iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted among all your devices and uses iCloud just for syncing your password and other shared keychain entries. As I’ve written previously in “Why iCloud Keychain may prompt you for a device password used with other Apple hardware you own,” Apple relies on device passcodes in a special way as you add additional devices to an iCloud Keychain set.

With your first device, you’re simply enabling syncing. Apple requires that you enter the password or passcode on that device to prime the pump. That encrypted password is used to wrap all your iCloud Keychain entries. The next device you add will prompt you to enter the passcode or password of the one you initiated iCloud Keychain with. Entering the secret unlocks the iCloud Keychain sync and adds your new device to the set of legitimate keychain sync partners. Because you’re entering the passcode or passphrase on a device under your control, it’s never leaving your hardware: Apple doesn’t learn it; it’s just a secret only you know to unlock the syncing operation.

One reader, however, was shocked when restoring an iPhone that they were prompted to enter the password of a computer they no longer owned—one they double-checked had been removed from their set of registered devices. Surely that was a security leak? They were concerned that whoever possessed their old computer might have access to their keychain secrets.

Fortunately, that’s not the case, though Apple surely should have a way to resolve this problem when devices are removed from iCloud—but possibly not with a restored backup. Only the encrypted passcode of that older device lingered, likely within the iPhone backup. When prompted to enter it, the reader was only unlocking their local keychain set.

While this request looked sketchy or problematic, it was poorly labeled rather than a security hole.

When the reader disabled iCloud Keychain on all their devices and re-enabled it, they weren’t prompted for the password on an old Mac again—or any passcode at all. The devices all retained enough mutual security elements associated with the iCloud identity that re-authentication wasn’t required.

This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Andrea.

Ask Mac 911

We’ve compiled a list of the questions we get asked most frequently, along with answers and links to columns: read our super FAQ to see if your question is covered. If not, we’re always looking for new problems to solve! Email yours to mac911@macworld.com, including screen captures as appropriate and whether you want your full name used. Not every question will be answered, we don’t reply to email, and we cannot provide direct troubleshooting advice.

iCloud, Security Software and Services

Thinking of buying a Mac or MacBook for school, college or university? Here, in our best Mac for students guide, we take a look at Apple’s current line-up to evaluate which Mac is best for students. We’ll compare the MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro for college and examine whether another Mac might actually be a better choice.

Choosing the best Mac for college or university depends on what you are going to be studying as well as how much you have to spend. Luckily registered students can save money on a new Mac by shopping at Apple’s Education Store, or with one of Apple’s partners. We discuss How to get an Apple student discount at Apple’s Education Store separately, although we also talk about the different ways you can save money as a student below.

You can save hundreds on a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio and even a Mac Pro at Apple’s Education Store all year round. Click on the following links for the Education stores in the countries where most of our readers reside:

• Apple’s U.S. Education Store
• Apple’s U.K. Education Store (in the UK you will need to verify your student status via UNiDAYS).
• Apple’s Canada Education Store
• Apple’s Australian Education Store

Plus, starting in June in the U.S., July in the U.K, and in January in Australia, Apple runs a “Back To Uni” event, where Apple gives people looking to buy a Mac for university vouchers or a free pair of AirPods! Between January and March 2023 Apple gave away AirPods in Australia, but the U.S. deal for 2023 is vouchers in differing amounts, determined by what you purchase.

If you’re a student, you can also get Apple Music for half price with free Apple TV+ included.

We’ll run through exactly how much money you can save on a new Mac if you are a student below, then we will assess which Mac to choose based on your needs as a student and the course you are taking. Note that you may be able to get even more money off your Mac purchase if you go straight to a reseller and take advantage of a discount, you’ll see the best deals for each Mac below.

If you’re doing a degree in film and video, or music, or graphic design then it might make sense to also look at one of our other Best Mac For… guides for that subject area:

• Best Mac for graphic design
• Best Mac for making music
• Best Mac for video editing
• Best Mac for programming
• Best Mac for photo editing
• Best Mac for gaming (in case you have any free time)

We also have a guide to help you get the best MacBook deals for students.

