NEW Mac Studio 2025 Buyers Guide - STOP Wasting Cash!

M4 Max or M3 Ultra, latest chip gen, or double all the cores? Apple, why would you make buying a Max Studio so confusing this year? Well, if that's you, don't worry because by the end of this video, you'll know exactly which one to buy for your specific use case as I'll be explaining all the differences and which upgrades actually matter as well as which ones are a huge waste of money. But before the buyer's guide part of this video, I've got to go through five mistakes you need to avoid when ordering the new 2025 Max Studio. Getting right into number one, do not overspend on an overkill configuration like the $4,000 M3 Ultra. People don't realize how powerful this chip is going to be. It's going to be around 30,000 to 33,000 points in Geekbench multi-core. The M4 Max was already the fastest production CPU ever made, destroying the very best desktop chips from AMD and Intel. Even the upgraded 14-core M4 Pro chip in the less expensive Mac Mini was right up there, almost as good as the best Intel chip. Heck, even the M4 MacBook Air that just came out is fast enough for most people, seeing as it's now as fast as the old $2,000 M3 Pro which was crazy fast. So unless you absolutely know that you can use the performance of the M3 Ultra, seriously just stick to the M4 Max and maybe just upgrade to the 16-core CPU if you want the best of the best multi-core performance, better than Intel and AMD at a decent price. Moving on to number two, do not upgrade to the insane 4TB, 8TB or ludicrous 16TB SSD storage. Those are extremely overpriced and I can bet that most people would be fine with 1 or even 2TB, but 4TB I think is too much for a regular person as you'll lose your resale value if you end up upgrading for something like an iMac Pro here in the next few years. Instead, get this. This is a DIY Thunderbolt 5 SSD that only took me a couple of minutes to put together with 4TB of insanely fast storage from the Samsung 990 Pro, which was actually faster than the internal drive on the M4 Max MacBook Pro that we tested, and this is only $500. So if you haven't watched that DIY custom SSD video yet, I'll drop a link at the end of this video so you can see how insanely great this was, and I'll leave a link to the parts down below. Now for mistake number three, if your work consists of common tasks like video editing, photo editing, programming, logic music production and other things like that, DO NOT upgrade to more than 64GB of RAM on the M4 Max, and honestly, just stick to the standard 96GB on the M3 Ultra model. I honestly think it's enough, and yes, maybe there might be a day when you have everything opened up and you might just hit that limit, but it's not gonna be very often unless your specific task does eat a ton of RAM, and then yes, if it does, go ahead and order more, but a lot of people overestimate the amount of RAM that they actually need, like we've been using the M2 Ultra Max Studio for the last couple years for all of our video editing and photo editing needs, with tons of tabs open for research, and it's been completely fine with 64GB. So if we do this every day as a small business on YouTube and we got 64GB, a lot of you probably should be just fine, except if you know that your task eats tons of RAM, and I'll get into which ones in just a minute. For number 4, this one is pretty simple, but don't assume that the M3 Ultra is stuck with old Thunderbolt 4 ports because it's part of the M3 family, which all of them had Thunderbolt 4, and as we know, only recently, the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips are the only ones that support Thunderbolt 5, well, Apple actually went and spent the time to redesign the M3 Max die to swap out the Thunderbolt controllers with the new 5th generation ones, so yes, the M3 Ultra also has Thunderbolt 5, and all 6 of the USB-C ports support it, you've got the ones on the back and the two on the front, all Thunderbolt 5, while the two ports on the front of the M4 Max model do not support Thunderbolt at all, it's just USB-C, so you're gonna need to plug in any of your Thunderbolt drives like that SSD into the back ports, which can be annoying if you have to use it for other things like displays and whatever else. And now onto number 5, some of you might actually be making a mistake by spending more on the M3 Ultra chip and should instead just get the M4 Max which will benefit you more. The M4 Max has newer generation cores that are a lot faster in terms of single-core performance, so if you're doing any kind of task that relies on that, the less expensive M4 Max might actually be a lot faster. For example, for web browsing, look at how much faster and snappier the M4 Max is compared to the M3 Ultra in Speedometer 3.0, and this will also translate to web-based apps like Figma Web Design where the M4 Max was a lot faster than the M3 Max, and since the M3 Ultra has the same cores as the M3 Max, the performance should basically be the same, which is slower than the M4 Max even though the M3 Ultra is twice as expensive. And another thing to consider is that the M4-generation CPU cores got redesigned with the RM-V9 instruction set, which supports a feature called SME or SVE2, which some complex real-world tasks might actually take advantage of, and that's why the Geekbench scores for single-core are so much higher, so unless you need all of the extra raw multi-core performance for apps that properly utilize it with all the extra cores of the M3 Ultra, just stick to the M4 Max. And now with that said, let's get into the Buyer's Guide. If you're someone who doesn't really do that much professional work and you just want the latest and snappiest desktop Mac, I honestly don't think you should buy this. You should probably just save some money and go for the M4 Pro Mac Mini or maybe even the basic $600 M4 Mac Mini with some upgrades like RAM and storage for longevity. If you do a lot of common productivity work like video editing, photo editing, programming, web design, things like that, the base $2000 M4 Max model should be more than good enough for a lot of people out there, maybe with a RAM upgrade if you multitask a lot. However, if you do a lot of lightroom photo editing and you deal with hundreds of photos at the same time, that is where RAM will mean a lot so it might be worth upgrading to 64GB or even more. And if you work with Blender doing 3D rendering, definitely upgrade to the best 40-core GPU on the M4 Max as that'll help with graphics performance and it'll likely be fast enough for a lot of common games, at least the ones you can play on MacOS or Windows games using translation apps like Crossover. And for those who do a lot of AI work like with local LLMs like DeepSeek R1, that is where you probably want as much RAM as you can get, up to 128GB on the M4 Max, which is probably good enough for a personal setup or for a small team. And now getting into who should buy the M3 Ultra, that's honestly gonna be someone who likely makes money with their Mac for a small business. So anyone who needs absolutely as much multi-core CPU performance as possible, like for CPU rendering or Logic Pro with tons of music tracks at once, or complex scientific workloads that need more CPU power, the M3 Ultra is great for that, as well as anybody doing insane local LLM builds that need as much VRAM as possible, since this goes up to 512GB of unified memory and there are guides on Reddit on how to increase the limitation which knocks it down and open it back up. You can even buy two of these, hook them up with Thunderbolt 5 using Exolabs and basically that'll be enough for like a decent team of doing work at once, instead of going with some crazy multiple NVIDIA GPU setup that's a pain to keep cool. And we're personally gonna be using the M3 Ultra for video editing, since the Ultra chips have more encoders and decoders, so you can export videos super fast, much faster than the M4 Max, as well as having a ton of GPU power for editing smoothly with tons of effects. And anybody doing 3D rendering, you're gonna want the 80-core M3 Ultra because it's gonna be insanely fast, in terms of raw performance, it's faster than the RTX 5080, so it'll also be insane for gaming as well. So with that said, you're gonna find the links to the best deals on Apple's Macs, including the MacStudio, the new MacBook Air, all the other Macs down below, and the SSD as well, so thanks for watching, subscribe above for our in-depth testing videos, and we'll see you in the next one.