11 ms·
Apple unveils new Mac Studio
- bananapub 2y agoin case people are unaware, this is more exciting than other random computer updates, since the Mac Studio is probably the best system in the world for running LLMs, as it can come with >> 100GB of ram and that's all accessible to the graphics/neural accelerator at high speed. this new one comes with up to 512GB of unified RAM!
- bryanlarsen 2y agoOr you could wait a couple months and get a Strix Halo based desktop from HP, Framework, Asus or GMK for > 100GB of unified memory.
- noelwelsh 2y agoDoesn't Strix Halo top out at 192GB RAM? The new M3 Ultra seems a lot more powerful on paper.
- Scramblejams 2y agoI believe it tops out at 128, of which 96 can be used as GPU VRAM. Hoping AMD will open the memory floodgates on the next rev.
- data-ottawa 2y ago110 with Linux, but 256gb/s memory bandwidth. The M3 Ultra seems strictly better but is also significantly more expensive.
- Scramblejams 2y ago110! Good to know, thanks for the info.
- kccqzy 2y agoI'm not aware that Strix Halo has shipped on desktop. I thought it was only shipped on laptops and tablets? And Framework announced a desktop but did not ship it yet.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoIt hasn't shipped anywhere yet. You can find previews of Strix Halo on laptops and tablets, but you can't buy them yet.
- short_sells_poo 2y agoIt has terrible compute performance...
- blobbers 2y agoBetter than cloud API calls?
- jazzyjackson 2y agoHave you used a 100GB model on a Mac studio? Tokens per second is single digit, I didn't find it usable at all, found myself going back to cloud APIs where 3000$ goes a much longer way I'm looking forward to trying Nvidia's little set top box if it actually ships, should have higher memory bandwidth, but still Ill probably set up a system where I email a query with attachments and just let DeepSeek email me back once it's finished with reasoning at 10T/s
- clonky 2y agoIt might blow your mind that you can run a quantized DeepSeek-R1 (671B) at over 15 t/s on an M2 Ultra 192GB and still get around 9000 context.
- angoragoats 2y agoI disagree with the “best system in the world for running LLMs” claim. The Mac platform offers high memory bandwidth, but especially with large models you start to quickly run into the fact that the CPU/GPU themselves are very slow compared to discrete GPUs. For models up to 70b parameters, I’d much rather use any PC with a couple of 3090/4090/5090s, and for anything bigger I’d rather 1) use cloud services and pay by the hour, or 2) run a larger Epyc/Xeon system with more GPUs if my use case absolutely requires local/offline support.
- lenerdenator 2y ago> 512GB of RAM Keep these things the hell away from the people who develop Chrome and desktop JS apps.
- draw_down 2y agoI come here for the tech news, but also the assmad potshots you guys always take at JS. Never change, HN.
- dylan604 2y agoIf legitimate complaints about your faveLanguage hurts your feelings, then how do you survive code reviews?
- eyelidlessness 2y agoNot OP, and not my favorite language, but I don’t see how “Apple ships large amount of RAM in expensive workstation” is a legitimate complaint about any language. It isn’t even in the same universe of topics. Completely off-topic JS (and Rust!) drama permeating every single discussion isn’t something that happens in code review. It’s very much an expression of the HN community and its culture. And it’s really tiresome, especially when there are both better complaints and better topical venues for these languages and more.
- dylan604 2y agoEveryone knows that an Electron app consumes a lot of RAM. Take Slack for example. Running slack in a tab in a browser uses less RAM than running the Electron app for Slack. The joke being that Apple realized that so many apps are built in Electron and made a decision to provide a shit ton of RAM to just to handle Electron. It seems very on point to the discussion
- eyelidlessness 2y agoA joke whose punchline can be and frequently is retrofitted to any setup… isn’t a particularly funny joke.
- WorldWideWebb 2y agoSo they wouldn’t put the power button on the back of the latest Mini, but they did on the Studio? That’s frustrating (yes, minor nit).
- jonnrb 2y agoPower buttons are for power users. lol
- bigtex 2y agoYou are holding it wrong - Steve Jobs
- zitterbewegung 2y agoThis was always part of the original design of the Mac Studio so they have never changed the design. This is a spec bump.
- wpm 2y agoI have an old style M1 Mac Mini on my desk and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I had to hit the power button, and Apple knows this, so they decided it wasn’t worth the machining cost to drill a hole in the back of the top shell and engineer a power button to the tolerances you’d expect. Imagine, my Apple TV doesn’t even have a power button! My MacBook tells at me if I accidentally press it when doing a TouchID!