How much can students save on a Mac?

Before we begin let’s cast our eyes over what’s available and how much you can save with the education discount.

Students can typically save $100 to $200 in the U.S., in the U.K. the savings are from £100 to £200, Australian students can save between $150 and $330 and Canadian students can typically save from $130 to $270. Savings are even bigger on high-end products like the Mac Pro, although we aren’t sure that many students need one of those.

Product	U.S.	U.K.	Australia	Canada
13.3-inch MacBook Air, M1, MSRP	$999	£999	$1,499	$1,299
13.3-inch MacBook Air, M1, Student discount	$899	£899	$1,349	$1,169
13.6-inch MacBook Air, M2, MSRP	$1,099	£1,149	$1,799	$1,449
13.6-inch MacBook Air, M2, Student discount	$999	£1,049	$1,649	$1,299
15-inch MacBook Air, M2, MSRP	$1,299	£1,399	$2,199	$1,749
15-inch MacBook Air, M2, Student discount	$1,199	£1,289	$1,999	$1,599
13-inch MacBook Pro MSRP	$1,299	£1,349	$1,999	$1,699
13-inch MacBook Pro Student discount	$1,199	£1,249	$1,849	$1,574
14-inch MacBook Pro MSRP	$1,999	£2,149	$3,199	$2,599
14-inch MacBook Pro Student discount	$1,849	£1,989	$2,959	$2,399
16-inch MacBook Pro MSRP	$2,499	£2,699	$3,999	$3,199
16-inch MacBook Pro Student discount	$2,299	£2,479	$3,679	$2,939
iMac MSRP	$1,299	£1,399	$1,999	$1,699
iMac Student discount	$1,249	£1,349	$1,919	$1,629
Mac mini MSRP	$599	£649	$999	$799
Mac mini Student discount	$499	£539	$829	$669
Mac Studio MSRP	$1,999	£2,099	$3,299	$2,699
Mac Studio Student discount	$1,799	£1,889	$2,969	$2,429
Mac Pro MSRP	$6,999	£7,199	$11,999	$8,999
Mac Pro Student discount	$6,599	£6,789	$11,309	$8,479

MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro for college/university?

It’s likely that this is the question you are hoping to get an answer to: should I buy a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro for college? We compare the MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro in detail separately. Below we’ll evaluate the different MacBooks from the perspective of a typical student in the order that we recommend them for students.

MacBook vs Mac desktop for students?

Student life normally involves a fair amount of mobility – traveling to lectures, libraries, the occasional coffee shop, and then possibly home for weekends and term breaks–so it makes sense to consider a laptop rather than a desktop Mac.

While the screen sizes in MacBooks are smaller than iMacs, you can always buy a cheap screen and use that with your laptop when you are home. Or, if you also have an iPad, you might be able to link your iPad to your MacBook and use the iPad screen too (here’s how to use your iPad as a second screen for your Mac). You could also use that iPad for taking notes when you are at lectures (read our guide to the best iPad for students).

However, there are some benefits to buying a Mac desktop. Generally, it is the case that you pay more for a Mac laptop, compared to the same specs on a desktop. The Mac mini, for example, is Apple’s cheapest Mac despite having some pretty impressive specs. However, if you compare the 24-inch iMac with a similarly speced Mac laptop the iMac is considerably more expensive. 

iMac vs Mac mini vs Mac Studio for students

While we appreciate that there are plenty of benefits associated with choosing a laptop for university, you may be better off with a desktop.

Which Mac should you get for university?

Our pick of the entire Mac range, if you’re a student, is the M2 MacBook Air. It will give you a better screen, better webcam and an attractive new design to show off in lectures. It’s light, fast, and with student pricing starting at $999/£999 it’s very good value.

You could save by opting for the older M1 MacBook Air, but, if you are looking for the cheapest Mac you can get, the M2 Mac mini is a very good option. It’s powerful and with Apple’s education discount, it’s just $499/£539. You just need a monitor, mouse and keyboard.

