatible (both with Monterey and Apple Silicon), it might be worth gambling on the future if your current system is in desperate need of replacing.
However, if you were running Logic Pro, it would be hard not to recommend the Mac Studio! Assuming any third-party Audio Units plug-ins are compatible with Monterey, being M1 native is less of an issue since Logic Pro makes it possible to run both x86 and Apple Silicon plug-ins alongside each other. And, of course, with Apple Silicon-native applications, it’s easier to gauge the performance differential even if you simply derive your ratios from the Geekbench scores.
Sadly, I really didn’t have enough time to spend with Cubase Pro 12 on the Mac Studio to include anything particularly helpful beyond looking at the GPU performance. Since Steinberg only just released a Universal version of Cubase, it’s going to require a few more hours to see where there might be any issues. That said, my initial impressions are positive, other than the fact you can only use Apple Silicon VST 3 plug-ins if you run Cubase natively, which is a serious limitation. Performance wise, with ASIO Guard and the improved metrics, it seems very promising.
There’s a brilliant piece of pop art called M-Maybe painted by Roy Lichtenstein in 1965, where the heroine appears concerned and we gain an insight into her psyche with a thought bubble that reads: “M-maybe he became ill and couldn’t leave the studio!” I don’t know if Lichtenstein was a Mac user in his later years, but illness seems as good an excuse as any to be at one’s studio. Either way, I do know that I’m not going to be leaving this Studio any time soon.
Black Magic Peripherals
As with the Mac mini (and the 2013 Mac Pro), Apple have chosen not to include a keyboard or mouse with the Mac Studio, inviting you to either use your own or purchase what you need from Apple. This is probably the right approach, since Apple’s peripherals carry a premium price, and there’s no point paying for bundled extras you might not need or want. That said, the ‘Magical’ input trio of the Keyboard, Mouse, and Trackpad are of course a perfect aesthetic accompaniment — and yes, they are once again available in black.
Even if you bring your own pointing device of choice, the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad is perhaps the peripheral that best complements the Mac Studio. The reason being that, as its name implies, in addition to including a numeric keypad, the keyboard — much like the keyboard without the numeric keypad supplied with the newer, M1-based iMacs — the magic in the keyboard is the inclusion of a Touch ID sensor.
If you can’t live without Touch ID, having experienced it on other Apple devices, this will be a welcome, well… touch for your desktop, although the convenience comes at quite a steep price. The Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad costs $199, which, let’s be honest, is rather expensive for an admittedly well-crafted Bluetooth keyboard. For my own needs, I probably wouldn’t pay extra for Touch ID as my fingers aren’t indelible enough to make it work, which is kind of annoying. I don’t know what it is about my physiology that prevents me from using Touch ID — regular soap and water are the only substances that are applied to my hands — but I’d be happy for Apple to use me as a guinea pig.
A Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad and no Touch ID is also available, although quite what makes this keyboard magical enough to warrant the name is beyond me. This is available for a slightly more palatable price of $129, although its only available with white keys rather than black!
When it comes to mice, Apple haven’t always made the best choices when it comes balancing form and function for the company’s mice. Remember the hockey puck design that first shipped with the very first iMac? That was nothing. You’ve probably heard the complaint, or maybe you’ve made it yourself, about having to connect the Lightning charging cable into the bottom of the peripheral, meaning it’s impossible to both charge and use the mouse simultaneously. This has been a persistent annoyance since 2015, and unless the company is secretly working on a mouse that can be charged wirelessly on a pad, couldn’t we just have one where the Lightening connector is anywhere else? Now, that would be magic!
Last but not least is the Magic Trackpad, and this comes down to personal peripheral preference. I love using the Trackpad on my MacBook Pro, but when I’m sat at a desk I find a mouse far more preferable. (I was also one of those Mac users who hated audio engineers who insisted on using trackballs instead of a mouse on the desktop!) But if you’d rather use a Trackpad with your desktop Mac, the Magic Trackpad is really the only game in town, and has the benefit of offering Force Touch gestures to access certain shortcuts.
