M4 Mac Studio: Everything you need to know

Macworld

The M2 Max and Ultra Mac Studio were released at more than a year ago at WWDC23, and the M4 era of Apple’s System on a Chip has already started. So it’s time to start looking forward to the next Mac Studio. But just how long will we have to wait for the new Mac Studio? We’ll keep track of what’s being said in this article. 

M4 Mac Studio: Release date

We’ve had two generations of Mac Studio. The first gen (M1 Max and Ultra) was released in March of 2022. The second-gen (M2 Max and Ultra) was revealed at WWDC23 in June 2023. Apple will probably continue with a March or June timeframe for the next Mac Studio, with WWDC25 the likely venue.




The next Max and Ultra Mac Studio could be released in 2025.Roman Loyola/IDG

In April 2024, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said in the paid version of his Power On newsletter that the next Mac Studio could launch in the second half of 2024, which at the time pointed to a June 2024 release at WWDC. However, the promise of an imminent update didn’t last long.

In May, Gurman reported that the Mac Studio was not on the schedule of Apple releases for 2024. He claimed it won’t appear until mid-2025. Gurman reiterated this in June 2024 when he reported that the Mac released schedule had not changed and the M4 Mac Studio is not expected until the second half of 2025. Gurman repeated this claim that the new Mac Studio will ship in 2025 again in August 2024.

In October, Gurman reported that the new Mac Studio had originally had a similar release schedule as the M4 MacBook Air, with a release planned between January and March of 2025. But Apple has decided to push the Mac Studio back to a release between March and June.

M4 Mac Studio: Price

No reports on the price for the next-gen Mac Studio have been made. Here are the standard configuration prices of the current M2 Mac Studio lineup, for reference.

$1,999/£2,099: M2 Max with a 12-core CPU, 30-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, 32GB unified memory, 512GB SSD

$3,999/ £4,199: M2 Ultra with a 24-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 64GB unified memory, 1TB SSD

The price is unlikely to change in the U.S., but we anticipate that the new Mac Studio will be less than it is currently in the U.K. The original Mac Studio was £1,999 in the U.K. when it launched, Apple then pushed up the price to £2,099 with the arrival of the M2-powered model. Since then fluctuations in economies around the world likely mean that the U.K. price will return to £1,999, as this is how Apple has aligned other prices.

M4 Mac Studio: Design

The Mac mini had a redesign when Apple introduced the M4 and M4 Pro versions, but no reports about design changes to the Mac Studio have been made. The current design works well so Apple likely won’t change it. The only possible exception is a new space black color option to match the MacBook Pro.

M4 Mac Studio: Specs and features

The main (and likely only) change that will happen with the upcoming Mac Studio is with its SoC. The Mac Studio should continue to have the Max and Ultra versions of its M-series chips, so the new chips we will see are likely to be the M4 Max and M4 Ultra.

We already know what to expect from the M4 Max as it has launched in the MacBook Pro.




The ports on the Mac Studio will likely remain unchanged.Roman Loyola/IDG

Apple’s Ultra chips are likely to combine two M4 Max chips to offer doubled the CPU and GPU cores. The M4 chip is already very impressive, in fact in our Geekbench tests the M4 Max beat the M2 Ultra. Read: How Apple’s M4 chips dispelled all my fears about buying a new Mac. When the M4 Ultra launches you can expect something exceedingly fast and powerful.

Apple could have even more up its sleeves. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has stated that Apple is working on AI-enhanced M4 chips that could find their way into the Mac Studio in 2025.

Another major upgrade to expect is Thunderbolt 5 implementation, an upgrade from Thunderbolt 4 in the current Mac Studio. With the M4 Pro/Max MacBook Pro, Apple implemented Thunderbolt 5, so it will happen with the new Mac Studio. Learn more about Thunderbolt 5.

The other features of the Mac Studio should remain the same. That means no changes to the ports, connectivity, speaker, SSD sizes, or display support.