HOLY MOLY!? M3 Ultra Mac Studio is NUTS & M4 MacBook Air

M3 Ultra! Are you kidding me, Apple? I thought you completed the M3 family of chips, but here you are. Where's the M4 Ultra? This is insanity. You're telling me I gotta pay more money for an older generation chip compared to the M4 Max that comes for two grand? Well, Apple, I forgive you because I've been looking into the details of everything the new M3 Ultra Max Studio comes with, and holy smokes! This thing is going to be a monster, and Nvidia, you have trouble coming your way. But before I get into the craziness of the new Max Studio with M3 Ultra, I want to talk about the huge surprise that Apple gave us with the new M4 MacBook Air. Apple literally just lowered the price down to $999 for a brand new M4 chipped Air. However, this was completely unexpected, seeing as we already knew that Apple was gonna double the RAM to 16 gigs for free, seeing as that's exactly what it did for the M4 MacBook Pro and even the older Airs, but for them to double the RAM and lower the price, what?! This is unprecedented, and Apple just created the best value MacBook of all time. No joke, this is almost like the M4 Mac mini moment, except with, I mean, of course, the same design, but the value, the value is there. This thing is gonna be a beast. People don't need the MacBook Pro anymore. You have no fans, but it performs so dang well. This is gonna be insane. So much value. Of course, you get the same 256 gig SSD as we expected, which Apple needs to keep the price down, but you can now get up to 32 gigs of RAM if you want, which is great. 20% higher memory bandwidth. It comes with the full 10-core M4 CPU, which is crazy powerful for that $999 price, which is once again nuts. Yes, the GPU has been down to 8 cores as expected, which you can easily upgrade to the 10-core version by upgrading the storage to 512 gigs for $100, which that is pretty cool that the GPU upgrade is included in that storage upgrade. Nice work on that, Apple. I know it's still expensive compared to what you could do with Windows laptops, but you also get an upgraded camera, 12 megapixel center stage as expected, seeing as Apple did that to the MacBook Pros as well, so they brought it down to the MacBook Air. Of course, we have Wi-Fi 6E again, which is fine because honestly, we weren't expecting Wi-Fi 7 until later, seeing as like only the iPhone Pro models have it right now. I kind of wish it did have Wi-Fi 7 because that's very future-proof, but hey, the Thunderbolt ports, they're now Thunderbolt 4, which is nice. We got that upgrade. Kind of wish they added another one to the other side. Same battery life as before. Apple actually increased the size of the battery from 52.6 watt hours to 53.8, likely to compensate for this M4 chip that's crazy powerful, but out of all the announcements, the thing I'm most excited about, other than the crazy price, of course, is the new sky blue finish. This looks absolutely beautiful, and it's the first colorful MacBook that hasn't stuck to like neutral and warm tones, I feel like in years, and I'm really, really excited about it. $999 to get 16 gigs of RAM and the M4 chip is absolutely immense value. Bravo, Apple, for doing this. Total surprise to me, and it's so welcome, and so many people are going to love this, and I'm glad that I ordered it and got it for day one shipping. I can't wait to use it. But speaking of other things that drained the bank account this morning, this new Mac Studio, which we ordered two of them, one with the M4 Max and one with a crazy spec'd out M3 Ultra. Yes, you heard that right. You have to pay more to get an older generation chip. What the heck? This makes zero sense, and it's just insane. Actually, I've been thinking about it, and it does actually make a lot of sense, at least for Apple, and I'll explain in just a minute. With that M3 Ultra chip, that means you get some benefits like ray tracing support, finally, since that was missing on the M2 Ultra, so 3D renders rejoice. We're going to be getting a massive boost in multi-core CPU performance, since we're going from a 20-core CPU in the M2 Ultra to a 32-core in the M3 Ultra, and all of those extra 8 cores are performance cores, so the performance is going to be nuts. And just to give you guys a little bit of a hint at what the performance will look like, we're likely looking at around 30,000 points in Geekbench 6, which is actually limited by the large amount of cores, since this benchmark has been reworked so that it doesn't scale perfectly by adding cores. It actually has one large task that all the cores have to work on, but the M4 Max was already the most powerful production CPU, beating every Intel and AMD chip, and now this is gonna go even higher. However, it might actually be even better because the first prediction was based on the M2 