I can still remember the first time I attended a press launch for a professional Mac – the January 1999 introduction of the Blue and White Power Mac G3, which Apple wanted the world to believe was faster than Intel PCs of similar clock speed. Today, Apple’s new professional Mac Studio absolutely devours any other system when it comes to processor performance and energy efficiency. What a difference a quarter century makes. I’ve spent time with the Mac Studio M4 Max in recent weeks. This model was equipped with an M4 Max chip boasting 16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores, a 1TB SSD drive and 128GB of memory. This particular iteration costs $3,699, but you get a lot for your money. (For reference, that original Power Mac G3 started at $1,599, shipped with Apple’s infamous ‘puck’ mouse, and was nicknamed the Smurf, for its distinctive blue-&-white color.) That’s where the comparisons end, of course, as there really is no relevant comparison to make between Apple’s old Power Macs and the new breed of Apple Silicon-driven speed demons. The Mac Studio is everything Apple 20 years ago couldn’t deliver — the most powerful machine in its class, capable of munching its way through the most demanding tasks, and with benchmark data points that absolutely show these Macs to be the best systems for any professional needing to do intensive work. Speeds and feeds Here’s what the numbers show: Geekbench, Single-core, 4,086 Geekbench, Multi-core, 26,021 Geekbench, Metal, 187,728 Geekbench, Open CL, 118,684 The Mac aced its Cinebench tests, too, convincingly topping the list of reference systems and achieving in excess of 3,000 points on the Unigine Heaven benchmark; it’s a good score, but is dented by the fact the test environment needs to run in Darwin emulation. Apple Supporting the release, Apple published a number of data points to show how powerful these systems can be. The main takeaways: even if you’re using a Mac Studio that’s under a year old, the new model is a welcome speed upgrade, and if you use an M1 Mac Studio you can expect twice the performance (faster rendering, compiling, photo editing). Numbers are really real-world, so to put these into context, they mean this Mac — the latter-day descendant of the “Smurf” — is powerful enough to take anything you throw at it. And with even more powerful models also available, there’s almost no demanding task you can’t expect this Mac to achieve. Apple Silicon is eating the PC industry lunch. Higher and higher Finally, if you upgrade from an Intel Mac, well, just as the move to Intel unleashed Apple’s pro Macs from decades in the PowerPC doldrums, the move to Apple Silicon has utterly unshackled the line. It means that if you’ve come across from an Intel Mac, you’ll be stunned by the huge performance upgrade you experience. For pros, it means you’ll get more done faster than ever on a Mac. That really wasn’t the case in 1999, when pro machines really were destined for use by Mac fans and people from the creative departments; while good at handling creative tasks, they didn’t truly match Windows in others — except you didn’t have to run Windows, which has always been an advantage to many of us. Apple Where’s the ceiling? The problem with reviewing this piece of kit is that nothing I could do would actually make it break a sweat. For example, I did my usual test of opening up a GarageBand project with 300 instrument tracks; the machine figuratively shrugged and delivered. It then shrugged at everything I could think of doing with it — running multiple video windows, working with Pixelmator Pro transitions, dabbling about with Final Cut. During the week or so I tried to make the Mac stumble, I barely noticed it get warm and never heard the cooling system in action. For me, these Macs over deliver, delivering performance far beyond what I actually need. To be frank, of course, most of my computing needs are answered by the also available M4-powered MacBook Air, with which I also had a pleasant dalliance. But I’m not the target market — the most cutting-edge pros in design, graphics, architecture, AI, medicine, and researchers. For those people, these Macs will deliver. They also open up other opportunities.  For example, Apple researcher Awni Hannun managed to run Deep Seek v3 in 4-bit natively on the even more powerful M3 Ultra Mac Studio: “The new DeepSeek-V3-0324 in 4-bit runs at > 20 tokens/second on a 512GB M3 Ultra with mlx-lm!” he wrote. The system I tested can’t quite do that, but it will happily run smaller large language models on device, making it possible to build and run bespoke AI systems on hardware you keep on your desk. That’s great for security-conscious businesses seeking an AI edge who want to ensure all the data belongs to them, and not to their AI provider. Are there limitations? There are some drawbacks, I suppose. Some could see the need to get hold of a display, mouse, and keyboard to use with the device as being a snag. Users might also feel frustrated at the lack of easy upgradeability of Apple’s systems – it would be neat to be able to install your own memory, just as you were able to do with the more upgradeable Power Mac of yore. Some might want more connectivity options, but that didn’t really worry me; the 5 USB-C/Thunderbolt 5 slots, 10Gb Ethernet, dual USB-A, HDMI, and SDXC slot seemed more than enough for most people. If you really want the best and most powerful gaming computer, you might need to use systems with Nvidia chips, at least for a little while longer until gaming firms catch up with Mac. Again and again, we hit software compatibility problems with some apps as the only remaining barrier to accelerating Mac adoption. Summing up I’ve deliberately tried to avoid the formulaic approach to a Mac review here. You don’t have the time to hear me reprise every data point from the tech sheet you can read here, and I don’t see any value in regurgitating those numbers. Life’s too short to re-read it, right? And when it comes to looks, here’s a picture: Apple If you’ve been keeping up with news on these machines, you know they look like a tall Mac mini and come in the form of a nice silver box. You already know what Macs do – they run macOS, can run Windows in emulation, and as Apple builds out the Apple Intelligence system, they’ll do more things more effectively over time.  What is clear is that Apple’s high-end Macs can and will scale to whatever you need them to do. You should also recognize that the velocity of Apple Silicon development means that within the next 12 to 18 months Apple will be able to upgrade the range all over again, inserting even faster processors that raise the bar of what Macs can achieve even more all over again. That’s a huge change from how things used to be. Back when I met the Power Mac G3, Apple really was playing catch-up with its professional Macs. These days, Apple’s pro machines aren’t playing the same game. The computers set the bar for what competitors hope to achieve. If you need a lot of computational power at significantly lower energy costs, you can’t go wrong with a Mac Studio. You can follow me on social media! 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