How to get a discount on a Mac for university or school

You can get a student discount at Apple’s education stores, but you have to qualify as a student in higher education, be a teacher, someone buying for an education institution, or a home educator. School-age children can only take advantage if the equipment is being purchased by their school or if their parent is home-educating them. If you are a registered student you’ll be able to get a discount on a new Mac if you shop in Apple’s various Education Stores (below). You can find out all about it in more detail in our Apple Education Store explainer.

• Apple’s U.S. Education Store
• Apple’s U.K. Education Store (in the UK you will need to verify your student status via UNiDAYS).
• Apple’s Canada Education Store
• Apple’s Australian Education Store

Getting a student discount from Apple’s education store isn’t the only way to get a cheaper Mac as a student though. There are various ways to get a bargain:

Look out for reseller discounts: Another way to get a bargain is to look out for deals at Apple resellers and Amazon, where we have see Macs with as much as $500 off the price. Take a look at our round ups of the best Mac deals to get the best prices right now:

• Best MacBook Air deals this month
• Best Mac Studio deals available now
• Best MacBook Pro deals this month
• Best iMac deals this month
• Best Mac mini deals this month

Buy a refurbished Mac: Take advantage of Apple’s refurbished store where the company sells ex-display, returned, and previous-generation Macs at a discount. The benefit of buying refurbished from Apple is that the products are fully checked and come with a one-year warranty. You can also get a refurbished Mac elsewhere with many resellers offering the same service, but beware that not all refurbished Macs are equal. Usually refurbished means that the Mac is guaranteed to be in full working order, but do check with the reseller. Here’s a guide to how to buy a refurbished Mac. We also look at why you should buy a refurbished Mac.

Buy second hand/used: One advantage of buying refurbished is that it should be guaranteed to work and you should have no problem returning it if there is a problem. These are reasons why we don’t recommend buying a second hand Mac. If you do see a deal on a second hand or used Mac just be especially cautious.

The best Mac bargains are usually on older models, although we do see discounts on current Macs as well. If you see a good discount on an older Mac it’s important to be aware of what the newer models offers so that you know what you are missing out on and can judge whether the deal is as good as it appears to be. For one thing, older Macs are likely to feature Intel processors rather than Apple’s M1, M2 or their variants, which could put you at a disadvantage in the future (and will certainly mean your Mac depreciates in value very quickly). If you are picking an Intel Mac then make sure that it is a relatively recent Intel chip to ensure that Apple will at least support that Mac until the end of your course. See: How long does Apple support Macs for.

If you are a student here’s how to get Apple Music for half price. Plus students with an Apple Music student subscription also get free access to Apple TV+ for a limited time.

Mac

The Mac Studio had a splashy debut last year, a new desktop design with speed that filled the needs of the most demanding professionals. But it also raised a few questions at the time: Does it replace the Mac Pro? And if it doesn’t, will Apple continue the Mac Studio line once the Apple silicon Mac Pro arrives? Would the Mac Studio end up just like iMac Pro, a model that got little attention after its release and eventually was discontinued?

We now have answers that give the Mac lineup some much-needed clarity. Apple showed at WWDC that it is dedicated to upgrading and maintaining the high-end desktop Mac as a platform with the release of the M2 Max/Ultra Mac Studio and the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. The Mac Studio is Apple’s primary offering for customers looking for a high-performance Mac, while the Mac Pro addresses a niche that needs hardware expansion.

However, the M2 Pro Mac mini that Apple released back in January provides an interesting comparison with the M2 Max Mac Studio. Whether that Mac mini or the M2 Max Mac Studio is the Mac for you depends on the kind of work you do.

This review looks at the Mac Studio with an M2 Max chip, a 38-core GPU, 64GB of memory, and a 2TB SSD. It has several upgrades over the entry-level $1,999/£2,099 M2 Max Mac Studio, which puts the price of our review unit at $3,199/£3,299. Apple also sells a $3,999/£4,199 Mac Studio with an M2 Ultra, 64GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD.

