Horizon

The best new tech heading your way

- Josh Russell

1 APPLE MAC STUDIO

From £1,999, apple.com

What's better than the M1 Max chip? Two of them. But, somehow, only one? It's less confusing than we're making it: when pulling back the curtain of the Mac Studio, Apple revealed that it had built an interconnect right into the design of what was once its highest-spec processor and cleverly not told anyone about it. Thus the Mi Ultra processor at the heart of the high-end spec of the new Mac Studio, which stitches the silicon of two M1 Max chips together into one cohesive whole, effectively manages to double the performance of what was already one of the most efficient CPUs in the world with no downside.

That's genius internal design, and makes the Mac Studio attractive to basically anyone of an artistic persuasion: time and testing will tell, but we can't see a way that this won't be the ultimate maker's machine, like Macs Pro before it. Apple's outward design language this time speaks of compactness, with clever airflow from the base to the rear allowing the Mac Studio to resemble a dumpier Mac Mini, taking up minimal desk room. Apple has also sensibly positioned a bunch of Type-C ports up front (at last) - and four of its ports are Thunderbolt 4, giving this about the best 10 throughput we've ever seen.

This may not be the machine for you. It's a creative powerhouse, and priced as such. But as a template and as a statement of intent, it proves Apple is well and truly at the top of the CPU game.

ULTRA POWER

The Mi Ultra being two M1 Max chips isn't just a gimmick - that's literally what it is. It gets 20 cores to the Max's 10, 64 GPU cores, double the memory and double the memory bandwidth, too.

IMPORTANT NUMBERS