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Macworld tells M4 Max and M3 Ultra Mac Studio owners to consider upgrading for the faster SSD
The review's own processor numbers run from 8 to 22 percent, and its case for replacing an M4 Max or M3 Ultra Studio rests on disk throughput. Memory and storage are soldered, so that gain arrives only with a whole new machine.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Macworld's review of the M5 Max Mac Studio tells buyers of the previous M4 Max and M3 Ultra models to consider upgrading, on the strength of the SSD speed improvement alone.
- In Geekbench 7 multi-core CPU testing, the review puts 22 percent between the M5 Max and the M4 Max it replaces.
- Macworld's con list for the machine is that the RAM and SSD are not user upgradeable, alongside pros for disk speed and external display support.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint With storage soldered in, the faster SSD cannot be retrofitted to the Studio already on the desk, so the only route to it is a second purchase of a machine the shop bought a year ago.
- cost The shops being told to re-up are the ones that bought heavy last cycle, and matching the tested configuration means $4,400 of options above the $2,499 base.
- contradiction The review's own benchmark works against its advice for M3 Ultra owners, who would be trading away 9 percent of multi-core CPU to get the disk gain.
- decision With the disk result in a chart rather than in figures, any shop sizing the saving has to time its own ingest and export jobs before signing off on the purchase order.
The evidence for replacing a machine bought last cycle is one test. Macworld's review says the SSD performance "is so overwhelmingly good, it's the story here" [10], and presents that result as a Blackmagic Disk Tests chart, without read or write figures in the text [12]. The numbers the text does give belong to the processor. Multi-core is 22 percent up on the M4 Max [8], single-core 8 percent, which the review notes is in line with the usual 8 to 10 percent per generation [9]. It describes the CPU and graphics gains as a marginal boost [18].
A shop that already owns an M4 Max cannot buy the faster storage by itself. Macworld lists RAM and SSD as not user upgradeable [2], so the improvement comes attached to a computer, starting at $2,499 for the 18-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 36GB, 512GB configuration [3].
That base machine is fixed at 36GB of memory. Going past it means taking the 40-core GPU chip, which lists at $300 and adds $600 once the required 48GB memory step is counted, after which 64GB costs $400 and 128GB costs $2,000 [6]. The review unit, with the 40-core GPU, 128GB of unified memory at 614GBps and a 4TB SSD, came to $6,899 as tested [4]. Options account for $4,400 of that [5], or 64 percent of the total [15].
The advice is addressed to production environments, and the review grants that the prices are higher than last time [19]. It also reports that the M3 Ultra beats the M5 Max by 9 percent in Geekbench 7 multi-core [7]. A shop whose exports and renders scale across cores would be paying for a new machine to go backwards on that axis in exchange for disk speed. Apple's chip cadence is what put those two parts in the same buying decision: it skipped an Ultra generation last cycle, which is why the previous Studio line paired an M4 Max with an M3 Ultra, and the M5 series has both [13].
The comparison that settles this takes a week of logging. Count the minutes your operators spend waiting on ingest, file copies, exports and opening large project files. Count separately the minutes they wait on compute. Then divide the replacement price, net of what the old Studio sells for, by the loaded hourly cost of the person at the keyboard, and you have the number of waiting hours the new SSD has to give back before the box pays for itself.
Macworld's verdict says "Time is money, and an investment in the current Mac Studio will be money well spent" [11]. Whether it is depends on which minutes your shop loses, and the review's own Geekbench 7 result gives the multi-core minutes to the M3 Ultra by 9 percent [7].
What to watch
- Published Blackmagic read and write numbers for the M5 Max, M4 Max and M3 Ultra Studios side by side. Those would let a buyer size the saving per ingest job.
- Whether the $5,499 M5 Ultra configuration shows the same SSD improvement as the M5 Max.
- Trade-in and resale pricing for one-year-old M4 Max Studios, which sets the real cost of the swap.