Update 6/13: The M2 Max Mac Studio is now shipping from Apple.com and other retailers.

From M1 Max to the M2 Max

The Mac Studio debuted in March of last year with M1 Max and M1 Ultra models. The M1 chip series has had its time (there are only two Macs left with the entry-level M1 chip), and the M2 series is in full swing. The Mac Studio now comes with an M2 Max or M2 Ultra for the same price.

New chips mean, of course, boosted performance. The M2 Max has a 12-core CPU, which is split between eight performance cores and four efficiency cores. Its predecessor, the M1 Max, had two fewer efficiency cores (10 total CPU cores). Apple claims an improvement of up to 25 percent over the M1 Max.

We always start off our reviews with a look at general-purpose performance with the Geekbench benchmark. In our multi-core testing, the M2 Max was 18 percent faster than the M1 Max it replaces–not the 25 percent Apple claims, but Apple does hedge it by saying “up to 25 percent.” The M2 Max’s single-core result provides a 19 percent improvement.

A data point that sticks out is the multi-core result of the M2 Pro–this chip has the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Max. The M2 Pro that I tested in the 16-inch MacBook Pro is about 5 percent slower than the M2 Max Mac Studio, a difference you’ll barely notice, so it basically has the same CPU performance. The M2 Pro is a $300 option on the $1,299 Mac mini; if your work involves a lot of CPU processing and less graphics processing (which we’ll get to in a bit), the Mac mini can be a more affordable option over the Mac Studio.

We also ran Cinebench R23 to gauge CPU performance, and these are the results that matter most to buyers of the Mac Studio since Cinebench mainly uses 3D rendering and is a better performance gauge for creative professionals. We saw a 20 percent improvement of the M2 Max over the M1 Max–still not 25 percent, but closer.

We also again saw that the M2 Max Mac Studio and the M2 Pro Mac mini had the same performance. It’s important to reiterate here that even though Cinebench is a CPU-focused 3D rendering test and doesn’t rely on the chip’s GPU.

HandBrake is a video converter app that stresses the CPU or specialized video hardware, depending on how it is configured. In this test, we transcoded the 4K version of the royalty-free Tears of Steel video to H.265 using the CPU and the video encoders (the “VideoToolbox” framework version).

In the CPU encode test, the M2 Max blew by the M1 Max, improving performance by 32 percent. Our results also showed that the M2 Max has a slight edge over the M2 Pro, which is likely due to the amount of memory available. The Mac mini in our tests had 16GB of RAM, while the Mac Studio has 64GB.

The M2 Max’s boost over the M1 Max was a more modest 18 percent when using the video encoders. It also posted the same speed as the M2 Pro Mac mini.

With the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, we saw a small 5 percent improvement in the M2 Max Mac Studio’s SSD over the M1 Max. That’s a noticeable difference when dealing with large files. The Read results are basically similar. The M2 Max Mac Studio’s SSD also posted moderate boosts over the M2 Pro Mac mini’s SSD.

The GPU gets a boost, too

The M2 Max in this review has a 38-core GPU, which is an upgrade from the 30-core GPU in the $1,999 Mac Studio. The 32-core GPU in the M1 Max Mac Studio that we reviewed last year was also an upgrade option. So in our GPU comparisons, we’re looking at the new 38-core GPU versus the old 32-core GPU.

The Geekbench 6 Compute benchmark tests the GPU performance using OpenCL or Metal APIs. Metal is developed by Apple and it’s the API the company wants developers to use to get the best performance. OpenCL is an open-standard API that’s more widely used because of its cross-compatibility.

With both the Metal and OpenCL benchmarks, the M2 Max’s 38-core GPU provides speed that is over 21 percent faster than the M1 Max’s 30-core GPU. The M1 Ultra is included in this testing for your reference–with either 48 or 64 GPU cores, it zooms past the M2 Max. The M2 Ultra is available with 60 or 76 GPU cores.

I made it a point to call out the M2 Max’s similar CPU performance against the M2 Pro, but here’s where the M2 Max Mac Studio separates itself from the M2 Pro Mac mini, which comes with either 16 or 19 GPU cores. If your work involves GPU processing, get a Mac Studio with as many GPU cores as you can afford.

