Way back when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and saved it from bankruptcy, he implemented his famous product quadrant: Apple should have desktops and laptops for consumers and professionals. These four categories should contain just one of the best Macs each — no more, no less.
The idea was that you should be able to instantly differentiate each device and know who it’s for and what it does, and it worked incredibly effectively. Yet when I look at the new Mac Studio that Apple unveiled today, I get the feeling that Steve Jobs would be most displeased.
That might sound a little hyperbolic, so let me explain. The latest Mac Studio comes with two chips: the M4 Max from the MacBook Pro, plus the new M3 Ultra. But which one of those two chips is the best? If you were an Apple newbie and you wanted to get a Mac Studio, would you be able to confidently answer that question?
After all, “Max” implies “maximum,” while M4 indicates a more recent generation in M3. That would surely suggest that the M4 Max is the top-range chip. Case closed, right?
But then again, maybe Ultra is better than Max. It sounds like it could be — Ultra also implies class-leading performance levels, does it not?
As it turns out, the M3 Ultra is the best one, and Apple says it delivers “nearly 2x faster performance than M4 Max.” But you might not be sure of that judging by the name. It’s an incredibly confusing state of affairs and one that Apple must have seen coming. And it’s a mistake you don’t want to make when you could be paying over $14,000 for a Mac Studio.
Apple has one of the best marketing teams on the planet and I can’t imagine they are thrilled at the current situation. Launching a previous-generation chip in a new device alongside and inferior chip that plausibly sounds superior is not likely to be something that anyone in Apple is happy about.
Overcorrecting the Mac lineup
So, how did we get here? Maybe Apple struggled to get the M4 Ultra ready in time and had to go with the M3 Ultra out of necessity. Or perhaps Apple has an M4 Ultra waiting in the wings but is saving it for the Mac Pro in order to differentiate that high-end computer from the Mac Studio.
If the latter assumption is correct, it shows how perplexing Apple’s current Mac lineup is. Funnily enough, the Mac Studio was amply illustrating this even before the latest M4/M3 version came out.
That’s because the M2 Mac Studio and the M2 Mac Pro offered the same maximum performance, as they both came with the M2 Ultra chip. You could get the same power no matter which computer you purchased, which led to a serious question: why would you buy a $6,999 Mac Pro when the much more affordable Mac Studio gave you the same performance in a far more desk-friendly package?
It was a strange situation, and I can imagine the Mac Studio cannibalized a heap of Mac Pro sales in the process. Now, it seems to me that Apple has tried to put this right with the new Mac Studio, but in doing so it has overcorrected and is now offering a previous-generation chip in a brand-new device. It’s a different flavor of confusing, but it’s still not any better.
Sure, the M3 Ultra is a new chip that has never been available in any other Mac, but its M3 designation does nothing to flatter it. It sounds outdated, even if it’s not.
And that’s the funny thing – it’s not outdated at all. It’s hugely powerful and is easily the beefiest chip Apple has blessed any Mac with. It should be obvious that this is the chip to buy if you want ultimate performance. Yet Apple’s weird naming conventions mean it’s anything but.
And if Apple is having to include past-gen chips in its latest devices just so they don’t cannibalize sales of its other Macs, something has gone very wrong.
The Apple quadrant
Times have changed a lot since Steve Jobs’ day, and the four-device quadrant might not work quite so well now. After all, people are using computers for much more than they were 20 years ago. Of course Apple is going to have a busier lineup than it did back then.
But the quadrant is still a useful way to show that you need to know what your users want and then give it to them in a clear, concise way. It’s as useful for Apple consumers as it is for Apple itself.
So ultimately, I can’t help thinking that putting an M3 Ultra alongside an M4 Max in the new Mac Studio suggests that Apple somehow forgot that important lesson.
