Apple didn’t launch the 2025 Mac Studio with an M4 Ultra processor — the top-of-the-line version of Apple’s current chip family. And it now seems that chip will never exist at all.
Apparently, Cupertino never intended to produce it.
Don’t count on an Apple M4 Ultra processor
There are four possible versions of each Apple M-series processor. That starts with the basic one (M1, M2, etc.) followed by increasingly powerful Pro, Max and Ultra variants. Each annual generation uses the same CPU and GPU cores, just in increasing numbers.
But it turns out not every generation will be made in every variant. Which explains why the 2025 Mac Studio launched Wednesday with an M4 Max upgradable to (surprise!) an M3 Ultra — a variant of Apple’s chip from 2023.
“When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an ‘Ultra’ tier,” Ars Technica reported.
Apple’s plan all along
And it seems Apple never planned to make an M4 Ultra. It left out a necessary component out of its latest family of processors: the UltraFusion connector.
While each M-series generation uses the same CPU and GPU cores, that’s not the only way the chips reuse components. Each Ultra processor is two Max chips grafted together. The graft requires what’s called an UltraFusion connector, though. And Apple never designed the M4 series with the necessary connector.
That’s what Apple told the French-language site Numerama, anyway. “There are no UltraFusion connectors on the M4 Max chip. It is therefore impossible to merge two fourth-generation chips to create an M4 Ultra,” according to a machine translation.
There had been speculation that Apple had reserved the M4 Ultra for a version of the Mac Pro expected in mid-2025, but apparently not.
An M3 Ultra consolation prize
While 2025 Mac Studio buyers can’t opt for an M4 Ultra, they do have the option to upgrade the standard M4 Max to an M3 Ultra, which is no slouch.
“It delivers nearly 2x faster performance than M4 Max in workloads that take advantage of high CPU and GPU core counts,” promises Apple.
And there are plenty of cores in the new chip. The M3 Ultra offers up to 32 CPU cores, and up to 80 GPU cores.
Still, each individual M3 CPU core is slower than an M4 CPU core, so applications that can’t take advantage of all the additional cores will perform slower on the M3 variant .
Looking ahead, those dreaming of extreme power in a Mac should set their hopes on an M5 Ultra… maybe in 2026.