Apple says it wants to bring more games to the Mac, and at WWDC, the company revealed some efforts to get more developers on board. It’s going to take some time before we can get some modern games to benchmark with, so in the meantime, we’re sticking to what we have: Tomb Raider and Civilization 6. The M2 Max Mac Studio posted some impressive framerates.

Resident Evil Village is a more recent game that features MetalFX Upscaling, which can boost graphics performance in software that uses Apple’s MetalFX API. It’s the type of graphics upscaling that AMD and Nvidia have done on the Windows PC.

To see it in action on the Mac Studio, I activated a Metal Performance HUD, which displays the frame rate. (You can do this in the Terminal by entering at the prompt defaults write -g MetalForceHudEnabled -bool yes and then hit Return. To turn it off, enter the same code in Terminal but replace yes with no.) I set the game display settings with the Prioritize Graphics preset and the screen resolution at 2560×1440. Then I ran the game twice.

The first time, I did not use MetalFX Upscaling and I had frame rates between 130 and 160 fps when moving around the game. The second time, I activated MetalFX Upscaling to the Quality setting, and the frame rates jumped up between 160 to 195 fps. What a sweet boost! Hopefully, Apple will do more to promote this technology to game developers so we can see the Mac gaming library grow and, more importantly, become more current.

Apple chips have video encoding engines, and we use iMovie to test them out. In our export tests, we didn’t see a difference between the M2 Max and the M1 Max, which isn’t that surprising since the engines between the two are very similar. The iMovie Stabilze test that we do puts pressure on the chip’s Neural Engine, and we see a 20 percent difference between the two chips.

The M2 Max has twice as many ProRes engines as the M2 Pro, which explains why it is so much faster in our tests.

A big difference with display support

The main thing that’s new about the 2023 Mac Studio is the system on a chip–almost everything else is the same as last year. Apple didn’t introduce any design modifications or change the number of ports, though there are some upgrades. The headphone jack now has advanced support for high-impedance headphones and you get Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 as with Apple’s other recent Macs.

However, there is a big change in the display support. The 2023 Mac Studio has an “enhanced HDMI” port instead of HDMI 2.0, and this enhanced HDMI implementation supports features in the HDMI 2.1 specification. This upgrade fixes the major flaw in the original Mac Studio: its HDMI port has a maximum resolution of 4K at 60Hz. Now, you can connect a display with 8K at 60Hz or 4K at 240Hz. And there’s support for variable refresh rate, HDR, and multichannel audio.

That’s not all! If you also use Thunderbolt, the M2 Max Mac Pro still supports four displays with 6K at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one display with 4K at 60Hz over HDMI. The new feature is that you can now connect two displays with 6K at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one display with 8K at 60Hz or 4K at up to 240Hz over HDMI. Did you get all that? Cool!

If you need to go hog wild with the displays, you’ll need to upgrade to the M2 Ultra Mac Studio. Since this is a review of the M2 Max Mac Studio, I’m not going to go over all the M2 Ultra display configurations. You can check out Apple’s website, but here’s a little teaser: you can connect up to eight 4K at 60Hz displays. Yowza!

You can read my review from, last year if you want a deep dive into the Mac Studio’s design, find out the details about the external ports, or get the nitty-gritty on Apple’s mouse, trackpad, and keyboard offerings. Here’s a quick bullet-point summary if you want the gist.

• The Mac Studio measures 7.7 inches square and is 3.7 inches tall. The M2 Max model is 5.7 pounds, while the M2 Ultra model is two pounds heavier because of the thermal system it needs.
• The back of the Mac Studio has four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10Gb ethernet port, two USB-A ports, enhanced HDMI, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack
• The front of the Mac Studio has either two USB-C ports (M2 Max model) or two Thunderbolt 4 ports (M2 Ultra model), and an SDXC Card slot
• The Mac Studio does not include a mouse, trackpad, or keyboard. You can provide your own but know that the Mac Studio works with the Magic Keyboard Touch ID and Numeric Keypad ($199). Touch ID is handy to have.