- pourred 2y agoI have to hit that power button multiple times a day, because the Mac mini just won't wake up from the USB keyboard/mouse... Worst of all, it always worked fine on my previous Hackintosh!
- FloatArtifact 2y agoThey didn't increase the memory bandwidth. You can get the same memory bandwidth, which is available on the M2 Studio. Yes, yes, of course you can get 512 gigabytes of uRAM for 10 grand. The the question is if a llm will run with usable performance at that scale? The point is there's diminishing returns despite having enough uRAM with the same amount of memory bandwidth even with increased processing speed of the new chip m3 for AI.
- wkat4242 2y agoTrue, I also noticed that bigger models run slower at the same memory bandwidth (makes sense).
- memhole 2y agoYeah, I don’t think RAM is the bottleneck. Which is unfortunate. It feels like a missed opportunity for them. I think Apple partly became popular because it enabled creatives and developers.
- throw-qqqqq 2y ago> I don’t think RAM is the bottleneck Not the size/amount, but the memory bandwidth usually is.
- espadrine 2y ago> if a llm will run with usable performance at that scale? Yes. The reason: MoE. They are able to run at a good speed because they don't load all of the weights into the GPU cores. For instance, DeepSeek R1 uses 404 GB in Q4 quantization[0], containing 256 experts of which 8 are routed to[1] (very roughly 13 GB per forward pass). With a memory bandwidth of 800 GB/s[3], the Mac Studio will be able to output 800/13 = 62 tokens per second. [0]: https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1 https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1 [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437 [2]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/03/apple-unveils-new-mac-studio-the-most-powerful-mac-ever/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/03/apple-unveils-new-mac...
- 2y ago
- shrx 2y agoWhy don't they provide performance comparisons between the two chips offered, M3 Ultra and M4 Max?
- relium 2y agoIt'll likely be very workload dependent. The M4 Max will probably do a little better in single threaded tasks like browser benchmarks and the M3 Ultra will do better in things like video transcoding and 3D rendering.
- shrx 2y agoYes but I'd still like to know what tradeoffs I am making when deciding to get one or the other option. Right now it's all hand-wavy.
- cyberlimerence 2y agoWhat model can you run realistically with 512 GB of unified memory ? I'm curious who is even the market for such an offering.
- wkat4242 2y agoDeepSeek R1 for one, quantised but not too cripplingly.
- numpad0 2y agothe full R1 takes >512GB and the 1.52bit takes >128GB. So enough for agent + app to realize a fully autonomous monolithic AGI humanoid head, potentially, but then it'll be compute limited...
- wkat4242 2y agoYeah I was thinking more about q6_0 or so. The q4_K_M is 404GB so you can still push it a bit higher than that. Obviously the 1.52 bit doesn't make sense. I'm never going to pay 10k for that though. Hopefully cheaper hardware options are coming soon.
- saganus 2y agoI assume they are getting ready for the next year or two of LLM development. Maybe there's not much market right now, but who knows if DeepkSeek R3 or whatever will need something like this. It would be awesome to be able to have a high-performance local-only coding assistant for example (or any other LLM apllication for that matter).
- mlboss 2y agoThe future is local AI agents running on your desktop 24x7. This and NVIDIA Digits will be the hardware to do that.
- petesergeant 2y ago> featuring M4 Max and new M3 Ultra I hate that this naming shit has gotten so bad
- blobbers 2y agoAgree. This ship is adrift. Remember when it was just a MacBook, or air, or pro and it had a year.
- whynotminot 2y agoIt’s really not that complicated guys. It’s definitely a little odd to have M3 Ultra > M4 Max, but I feel like anyone complaining about this must have never bought any other manufacturers’ wares in their lives. Obtuse complication is kind of the norm in this industry.
- rsynnott 2y agoOh, but things were far worse back then, in terms of knowing what you were getting. For instance, let's say you bought a 13" MacBook Pro in 2016. Do you have a dual core or quad core processor? Depends on whether you have a touchbar! (For reasons best known to themselves, Apple made two completely different 13" MBPs that year, both new, with the loathed butterfly keyboard, weighing a different amount, with different processors, and the same name.)
- pram 2y agoLiterally not even the same thing you're comparing. There were more processor and graphics options. Want an i5, i7, or i9 and what about a RX 580, 5300, 5500, 5700, or 5700XT?
- caconym_ 2y agoHas it? These names are basically (architecture version, amount of compute) tuples. Much better than what AMD, Intel, Nvidia, etc. are currently doing.
