Around back, you get four Thunderbolt, two USB-A, 10Gb Ethernet, HDMI and a headphone port. Having for years doled out ports as if they were gold dust, the Mac Studio comes across like they’re going out of fashion. But, again, if you lack workflows to take advantage of all that raw power, it’s like owning a Bugatti Chiron and only ever tootling along at 30mph. Here’s another Mac, then, that betters the current – and far more expensive – Mac Pro with Afterburner for such tasks.

And like the 16in MacBook Pro, the Studio chewed through image edits and music production work, and blazed through video encoding. For content creators, the extra graphics and multicore performance over an M1 or M1 Pro is where value resides. Speaking of which, this Mac largely aligns with the 2021 16in MacBook Pro when it comes to raw power.

Apple Peek Performance Event: everything Apple announced.

That said, when we tested equivalent Mac laptops over the past year and change, we could barely get their fans to spin up at all. We pushed the review unit – Apple’s baseline M1 Max model, but with 64GB of RAM over the 32GB default – and the fan never spun up further under load. The flip side of the fan thing is that during testing, it never got louder either.

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