In the last two years, Apple has turned the personal computer space on its head. For years, its MacBook laptops were considered the best machines of their kind. But large desktops? Not so much, although both iMac and the Mac Pro have been quite stellar on some occasions. Apple is changing this with the Mac Studio, which has been launched in India along with a companion monitor, Studio Display. The company finally has a computer for professionals who want more than what a MacBook laptop can offer but also do not want to spend some Rs 4 lakh or such on a Mac Pro.
More significantly, there is the story of the M1 chipsets. When the M1 appeared on the MacBook Pro and Air in 2020, that was a revelation. It ran cool, and it ran fast. It was better than anything Intel or AMD were putting in laptops. In 2021, and now in 2022, Apple has scaled the M1 to be bigger and faster. Results are chipsets like the M1 Max, which powers the base variant of the Mac Studio, and the M1 Ultra, which offers oodles of performance to content creators and working professionals. The potency of M1 chipsets makes the new Macs, including the Mac Studio, appealing options.
In 2022, Intel and AMD caught up with the performance of M1 chipsets. But given the dynamics of the market, I feel that for most content creators — the people who are shooting, editing, and producing videos, or those who are working with photos and audio for their living — the Mac Studio is one of the best, if not the outright best, option in India right now. In particular, the base variant, which we reviewed here, is a well-priced, high-performance computer working professionals can buy in India right now.
It is not perfect, though. There are some caveats to it. But all in good time.
For over a month now, I have used the Mac Studio along with the Studio Display for work and pleasure. In evaluating the Mac Studio, I have been majorly aided and helped by Narender Sharma. Narender is one of our ace video editors and he works on the videos we create for India Today Tech’s YouTube Channel, called FIIBER. Off-topic, if you are into videos, you should check our FIIBER HINDI tech videos and FIIBER English tech videos. These videos will also give you an idea of the content (oversampled 4K, multiple effects and animations, multiple layers) that we edited and created on the Mac Studio in the process of reviewing it.
Alright, enough background. Let’s talk about the Mac Studio and the Studio Display. Of the two, I find Mac Studio excellent. The Display is good, but I feel it is priced on the higher side and offers features that are not essential.
Apple Mac Studio India review
Before the Mac Studio was launched in March, there were rumors that the computer would look like two Mac Mini computers stacked together. Well, the rumors were wrong. But not by much. The Mac Studio, housed inside a square aluminium, looks almost like three Mac Mini computers stacked vertically. One great bit about the M1 chipsets is that they run cool and are extremely power-efficient. Yet, given that the Mac Studio is a performance machine, Apple has made more elaborate arrangements in it for cooling. Around its round base, which has rubber wrapped under it so that the machine stays planted on the table, there are cooling vents. On the backside too, which houses the connectivity ports, the Studio has a mesh for cooling.
Overall, the Mac Studio looks extremely slick. And it is compact, so compact that you can pick it up, put it in a bag, and use it as a portable computer. This, in itself, is a big deal because, even though the Mac Studio matches the performance offered by 20-inch workstation towers that weigh 15 kilograms, it is actually a portable computer that is barely bigger than a lunch box.
In terms of ports, I feel that the Mac Studio will easily satisfy most users. It has 6 USB-C ports. Four of them on the back also support Thunderbolt 4. There are 2 USB A ports, which are useful if you want to hook the Studio to a wired mouse and keyboard. There is an SDXC card reader on the front, which a lot of content creators will find useful. The headphone jack, HDMI Port, and Ethernet port are also available.
As it is usually for Macs, there is no power brick or anything here. Just a regular power cable. You hook up the Studio to a power source and it is ready to go.
While looks are subjective, personally I find the design of the Mac Studio fabulous. In an office full of big and black towers, the Mac Studio sits on the table inconspicuously. And when it is chugging during work, crunching through 4K videos, it runs cool and remains surprisingly silent, as I found during this review while comparing it to some video editing workstations in my office.
For this review, over here at India Today Tech, we used the Mac Studio with the base variant. It has:
— M1 Max chipset with 10-core CPU and 24-core GPU.
— 32GB RAM
— 500GB SSD
The machine was used with the Studio Display and the Apple Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard, which are sold separately.
Unlike Windows, even the new Windows 11, I find Mac computers to be a less hassle in terms of how they work out of the box. All you need to start working on them is to just take them out of the box, power them on and hook them to WiFi or wired internet. It’s the same with the Mac Studio, although in this instance we did install some of the programs we use — mostly Adobe’s applications like Premiere Pro and After Effects.
The Mac Studio is an extremely powerful machine. Now, the way I see it, there are two use cases for this computer. One is, you need it because you want something faster than a Mac Mini. Personally, I feel that a Mac Mini with 16GB RAM is good enough for most people. But maybe you want more for certain reasons. Probably you work with a lot of high-resolution photos. Or maybe you just want this extra performance. In that case, the Mac Studio will work beautifully for you.
For any regular use, the Mac Studio is more than a handful. It is extremely fast in day-to-day use and photo work. No sweat at all. So much so that it is overkill for regular use.
The second use case is, however, the primary reason why many people might be eyeing the Mac Studio in India. It is a machine aimed at content creators, as evident from its “studio” moniker. It is a computer that Apple is selling to those who record videos and audio and then shape that content into top-quality work.
To ascertain how well Mac Studio handles content creation, I took help from Narender. He has been using the machine for over a month now, and his impression of Mac Studio is that it’s great but could have been better.
We have used the Mac Studio primarily to edit videos and create content in Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop. In most instances, we found the Mac Studio matching or outperforming our more expensive workstations. But with the kind of workflow we have, it wasn’t smooth sailing all the time. Most of the time, with a couple of the 4K streams layered together in Premiere Pro, the Mac Studio offers lag-free and smooth performance. But there were instances where we found the base variant of the Mac Studio struggled a bit. These were:
— Playback can be choppy at “Full” 4K stream in Premiere Pro when a project has some 4-5 layers stacked together.