- InitialLastName 2y ago
- deadbabe 2y agoSo DeepSeek R1 running locally at like 4 tokens per second? Okay
- blobbers 2y agoThe previous ranking article said the M3 ultra was the most powerful chip ever. Mac ecosystem is starting to feel like the PC world. Just give me 3 options. Cheap, good, and expensive. Having to decide how many dedicated graphic cores for a teenagers laptop is impossible.
- bee_rider 2y agoFor chips, Ultra and Max are like their workstation chips or something, right? It seems expected that they should be a little more differentiated, they are specialist, aren’t they?
- erickhill 2y agoThe way I think about it is if I buy a Max chip I'm getting the performance of the generation that will be released a year later now in the current form factor, and then some. For example, I got the M1 Max when it was new. A year later the M2 came out. Spec-wise, the M1 Max was still a bit better than the M2 Pro in many regards. To me, getting a Max buys you some future proofing if you or your company can afford it (and you need that kind of performance). I use the Max with a lot of video work, and it's been fantastic.
- fckgw 2y agoThey have that. On laptops they have the M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max. Cheap, good and expensive.
- eyelidlessness 2y agoMy buying strategy has been the same since they started soldering RAM: buy the lowest spec CPU/GPU they offer with the amount of RAM I will need (which all but once has always been the maximum RAM they offer, which unfortunately usually means also buying the max CPU/GPU).
- zitterbewegung 2y agoIf you are in college or school getting a MacBook Air would be best and the size of your screen is going to have a higher impact (13 to 15 inch) than the Dedicated Graphics cores. Would advise not getting an MacBook Pro.
- vr46 2y agoApple's CPU nomenclature is getting more deliberately confusing than BMW's.
- el_benhameen 2y agoOpen AI’s naming conventions are still the best-in-worst-in-class, though.
- vr46 2y agoWhen you say "conventions", do you actually mean, "insanity"?
- cxie 2y agoThe M3 Ultra with 512GB unified memory is a monster for AI development, while the new M4 MacBook Air makes AI features accessible to the mainstream. Apple's approach of building their own silicon shows massive dividends - they can optimize the entire stack from hardware to software for specific workloads like AI inference
- geerlingguy 2y agoThe buzz is all around AI and unified memory... but after editing 4K content on an M4 mini (versus my M1 Max Mac Studio), I've realized the few-generations-newer media processing in the M4 is a huge boost over the M1. Coupled with the CPU just having more oomph, I ordered an M4 Max with 64 GB of RAM for my video/photo editing; I may be able to export H.265 content at 4K/high settings with greater-than-realtime performance... I'm a little sad that the AI narratives have taken over all discussion of mid-tier workstation-ish builds now.
- TylerE 2y agoThe one thing that has me a bit bummed with this is that the Ultra, which I had planned to upgrade to, is only an M3 not an M4. Bit disappointing after waiting this long.
- tromp 2y agoNot all that disappointing considering that most of the performance improvement in M4 seems to come from increased power consumption. In some applications, M4 performs worse per watt than M3.
- Uehreka 2y agoYeah but if you’re buying an Ultra you’re probably more concerned with raw performance than perf-per-watt. These aren’t exactly used in laptops.
- TylerE 2y agoExactly. And especially for my incredibly mixed use case, which includes some light gaming in crossover, the gpu improvements in m4 are apparently non-trivial. I’m sure whichever I end up with will be a pretty big upgrade over my basest of base model 32GB M1. The thing I’m most curious about on the new machines, especially the Ultra, is the thermals. I only care about perf per watt if it becomes unfavorable enough that the fan spins up above idle during normal Tasks. On my M1 the only way to get it to audibly spin up is to get the machine to near total load nd hold it there for some time.
- xnx 2y agoSince Apple has always positioned itself as a tool for creatives, is it likely that the Mac Studio my be a good tool for AI video generation using open weight models like Alibaba Wan?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fluidcruft 2y agoAt this point, having the power button not be on the bottom is a major selling point for me vs the annoying-as-hell mini.
- zie 2y agoMy thinking is, why would you ever turn it off? They go to sleep and wake up great and barely even sip power when on, let alone when asleep.
- fluidcruft 2y agoIt's a lab computer. You can tell people not to shut it off, but it's still always turned off when I try to use it. Could be being shut down via ITs management tools/policies for all I know.
- electriclove 2y agoI’ve had the new Mini for a few months and can’t recall having to use the power button. How often are you using the power button on your Mini? What is your use case?
- mort96 2y agoHow do you turn it on? If you never turn off your computer, it makes sense that you never use the power button. But some people do turn their computers off, and for us, it's really useful to be able to turn them on again.
