Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Heart of The Mac Studio”.
Hey everyone Travis here – and this is the M2 Ultra Max studio, which has been the heart of our studio for the better part of the last 6 months, and it’s been nothing short of insanely great. The Mac studio is on its second generation model, with the M2 Max and M2 Ultra models, and it came out in July of 2023, and I wanted to do a 6 months later review because we’ve been using it day in and day out ever since it released And see how it stood the test of time right now. This Mac Studio in particular, is the only Mac desktop machine that we rely on on a daily basis for production. Everyone else around the office uses a MacBook Pro of some kind, whether it’s M1, M2 or M3, and this machine lives here at my desk.
It’S accompanied by a pro display, xdr, two genac 8320a and an ape duet, 3, and then for accessories. We have a Logitech mxm 3s, a magic keyboard with Touch ID and numeric keypad alongside a magic Trackpad, and that will also be accompanied by a Vision Pro very shortly. Speaking of the Apple Vision Pro, we will be doing a ton of content as soon as that thing comes out so make sure to subscribe. The tldr of this M2 Ultra 6 months later is basically that this Mac Studio can handle anything we’ve thrown at it. Regardless of the task being photo editing, video editing, intense multitasking, moving files around or connecting a ton of drives and IO, it can handle all this without a sweat and it doesn’t even make a peep.
So, let’s break down the M2 Ultra Max studio into a few different parts: first up with design, then functionality performance and, ultimately, what I think of this machine. First up design and externally. This machine is identical to the M1 version of the Mac Studio and if you haven’t seen the M1 version of the Mac Studio, it’s basically the same footprint as a Mac Mini but thick. It doesn’t take up much space on my desk whatsoever and it looks great. I do really appreciate the fact that this machine has everything internal, including the power supply, so there’s really just a small power cable, that’s running behind my desk and there’s no bricks anywhere on the front. It does have two Thunderbolt ports and an SD card slot, which I love and I’ll talk about that in a second otherwise, in terms of design, I will actually say that it’s almost invisible, if that makes any sense, because it doesn’t make any sound, and I never Really hear the fans ramp up its footprint is really small, and I really honestly forget that it’s there sometimes, the only thing I would say in terms of design is going into the M3 version of this. Hopefully we get a space Black version of it, because I think that would be really reminiscent of the 2013 Mac Pro and that would be super cool functionally. I think this machine is fantastic.
I love the two Thunderbolt ports on the front and this one has Thunderbolt ports on the front because it has an M2 Ultra chip. If you get an M2 Max, those are just USBC. I use these front ports mostly for external ssds and card readers, because our fx6 uses CF Express, and I use a Sony card reader with that and the plethora of ssds that go around the office. It’S also really nice to be able to charge the keyboard mouse and trackpad from the front ports instead of running a cable behind it.
Additionally to those Thunderbolt ports. It also has a front SD card slot, which I find to be super clutch as well. That comes in handy for the audio cards that we use when shooting as well as cards from an a74. So if I need to dump photos, videos or audio, I can just pop the SD card in the front and we’re good to go and around back on this thing, we’ve got plenty more IO.
It’S got four more Thunderbolt ports, two usba ports, an HDMI, 2.1 Port, 10, GB ethernet and an audio jack. I would say the number one type of device I’m connecting to this machine off and on is ssds. Those range from Samsung t series ssds to the OWC thunderblade series of drives Pegasus raids and much more so having the amount of Thunderbolt ports that this thing has is super nice in terms of things that are connected on The Daily. To the back of this thing, it’s our jellyfish over 10 gbit ethernet, my Pro display and the audio interface, which I connect directly.
I don’t use the onboard audio on this thing. I use the duet instead, which is honestly fantastic, and it’s perfect for this setup, because that’s also a really small interface. The 10 GB ethernet is also super nice, because before when I was using the MacBook Air, or even before that, when I was using an older iMac, I had to use a thunderbolt to ethernet adapter to get 10 GB ethernet. And the one thing I will say is of course most things at this point have gone to USBC, but it’s still nice to be able to have two usba ports on the back for older devices or flash drives. And honestly, I really haven’t ran into any issues where I ran out of IO, where I couldn’t connect all the things I had to to finish. A project performance in the Apple silicon era of Max is definitely becoming more of want, rather than a need, because these chips are screamers, especially the M2 Ultra. Every aspect of this chip is super fast, the GPU, the CPU, the neural engines and the media engine which I use heavily, and I can only imagine what an M3 Ultra is going to be like, especially on how fast the M3 Max is in that 16-in MacBook. Pro in terms of the full spec on this machine, this Mac packs a punch.
It’S got the M2 Ultra with 24 CPU cores 76 GPU cores 4 terab of internal storage and 128 GB of unified memory. Now, because this Mac Studio is used for our video production, it is used for video editing, 99 % of the time, and I heavily rely on the media engines, which makes transcoding and exports incredibly fast. This machine, in particular, has Hardware accelerated h264 hbvc, prores and prores raw. It has two video decode engines, four video encode engines and four prores encode and decode engines, which makes anything related to video wicked fast and the nice thing about having the media engines there is.
That leaves the CPU and GPU available to go. Do other tasks and let the media engines take on that workload, which also kind of makes this machine a little bit difficult to Benchmark because there’s so many different accelerated components like the media engine, the neural engine and having the CPU and GPU also do other things. It’S a little difficult to actually put your finger on real world performance. One comment I’ll make in terms of operating system is that this machine is still on Mac OS Ventura, usually I’m the lab rat for everyone around me and I’ll immediately update to the latest OS version, usually with a clean, install on all my devices, but on this Case this is a important, crucial Mac and I wanted to make sure that all of the stuff was working on somoma before we updated this machine. Wrapping up this review 6 months later of the M2 Ultra Mac Studio.
I really think that this machine stole the spot of the pro this last Mac. Pro release, of course, was not really the best. It was basically the same guts as the Mac Studio, but in the same form factor as the 2019 power, basically just giving you the slots and nothing else.
Mac Studio finally fulfilled the vision that apple had with the 2013 Mac Pro, and even before that the G4 Cube, which basically is a very powerful small and compact workstation that can live on your desk and adapt to any creative application. And honestly, I think, with how good the Mac Studio has become. I think there may be a time where the Mac Pro actually sunsets and the only other Pro machine that we have is a iMac Pro. I think that the 2013 trash can Mac Pro, really forced professionals to work on Thunderbolt externally and not rely on cards even more so with the 2017 iMac Pro. We got to the point where most people are relying on external raids, external ssds, external add-in cards and not relying on putting cards in the machine. I would say the only place where adding cards really matter is in a server environment or for audio production. So, honestly, the lack of internal expandability and the forced external expandability set this machine up for Success 10 years ago, and I’m not saying that all use cases are like this, but most use cases are like this, where most things can be connected externally and this machine Will be great in any application it’s set in now, who knows maybe the M2 Mac Pro was a filler machine to fill the Gap in between the next M2 extreme or whatever the next massive ship is going to be, but the M2 Mac Pro probably wasn’t. What most people thought it was going to be, and that’s why I think the M2 Ultra Max studio has become the heart of our studio, which 6 months later really still leaves me impressed with this Mac.
What is your favorite part of the Mac Studio and comment down below your thoughts on what a future Mac Studio would look like? Thank you so much for watching. This is Travis and have a good night. .