Phill Boettcher gives his verdict on Apple’s latest release

As soon as we recommended the best Mac minis for media workflows, Apple decided to one up us and release a new generation of that creative favourite, the Mac Studio, powered by your choice of M4 Max or M3 Ultra chip. Creatives looking for a little more power in their workflow are now spoiled for choice – but there are a few key differentiators that you can use to suss out which machine is best for you. Here are Lead Technical Pre-Sales Consultant Phillip Boettcher’s top tips…  

Are you a freelancer looking for flexibility?

“If you’re a freelancer taking on a range of projects, the Mac Studio is ideal,” says Phill. “When you’re working and financing projects as an individual, having a high-performance machine that can adapt to different projects allows you to take on more and more varied work, and adapt to different standards and resolutions as needed,” he explains.

“The M4 Mac Studio is powerful enough to work with raw camera footage if you have a fast-turnaround project and no time to transcode – though it will make transcoding and proxy generation significantly faster, too. It has the grunt needed to tackle VFX work if you want to add that to your portfolio. The GPU is performant enough that if you’re working in Adobe you’ll see a noticeable improvement in GPU-accelerated work.” 

How much do you need to cache?

The onboard storage available on different Mac Studio models ranges from 512GB all the way up to a massive 16TB on the largest M3 Ultra-equipped models. Which is right for you depends on how much work you’re looking to carry out locally. 

If you’re a freelancer doing all your work locally, go for the larger drives (and don’t forget to back up!). If you’re largely relying on cloud services, we’d still recommend having one or two terabytes of on-board storage so that you have a performant local cache for the files you’re working on at any given moment. If you’re looking to kit out a large team at a facility and want to limit the amount of work anyone can store locally in order to avoid missing media, a smaller configuration will make your life easier – just make sure you’re hitting the minimum configuration for your creative software of choice. 

Are you looking to create an old-school, client-facing feel? 

“The performance gap between the Mac Pro and Mac Studio is noticeable at this point, as the Mac Pro is still back on the M2 chip,” says Phill. “It used to be that we advised people to opt for Mac Pro if they needed an extensible machine that could carry a lot of additional cards, but multiple vendors now offer expansion chassis for the Mac Studio. However, there is still a certain prestige attached to having a visible, powerful workstation in every suite, particularly if you’re looking to fit out client-facing spaces rather than rack workstations in your machine room and have editors access them remotely.”

It's also worth noting that Apple are yet to release an M4 Ultra chip, leading some to speculate that they’re holding this back for an upcoming Mac Pro upgrade. While this is a nice thought we have no confirmation that it’s true, so if you need to upgrade urgently in order to keep working you might be best opting for a high-spec Mac Studio, which should be able to outmatch your existing Mac Pro when it comes to power.