- dylan604 2y agoI'm still on a wired USB full sized keyboard from at least a decade ago, but didn't the newer keyboards see the return of the power button? Did I dream that?
- mort96 2y agoI did some quick googling before answering, and from what I could find, people are generally saying that you can't power on the Mac Mini in other ways than by pushing its power button. Even if you can power it on using a wired keyboard though, I'm certain that you can imagine people who prefer wireless keyboards but also turn their computer off.
- singularity2001 2y ago256GB, 512GB only available with M3 Ultra not M4 WTH
- layer8 2y agoThe M3 Ultra is a higher-spec chip than the M4 Max.
- TylerE 2y agoBut this is the first time a machine offered with an Ultra has been a lower generation chip than the base Max.
- layer8 2y agoIt may not be the last time: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2025/03/apple-announces-m3-ultra-and-says-not-every-generation-will-see-an-ultra-chip/ https://arstechnica.com/apple/2025/03/apple-announces-m3-ult...
- fadedsignal 2y agoWhy do they always compare their new-gen CPUs with M1??
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Insanity 2y agoGuess they have usage statistics to know a lot of their users are still on M1. My partner and I are both still on M1 (our personal machines) and don’t really see the need to upgrade.
- dylan604 2y agoAre you a lawyer? Why do you only ask questions to which you already know the answer? Snark aside in case you're seriously asking, it's a PR thing. Generation to generation might not show much differences in direct comparisons that makes the crowd ooh and ahh. The M1 chip was the first Apple Silicone chip, so going back to their first one for basis of comparison provides for more oohs and ahhs. The charts look pretty this way too.
- altairprime 2y agoFor people who upgrade annually, comparisons don’t matter. For people who are making a forced purchase, comparisons don’t matter. For people who are content with what they’ve got, comparing with the oldest-popular market segment offers a clear statement of improvement and helps long-term users calibrate when to make their next purchase.
- TylerE 2y agoWell, in this case it's totally relevant as the extant studios are all M1. They never got M2 or M3.
- mbrubeck 2y agoM2 Mac Studios were released in June 2023. https://support.apple.com/en-us/111835 https://support.apple.com/en-us/111835
- OnionBlender 2y agoAre there any good sites or channels that do performance comparisons of new Mac hardware?
- slt2021 2y agoIt mentions AI, but Macs dont support CUDA. What people are using for LLMa on macs, is it ggml ?
- sampton 2y agoggml and pytorch support mps. aside from bleeding edge most ml workloads can run on mps these days.
- bri3d 2y agoGGML has a Metal (Apple's GPU interface layer) backend, yes, using MPS (Metal Performance Shaders), which are pre-baked shaders provided by Apple in a way similar to cuDNN. This is probably the most popular method for large-scale inference with modern bleeding-edge models. There's also Apple CoreML, which is sort of like ONNX in that it provides a limited set of primitives but if you can compile your model into its format, it does good low-power edge inference using custom hardware (Neural Engine). Apple also provide PyTorch with MPS, as well as a bunch of research libraries for training / development (axlearn, which is built on JAX/XLA, for example). They also have a custom framework, Accelerate, which provides the usual linear algebra primitives using a custom matrix ISA (AMX), and on top of that, MLX, which is like fancy accelerated numpy with both Metal and AMX backends (and slower CPU backends for NEON and AVX). Overall, there's a lot you can do with AI on Apple Silicon. Apple are clearly investing heavily in the space and the tools are pretty good.
- erickhill 2y agoPeople with the 2023 lattice Mac Pro be like... can I upgrade mine?
- silvestrov 2y agoThe SSD prices are insane. $400 to go from 1TB to 2GB. $307/TB to go from 1TB to 16TB. That is 3 times the Amazon prices: https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&capacity=4-&disk_types=m2_nvme https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new&capacity=4-&...
- rsynnott 2y agoGiven that it's a desktop, most people should just get it with the default size and get an external thunderbolt NVMe disk. Only if you need >Thunderbolt 5 speeds (ie 80 Gbit/sec) do you really need the internal drive, and most NVMe is slower than this in any case.
- WWLink 2y agoOr if you don't want ugly ass external boxes cluttering up your desk. I don't get why they couldn't be arsed to stuff a few m.2 slots in there. They could keep the main nand their weird soldered on BS with the firmware stuffed in a special partition if they want. Just give us more room!
- outime 2y agoYou seriously don't get why?
- WWLink 2y agoMONEY!
