Enlarge / Apple's M2 Ultra Mac Studio. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The original Mac Studio , despite the absence of "Pro" in the name, was Apple's most compelling professional desktop release in years. Though it was more like a supercharged Mac mini than a downsized Mac Pro, its M1 Max and M1 Ultra processors were fantastic performers, and they were much more energy-efficient than the one in the most recent Intel Mac Pro, too.

Apple is releasing the M2 version of the Mac Studio this week , and even though it's being launched alongside a brand-new Mac Pro , it still might be Apple's most compelling professional desktop. That's partly because the new Studio is even faster than the old one—Apple sent us a fully enabled M2 Ultra model with 128GB of RAM—and partly because Apple Silicon Macs are designed in ways that make Mac Pro-style expandability and modularity impossible.

There is probably still a tiny audience for the redesigned Mac Pro, people who still use macOS and still use internal PCI Express expansion cards that aren't GPUs; it should also be relatively easy to add gobs of cheap, fast internal storage, a kind of upgrade the Mac Studio is still frustratingly incapable of . There's also a bit of awkward pricing overlap with the high-end M2 Pro Mac mini that didn't exist last year.

Enlarge / Someone scans their face using Apple's "most advanced machine learning techniques" with the Apple Vision Pro during a WWDC 2023 keynote demo reel. (credit: Apple)

Amid notable new products like the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and the Apple Vision Pro revealed at Monday's WWDC 2023 keynote event , Apple presenters never once mentioned the term "AI," a notable omission given that its competitors like Microsoft and Google have been heavily focusing on generative AI at the moment. Still, AI was a part of Apple's presentation, just by other names.

While "AI" is a very ambiguous term these days, surrounded by both astounding advancements and extreme hype, Apple chose to avoid that association and instead focused on terms like "machine learning" and "ML." For example, during the iOS 17 demo, SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi talked about improvements to autocorrect and dictation:

Autocorrect is powered by on-device machine learning, and over the years, we've continued to advance these models. The keyboard now leverages a transformer language model, which is state of the art for word prediction, making autocorrect more accurate than ever. And with the power of Apple Silicon, iPhone can run this model every time you tap a key.

Notably, Apple mentioned the AI term "transformer" in an Apple keynote. The company specifically talked about a "transformer language model," which means its AI model uses the transformer architecture that has been powering many recent generative AI innovations, such as the DALL-E image generator and the ChatGPT chatbot.

Enlarge / Apple's new Mac Studio offers the M2 Ultra chip, which, like its M1 counterpart, provides vastly greater computing power. (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—The Mac Studio will be refreshed this summer with chips based on the M2, including the M2 Max and new M2 Ultra, the "most powerful chip" ever released "for a personal computer."

The M2 Pro and M2 Max have previously been seen in MacBook Pro models released late last year , but the M2 Ultra will be a first. In the M1 line, the Ultra was the top-of-the-line chip with substantially better performance than the Pro or Max—particularly in graphically intensive tasks. M2 Ultra will support 192 GB of unified memory, 800 GB/s memory bandwith, and a 24-core CPU and up to 76 cores of GPU. Apple claims the M2 Ultra will work 30% faster than the M1 Ultra, and that a single system with the Ultra can work machine learning datasets that would choke systems with discrete GPUs.

The M2 Max is "up to 50 percent faster" than the prior Max-based Studio, according to Apple, and features a 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU, and up to 96 GB unified memory, with 400 GB/s memory bandwidth.

Enlarge / Apple's Mac Studio desktop. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

As Apple rumors go, the long-rumored 15-inch MacBook Air sounds almost certain to be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next week. But as Apple’s plans take shape, it also seems possible that we’ll see new Mac desktops featuring high-end M2 Max and M2 Ultra chips.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes that these new chips are most likely to power an updated range of Mac Studio desktops, a little over a year after the first Studios were initially introduced . As recently as a few months ago, Gurman speculated that the M2 generation would skip over the Mac Studio entirely and that Apple would instead opt to use the newer chips as a selling point for a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

But that version of reality may not come to pass. Gurman says these new Mac models have Mac14,3 and Mac14,4 model identifiers, while the Mac Pro that Apple is testing internally is identified as Mac14,8. (We initially thought these no-adjective model identifiers were a throwback to the PowerPC days , but the reality is more boring; Apple just isn’t using unique Mac names in model identifiers anymore, possibly to combat leaks and the speculation that arises when new IDs break cover.)

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  The 16-inch MacBook Pro with its lid closed. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Second-generation refreshes of the current 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro design could arrive as soon as this fall, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The updated laptops will feature more powerful chips based on Apple's M2, he claims.

In his weekly Power On newsletter, the journalist—who has accurately reported on upcoming Apple products before—wrote that the overall design of the MacBook Pro is "likely to stay roughly the same," with no major new visual changes or features beyond what comes with the M2 generation of system-on-a-chip.

Gurman predicts that, unsurprisingly, the two new MacBook Pro models will offer buyers a choice between an M2 Pro and an M2 Max chip. These chips will be much faster and more oriented toward heavy-duty workflows than the M2 that shipped over the past couple of months in the 2022 refreshes of the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro.