Tested: The Mac Studio M5 Max claims its crown as the best of all Apple computers

The latest Mac Studio uses the M5 Max chip, which we’ve already seen in the form of a MacBook Pro. There's an M5 Ultra too, which takes things to another level, but the price gets excessive enough to make the Max version look reasonable. Still, this should be enough computer for anyone, whether you’re chewing through 8K video or trying to break the record for the greatest number of layers and filters in a Photoshop document.

On the outside, it’s the same old Studio we’ve seen for generations, but Apple keeps piling on the improvements and innovations in its silicon, and that’s lead to a machine that’s pulling ahead at the top of many of Creative Bloq’s benchmarking charts, will be a great alternative to the best laptop for animation and is looking hard to catch.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Small for a desktop Mac
• Lightweight

Opening up any new Apple product is always an exciting experience as they’re just so well packaged. You pull tabs and tear strips away from the box, then follow arrows to fold down the sides and reveal, in the case of the Studio, the aluminium monolith inside.

The M5 Max version of the Studio looks little different to the way it has all the way back to 2022, with all the changes concentrated on the inside. This means you get something that looks like a Mac Mini under a magnifying glass, only without any of the slight annoyances that have crept into the little computer over the years. The power button is at the back but you can reach it without turning the Mac over, there are loads of USB ports including some Type-As, there's an actual light on the front to tell you if it’s on, and a port for everything so there's less need for a dock or adapter. If you’re lucky enough to own an Apple Studio Display, it will sit on the foot like it was designed to go there.

If you’ve bought the M5 Ultra version of the Mac Studio, it’s heavier than either M5 Max edition due to the presence of an enhanced cooling system for the hotter chip, but the M5 Max is barely heavier than many laptops, and for something that’s settled nicely into the Mac Pro’s niche at the top of the product stack, that’s remarkable.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• Thunderbolt 5 aplenty
• Easy to reach ports

As Apple is reusing the same Studio chassis we’ve seen previously, and the M5 Max version even has the same IO as the M4 Max we reviewed previously, there's very little new here. The Wi-Fi has had a bump to version 7, the Bluetooth to version 6, but there's still plain Thunderbolt 5 (which is plenty fast enough) and a boring old HDMI port.

This machine doesn’t use the M6 - we haven’t seen that chip yet - but the M5 Max takes the already excellent M5 and just adds more to it. Apple is claiming 3.9x faster AI performance than the prior generation and 4.3x the peak AI compute performance of an M3 Ultra. You can spec it with up to 512GB of RAM, if you dare, and you’ll find that this has 50% more memory bandwidth. If that’s not enough, you can use Thunderbolt to connect multiple Mac Studios together to load the most demanding frontier-class open-weight models available. A cluster of four Mac Studios, so it’s claimed, can deliver up to 3x faster AI inference than a single system.

Apple is really pushing the AI capabilities, presumably getting in on the local model and agent action before the first crop of Nvidia RTX Spark machines arrives. But you know what else likes huge amounts of RAM and enormous bandwidth, not to mention loads of processing power? Creative work, that’s what. If you want hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes and AV1 decode, or to colour-grade uncompressed 8K footage while processing multiple concurrent video streams, this is the Mac to do it for you.

It’s also worth noting that Apple has moved its in-house creative apps to a subscription model, called Creator Studio. You get Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro and a bit more for a monthly fee rather than a large up-front cost, something that will hopefully rekindle interest in these underappreciated apps.

Feature score: 4/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Performance

• Good at everything
• Even the fan isn't too loud

The M5 Max Studio we’ve got here is the top model, with six Super cores, 12 Performance cores (for a total of 18) and a 40-core GPU. It sits one level below the M5 Ultra, which is two M5 Max chips stuck together and can have up to 36 cores, split between 12 Super and 24 Performance, but which costs a lot more. You don’t get Efficient cores on this level of Mac, and it’s essentially the same chip we saw in the M5 Max version of the MacBook Pro, just given slightly more room to breathe in the Studio chassis. It’s backed up in the model sent to Creative Bloq by 128GB of RAM and a 4TB SSD, which contributes to the cost as well as appealing to the new crop of AI types who want to run their models locally.

And so we see it head to the top of our benchmark charts. In Geekbench 6 it takes the top spot in both the single- and multi-core tests, butting even more of a gap between the M5 and its closest rival, the Snapdragon X2 Elite. In Geekbench 2026 it leads the Core Ultra 9 290HX+ in the Razer Blade 18 by almost 3000 points in multi-core rendering, and it’s the first CPU to break the 200-point barrier in Cinebench 2024’s single-core test, in which we used to say that 100 was a good score.

The GPU does well too, sitting 4.2% behind the GeForce RTX 5070Ti in the latest HP Omen 35L - a full-size desktop card - in Cinebench 2026. It beats the popular 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX laptop CPU in multi-core rendering, and almost doubles the score of the Omen 35L’s CPU, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D beloved of gamers, in the same test.

Speaking of games, if you were thinking of dropping this much money on a Mac and want to use it out of hours, it can get 60FPS out of Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K resolution using the ray-tracing ultra preset, as long as you turn on MetalFX upscaling and AMD FSR frame generation. Drop the res down to 1440p and you can go as high as 89FPS.

In single-precision AI workloads the M5 Max sits between gaming laptops with GeForce chips in our charts, still behind the big desktop PCs. It drops in the Quantized test, however, sitting behind the likes of the Geekom A9 Max, but still ahead of the vanilla M5.

It shines in creative apps though, taking a long lead at the top of the Premiere Pro benchmark chart, beating its portable sibling and the HP Omen 35L. It’s the same in Photoshop, where its results are 6% better than the MacBook Pro with the same CPU.

Performance score: 5/5

Price

In the spec we’ve reviewed here, the Mac Studio costs £6,899/$6,899, but with a lesser spec (M5 Max 16-core, 36GB RAM, 512GB storage) it starts at a more reasonable £2,499/$2,499. That’s still a big chunk of change, even if you are getting a lot of power in a small chassis, and you should definitely look at what a (much larger and noisier) PC with an Nvidia card can do for you in the same price bracket. There's not much else like the Mac Studio, however, and if it has the capabilities you need in a form factor you covet, you’re going to have to open your wallet.

Value score: 4/5

Who is it for?

• Creators and developers

Apple is going big on AI, but has also made a Mac that should be able to do the heavy lifting for many different creative disciplines. It will be overkill for many, as the basic M5 and the M6 that’s on the cusp of arriving are good enough for a lot of tasks. But if you find that you could do with a speed boost in your work, then it’s well worth looking at.

Buy it if...

• Your M1 machine is looking tired
• You prefer MacOS to Windows
• You can’t get enough raw power

Don't buy it if...

• Something cheaper will do the job
• You have little interest in AI
• You’re waiting to see what M6 can do

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