- rsynnott 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro#Apple_silicon_(2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro#Apple_silicon_(2023), kinda. The most ultra-niche of Apple's products.
- hot_gril 2y agoI remember this but never looked into it enough to get what the point is. They still sell it with an M2 chip. "includes six internal PCIe 4.0 slots for expansion. It does not support discrete GPUs over PCIe." uhhh, so in case people want an AS chip with most stuff soldered on but also really need certain PCIe cards that aren't GPUs?
- flenserboy 2y agoThis seems like a much better deal than a blinged-out Mini. Interesting choices this generation.
- ein0p 2y agoSo basically the entire stash of M4 Ultra got used up in Apple Private Cloud, I guess.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hart_russell 2y ago$14,000 fully configured by the way
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sdf4j 2y agoThe first paragraph that talks about the OS itself is depressing: >macOS Sequoia completes the new Mac Studio experience with a host of exciting features, including iPhone Mirroring, which allows users to wirelessly interact with their iPhone, its apps, and notifications directly from their Mac. So that's their highlight for a pro workstation user.
- Nevermark 2y agoJust be glad they didn't focus on movies, music and cute apps. Macs seems to be the only product line that continues to semi-dodge Apple's myopic media/services/social kiosk lens they now view all their other product lines through. If that sounds too negative, compare their current vision for their products with Steve Jobs old vision of "a bicycle for the mind". iOS-type devices are very useful, but unleashing new potential, enabling generational software innovation, just isn't their thing. (The Vision Pro is "just" another kiosk product for now, but it is hard to tell. The Mac support suggests they MIGHT get it. They should bifurcate: 1. A "Vision" can be the lower cost iOS type device, cool apps and movies product. Virtual Mac screen. 2. A future "Vision Pro that is a complete Mac replacement, the new high end Apple device, filled out spacial user interface for real work, etc. No development sandbox, Mx Ultra, top end resolution and field of view, raise the price, raise the price again, please. It could even do the reverse kind of support, power external screens that continued working like first class virtual screens, when you needed to share into the real world. The Vision Pro should become a maximum powered post-Mac device. Not another Mac satellite. Its user interface possibilities go far beyond what Mac/physical screens will ever do. The new nuclear powered bicycle for the mind. But I greatly fear they want to box it in, "iPad" everything, even the Mac someday.)
- nullpoint420 2y agoI agree, except I wonder how they'll do this securely. Imagine if a VS Code plugin could spy on everything in front of me. Opens up a whole new level of security concerns.
- rafram 2y agoThey use a similar line on the MacBook Air page. If you're buying an (up to) $13,000 Mac, hopefully you already understand macOS and its features, I guess.
- makz 2y agoWhat LLMs are people running on this kind of setups?
- parsimo2010 2y agoI found this part about PCIe expansions interesting: "For those who rely on PCIe expansion cards for their workflows, Thunderbolt 5 allows users to connect an external expansion chassis with higher bandwidth and lower latency." (Maybe this is a feature that Apple has supported for a while, but I am unaware) Does this mean they will be officially supporting all PCIe devices like GPUs? Or do they only mean certain PCIe components like SSD expansions and network interfaces?
- shellac 2y agoThis has been a thing for quite a while. Thunderbolt is, in part, PCIe over serial (now USB C). There have been GPUs in external boxes, so it is undoubtedly possible, but I don't think they have many users. Edit: BlackMagic was what I was thinking of https://support.apple.com/en-gb/102103 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/102103. 'Requires intel processor'
- jimnotgym 2y agoIsn't it time Apple moved forward with its design aesthetic? Apple devices always used to look cutting edge. Now they just look samey
- speedylight 2y agoIf only it didn’t cost as much as a used car to get max ram capacity I’d get one. It’s so ridiculously small for how much power it has.
- snovymgodym 2y agoI wonder what kind of sales volumes Apple sees with the desktop Mac variants compared to Macbooks. I know the Pro and Mini probably see decent sales number as servers, but I wonder just how many people are still buying iMacs or these Mac Studios. For me, the main value proposition from Macs are in their laptop offerings.
- adamredwoods 2y ago>> Mac Studio with M3 Ultra starts with 96GB of unified memory I still see laptops selling with 8GB memory, and IMO we should be well past this by now with, IMO, 32GB minimum. My work laptop still only has 16GB.
- 486sx33 2y agoSo M3 Ultra > M4 Max ?
- speckx 2y agoI wish this had 8K resolution at 120Hz.
- niek_pas 2y agoWow, I had no idea they even made 8k 120hz screens, that’s wild.