— After Effects is an app where the Mac Studio struggles more than usual. It is not clear if this is because of M1 Max or if it’s due to a lack of optimization from Adobe’s side. The chipsets like M1 Max and M1 Ultra are still new and Adobe is still in the process of optimizing its apps for these systems.
— Switching to Premiere Pro immediately after finishing a file in After Effects often freezes the Premier Pro for a couple of seconds. This, we suspect, is because of (only) 32GB RAM and likely a bug with After Effects. From our usage,, it is clear that if After Effects is an app where you do most of your work, you should go with at least 64GB RAM in the Studio (it does cost extra, though).
Mac Studio M1 Max performance summary
From the impressions of the Mac Studio we have shared so far, it will be clear to readers that while the Studio base variant is smooth and fast 95 percent of time, there are use cases — the kind of use cases where you are simultaneously working on After Effects and Premiere Pro — where the performance will get choppy from time to time.
But this we also need to put in perspective. The workloads where our video editor found the Studio struggling are the kind of workloads that are best dealt with a Rs 3 lakh machine. Or you have to assemble your own custom machine, a process that is nowadays a mess because of extremely high prices of PC parts in India. A pro-grade but mid-level Nvidia A4000 graphics card alone costs some Rs 75,000. Given these market realities, the Mac Studio makes for the one compelling option for multimedia professionals and content creators. Hooked to a 27-inch monitor — and there are a lot of good affordable options for such monitors — the Mac Studio makes for a quick, hassle-free and powerful video and audio editing platform.
What about Studio Display?
For a long time, people have asked Apple to come out with a more affordable monitor. The Pro Display XDR costs close to Rs 4.5 lakh, plus 1 lakh more if you also include the stand. Apple’s answer to these requests is Studio Display. Apple believes that the Mac Studio and the Studio Display make a dream team, and in a way they do. But I found the Studio Display to be an indulgence and not a necessity.
I feel most content creators would be better off pairing the Mac Studio with a regular QHD or 4K monitor. Now, this is not because the Studio Display is not good. It’s indeed, at least display-wise, spectacular. Given its feature set, I feel it is even decently priced. After all, a 5K monitor — only LG is selling those in India — costs close to Rs 1.1 lakh. Apple is charging Rs 1,59,900 for the Studio Display but then it is not only giving a vibrant and bright 5K display but also a host of other features like a 6-speaker sound setup, a 12-megapixel webcam, and a host of connectivity options. So, price is not exactly a problem with Studio Display. It is its usability.
In our use, most of the time we used the Studio Display purely as a display. Its webcam wasn’t used much, and its speakers too stayed muted most of the time because our video editors mostly wore headphones while editing videos. Yes, there are a host of features that Studio Display offers. But these features aren’t needed. In that sense, I feel it would have been better for Apple to only offer a “pure” display at a lower price.
The design of the Studio is classic Apple: minimalist, and sophisticated with its milled aluminium. The frame has rectangular edges and looks inspired by the design of the current iPhone and iPad. The stand is sleek and surefooted, staying planted on the table with no wobbles. There are tilt and height adjustments, which make using the Display easier. Compared to regular monitors, the Studio Display is fairly heavy at 6.3 kilograms. It also has thick edges because under them it hides its big sound system and because inside its belly it has the A13 Bionic chip, a serious computing chipset for a monitor. The chip is used to power display, sound, and connectivity features that the Studio offers.
As far as the display is concerned, I find the 27-inch screen with 5K resolution (5120 x 2880) here fantastic in every possible way: it is vibrant and shows glorious colours and its good brightness means that even in a well-lit office users will have no issues dealing with the high-quality footage and photos while working on them. The speaker system, which supports Dolby audio, inside the Display is capable of putting out meaty sound, although our video editors still prefer editing videos while wearing headphones.
Mac Studio and Studio Display review summary
If you made it this far in the piece, I have a feeling that you already know what I am about to say. Apple has positioned the Mac Studio between the Mac Mini (M1 variant already launched) and Mac Pro (M series is yet to be launched). And after using the Mac Studio for over a month, we feel that it fits right into the slot where Apple has slotted it. In other words, Mac Studio is a stupendously fast computer and a boon for content creators, but for many multimedia professionals who work to create absolutely world-class video content it might not be enough. They would do well to wait for the next Mac Pro from Apple. I also feel that many of these professionals, if After Effects is a big part of their work flow, should choose the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra chipset if they are looking to get it for their work.
But for everyone else — and this includes power users, professionals creating 4K content for YouTube, programmers who do a lot of compiling, graphics designers, and pro photographers — the Mac Studio I feel is one of the most well-priced and complete computers. Even the base variant with a price of Rs 1,89,900 is a speedy, but cool and silent running beast. Hook it up with a monitor of your choice and you are good to go. I must say that it is possible for you to get a Windows computer that is faster than Mac Studio at a price point of around Rs 2 lakh or so, but the process to get that will most likely be messy and expensive for most users. It will also mean that you will have to assemble your own computer, and that may not work for everyone.
The Studio Display, meanwhile, is worth getting only if you absolutely want a 5K resolution monitor. Such displays remain rare in the market and hence the premium price that Apple is charging for them. But if you are happy with a 4K monitor, I would suggest that you put the saved money into getting a Mac Studio that has more RAM or storage, particularly when you factor in that you can’t add more RAM or storage to the machine after you purchase it.
Apple Mac Studio and Studio Display review
Pros
- Fast
- Compact design
- Well-priced
Cons
- Can struggle with some workloads