Ultra, which keep in mind, used UltraFusion to connect two M2 Max dies, which does suffer from a lot of performance scaling loss because data has to flow back and forth between those two dies, which was inefficient. This new M3 Ultra die is 100% a brand new monolithic die because we've already confirmed many times that the M3 Max die did not come with UltraFusion on the die, so this is a brand new, never-before-seen monolithic die, which means that it's designed and created as one huge die or chip, which is so much more efficient since it's all in one area, so we might actually see closer to 32 or 33 thousand points in Geekbench 6, even despite diminishing returns with more cores. And then as for the graphics, the new M3 Ultra has an 80-core GPU which is double the cores of the M3 Max, and since it's a monolithic die, we no longer have to account for those scaling issues anymore, so we should get almost double the performance, let's say just to be safe, 93-95% scaling instead of perfect 100%, so that gives us probably right around 300 thousand points in Geekbench 6 Metal, making it faster than an RTX 5080 in terms of raw GPU performance, but not quite as fast as a 5090 since this does have older M3-generation GPU cores, not M4. Now getting back to the specs, when Mark Gurman said that we could be getting an M3 Ultra today, I was like no flippin' way because we want Thunderbolt 5 support, but look at that, Apple still gave us Thunderbolt 5 with an older generation M3 Ultra chip, so all 6 of the ports, 2 in the front, 4 in the back, Thunderbolt 5. So we're basically getting an older gen Ultra chip, but no other downsides, all the other specs are nicely updated, and the reason why it makes sense for Apple to do M3 Ultra instead of M4 Ultra is because the issue they had previously with the M2 Ultra, Mac Studio and Mac Pro, where you basically had the same top-of-the-line chip on both of those machines, so nobody bought the Mac Pro, you'd have to be insane to buy the Mac Pro or need a very specific use case, so Apple needs some way to make the Mac Pro better. So instead of just giving this an M4 Ultra and giving the Mac Pro an M4 Extreme, turns out that did not work out, they're like screw it, let's just downgrade what we give the Mac Studio to make the Mac Pro look better with the M4 Ultra later this year, come on Apple, that's so annoying, but honestly, M3 Ultra is more than powerful enough, so whatever. In terms of the specs, you can get 16TB of storage on this Mac Studio, please don't do that unless you're insane or you're literally running a server, and the most insane detail that's actually incredibly useful for some, a huge shocker to me, is that you can get up to 512GB of memory, 2.66 times more than the M2 Ultra's maximum of 192GB. The implications of this for LLM work are nuts, Reddit has been going crazy over the Mac Mini's and Mac Studio's because you can use Apple's unified memory as VRAM, so for example, you can run very large models on the 192GB of VRAM M2 Ultra Mac Studio, which makes it really unique compared to buying Nvidia GPUs that are usually limited to only up to like 32GB of VRAM like on the new RTX 5090, which you still can't find anywhere other than $6000 to a scalper on eBay, but this new M3 Ultra Mac Studio, which you can order today, gets up to 512GB, basically making it the only way in the world to get anywhere near 512GB of VRAM, allowing you to run things like 671 billion parameters, quantized down to 4-bit, and no KB cache, whatever the heck that means on DeepSeek R1, according to Alex Ziskin, I don't know what that means, but it sounds crazy, and you can do it with this thing that literally you can toss around, you plug and play, it's absolutely insane, you don't need to go buy like 5, 6, 10 Nvidia GPUs, try to figure out how to connect them all, figure out how to cool them all, you buy this thing, the cooling's insane, you plug it in, and you got insane LLM work, and even better is the memory bandwidth, 819Gbps, which is just crazy, so Apple just created something incredibly unique that is going to be the best of the best option for prosumers and creators like us that need to do a lot of video editing, exporting, photo editing, if you get the basic M4 Macs, Mac Studio, all the way up to the M3 Ultra for the most demanding workloads like massive LLM setups that need the most amount of VRAM, up to 512. And based on all this, I can guarantee you that less Nvidia GPUs will be ordered because of this machine. So let me know your thoughts on all of this down in the comments section below, and subscribe right now so you don't miss out on our in-depth testing because we bought these things, and I think I'm probably gonna make a buyer's guide for the Mac Studio coming up soon, stay tuned for that, thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next one!