Apples spring season product launches continues. The company today followed the introduction of its newM4 iPad Airwith two additional releases, a MacBook Air with an M4 chip and the latest super-powered upgrades to its most powerful Mac, the Mac Studio. The new Macs come with faster variants ofApples existing Apple Silicon processors, including the M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips.New high-end Mac desktopsApples Mac Studio is powered by either an M3 Ultra or M4 Max. These are both high-performance chips, but its the M3 Ultra that delivers the highest performance, Apple said. The Mac Studio can run large language models (LLMs) with over 600 billion parameters entirely in memory thanks to the chip, its support for over 512GB unified memory, and advanced GPU architecture. The new Mac Studio is the most powerful Mac weve ever made, said John Ternus, Apples senior vice president of hardware engineering, calling it Aa complete game-changer for pros around the world. The company said the M4 Max is up to 3.5 times faster than a Mac Studio with M1 Max.Whats the deal with the new high-end chips? Apple tells us its new M3 chip architecture delivers up to 2.6x the performance of theM1 Ultrawith support for more than half a terabyte of unified memory, the most ever in a personal computer.Apple built the processor using itsUltraFusion packaging architecture, which effectively links two M3 Max dies over 10,000 high-speed connections; the result is a speedy chunk of processor power with low latency and high bandwidth. The system then treats those two combined chips as a single processor, enabling the performance gains (as you would expect from systems that contain 184 billion transistors).M3 Ultra is the pinnacle of our scalable system-on-a-chip architecture, aimed specifically at users who run the most heavily threaded and bandwidth-intensive applications, said Johny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware technologies.One other new feature: once it is introduced next month, macOS Sequoia 15.4 will make it easier than ever to set up the new Mac Studio with an iPhone. By simply bringing iPhone close to Mac, users can quickly and conveniently sign in to their Apple Account to get their files, photos, messages, passwords, and more on their new Mac Studio, Apple said. This is how iPhones can already be provisioned, and its nice to see this feature make it to the Mac.Mac Studio specification highlightsM4 Max or M3 Ultra chips.Up to 16 cores on the CPU (M4 Max), or 32 cores on the M3 Ultra.Up to 40 cores on the GPU, or up to 80 cores on the M3 Ultra.The neural engine is over 3x faster than the M1 Max.Up to 512GB unified memory with over half a TBps of unified memory bandwidth on M3 Ultra.Up to 128GB unified memory with over half a TBps of unified memory bandwidth on M4 Max.Up to 16TB SSD.Thunderbolt 5.The M3 Ultra can drive up to eight Pro Display XDRs at the full 6K resolution.A 10Gb Ethernet port, HDMI port, SDXC card slot, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.Pricing begins at $1,999.These Macs bring dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and a second-generation ray-tracing engine. The M4 Max features two ProRes accelerators, making it a highly performance machine for video editors.A better MacBook AirThe MacBook Air has justifiably become the worlds most popular laptop, because it combines good performance with a solid set of features at a reasonable $999 starting price. Apple has now upgraded the Mac with an M4 chip, a better 12MP camera, and 18 hours of battery life. Theres an improved display, and the systems are now also available in light blue as well as midnight (charcoal black), starlight (gold), and silver (which is actually silver).There are several additional improvements, including support for up to two external displays beyond the built-in display and 16GB of starting unified memory (required for best results from Apple Intelligence). The M4 chip features a 10-core CPU, up to a 10-core GPU, and support for up to 32GB of unified memory, making it up to 2x faster than the M1 model. The Neural Engine in the M4 chip is up to 3x faster than on MacBook Air with M1.AppleThe end result is performance, and if you use Excel, iMovie, Photoshop, or browse the web, Apples own figures promise that youll see significant speed enhancements, even if upgrading from the relatively recent and still highly performant M1 MacBook Air. Photo editing in Adobe Photoshop is up to twice as fast, for example.All the existing features remain, so that means a durable aluminium unibody, Touch ID, Magic Keyboard, and Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 support. Youll also find MagSafe, two Thunderbolt ports, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, along with a built-in three-mic array for better voice clarity when making calls.What this meansWhat all these updates mean in real terms is that the high-end applications these Macs are designed to support will absolutely fly. Apple says you can expect up to 1.6x faster image processing in Adobe Photoshop on the M4 Max when compared to Mac Studio with M1 Max.But these performance gains are even more impressive on the M3 Ultra system, which delivers nearly twice the performance of the M4 Max and makes the systems dramatically faster than any previous high-end Mac.On the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra you should find 8K video rendering performance in Final Cut Pro to be up to 4x faster when compared to the 16-core Intel-based Mac Pro with Radeon Pro W5700X. These data points should really reinforce the huge leap forward Apple has accomplished with Apple Silicon. Though it is somewhat counter-intuitive to find that the best-performing machine has the processor with the lower number in it. Apple will have to tread carefully not to repeat the processor name recognition chaos other platforms endure. But what it can also claim is that it now offers the best-performing, lowest-energy consuming devices in every class in which it plays and it has, at least in part, itssilicon design teams to thank for that.You can follow me on social media! Join me onBlueSky,LinkedIn,andMastodon.