New Mac Studio and Mac Pro: Apple’s Latest High-Performance Computers

TECH

On Monday night, Apple took the ar arena with the Vision Pro. In parallel, they invest in portable and desktop – with fresh Macbook Air 15 inch, Mac Studio and Mac Pro as ammunition in the fight against Windows PC.

It was a casually dressed and seemingly happy Tim Cook who appeared at the opening of WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference, on Monday evening Swedish time. Given what Apple launched, it was no wonder the tech company’s CEO was smiling.

15-inch version of the popular Macbook Air

The evening offered the world premiere of Apple Vision Pro, the company’s first pure AR and VR hardware. But that wasn’t all that was on display. Before it was time to unveil the Vision Pro, Apple made a whole bunch of launches in quick succession, including Ios 17, the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

During the evening, we also got to see several news on the computer front. First up was the portable Macbook Air, which was launched in a new 15-inch model with Apple’s own-designed arm-chip M2.

Apple: “The world’s thinnest computer”

Apple didn’t skimp on the powder during the presentation – the brand new 15-incher is said by the manufacturer to be “the world’s thinnest computer”, with a thickness of 11.4 millimeters and a weight of just 1.5 kilograms. In addition, the computer should have a battery life of up to 18 hours, a new sound system with six speakers and a video call camera (Facetime) with 1080p resolution.

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During the launch, it was pushed hard that the new Macbook Air 15 inch should be twice as fast as “the best-selling 15-inch notebook PC with a core i7 processor”. In usual Apple order, however, they did not go into more detail about the technical details, so it remains to be seen how well the new Macbook Air performs in reality.

Fresh Macbook Air 15 inches costs from SEK 18,995, or SEK 17,595 with an education discount.

Stationary cans get the new worst thing chip M2 Ultra

Until tonight, the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips have been the ultimate performance class for Apple’s self-designed system chips. That changed on Monday night when Apple launched updated models of the powerful Mac Studio and Mac Pro desktop computers.

Mac Studio is a square computer intended for illustrators, filmmakers and designers, among others. What stands out about the new Mac Studio model is that it can be configured with a new chip from Apple called the M2 Ultra. It is the successor to the previous generation M1 Ultra processor. Just like before, it is a real beast of a system circuit.

76 graphics cores – and 192 GB of memory

The M2 Ultra consists of two M2 Max chips joined by a silicon spacer. The new chip should give a real performance boost to, for example, filmmakers and programmers, and among other things render up 50 percent faster with After Effects compared to the previous Mac Studio with M1 Max. The updated chip should also provide 25 percent higher performance when developers build new versions of apps using Xcode.

The Mac Pro is Apple’s absolute most expensive computer. It has also been the last machine to have Intel processors after the transition to Apple Silicon. But not anymore – the new Mac Pro, launched on Monday, will come with Apple’s proprietary M2 Ultra chip.

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This means, among other things, that Apple’s most powerful computer is equipped with a system chip that has 24 CPU cores, a graphics processor with up to 76 cores and a maximum of 192 GB of unified memory (a memory pool shared between, among other things, the CPU and GPU) with a memory bandwidth of a breathtaking 800 GB/s.

This is how much Mac Studio and Mac Pro cost

Mac Studio costs from SEK 28,995. So-called education customers, or students, pay from SEK 26,095.

Mac Pro (tower version) costs from SEK 98,995, and students pay from SEK 93,295. The rack model of the same computer costs from SEK 105,995, or from SEK 98,895 for students.