Mac Studio or M2 Pro Mac mini?

As shown by our testing, the M2 Max Mac Studio and the M2 Pro Mac mini have similar CPU performance. That makes sense since both CPUs have 12 cores, split into 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. With that being the case, if you know that the apps you work in the most are CPU dependent, the M2 Pro Mac mini could be a money-saving consideration–if you don’t customize it beyond the CPU upgrade.

To get the 12-core M2 Pro Mac mini, customers take the $1,299 standard configuration 10-core M2 Pro Mac mini and upgrade the CPU. That brings the price up to $1,599 on a model with 16GB of memory. If you then decide to also upgrade to 32GB of memory, the price is $1,999–the same price as a base model M2 Max Mac Studio with a 12-core CPU, 30-core GPU, 32GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD. For the same price, the Mac Studio provides more GPU performance, front ports, and expanded display support.

If you use a lot of pro-level software that is GPU dependent, then the Mac Studio is the definite choice with its better graphics performance. The M2 Pro Mac mini’s GPU tops off at 19 cores, while the M2 Max Mac Studio GPU starts at 30 cores and has an upgrade to 38 cores (which we tested here). If you need more, you can upgrade to an M2 Ultra with 60 or 76 GPU cores.

The M2 Pro Mac mini has other limitations that could sway you towards a Mac Studio. Its maximum memory configuration is 32GB, while the M2 Max Mac Studio can have up to 64GB, or 96GB if you upgrade to the 38-core GPU. Also, the M2 Pro Mac mini supports up to three 4K 60Hz displays, while the M2 Max Mac Studio can handle up to five, and the M2 Ultra Mac Studio can support up to eight.

Still a worthy investment

Thanks to the internet, everyone is a media creator nowadays, whether you’re tending to social media, making your own movies, producing music, shooting and editing photos, creating works of art, or developing software. The Mac Studio is the ideal Mac–it’s powerful, priced appropriately, has lots of ports for connecting devices, and it won’t take up a lot of desk space.

If you bought a Mac Studio last year, there’s little reason to upgrade, unless processing power is a never-ending search for you, or you need to connect more displays than what the 2022 Mac Studio can handle. If you can hold off until later 2024 or early 2025, we could get the M3 Max/Pro by then, and the M3’s new 3nm process promises to take Apple silicon beyond the 25 percent incremental improvement we usually get.

If you’ve been holding off on the Mac Studio all this time, what are you waiting for? The Mac Pro? Well, it’s here, have fun with it! Seriously, if the Mac Studio fits the bill when it first came out but you waited, you could keep waiting for the M3 I just mentioned. Or you can get one now and get some work done faster than ever before.

The Mac Studio starts at $1,999 with an M2 Max–you get a great number of features and power, especially if you compare it to the M2 Pro Mac mini. The Mac Studio with Apple’s most powerful chip, the M2 Ultra, starts at $3,999.

Mac

The Mac Studio had a splashy debut last year, a new desktop design with speed that filled the needs of the most demanding professionals. But it also raised a few questions at the time: Does it replace the Mac Pro? And if it doesn’t, will Apple continue the Mac Studio line once the Apple silicon Mac Pro arrives? Would the Mac Studio end up just like iMac Pro, a model that got little attention after its release and eventually was discontinued?

We now have answers that give the Mac lineup some much-needed clarity. Apple showed at WWDC that it is dedicated to upgrading and maintaining the high-end desktop Mac as a platform with the release of the M2 Max/Ultra Mac Studio and the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. The Mac Studio is Apple’s primary offering for customers looking for a high-performance Mac, while the Mac Pro addresses a niche that needs hardware expansion.

However, the M2 Pro Mac mini that Apple released back in January provides an interesting comparison with the M2 Max Mac Studio. Whether that Mac mini or the M2 Max Mac Studio is the Mac for you depends on the kind of work you do.

This review looks at the Mac Studio with an M2 Max chip, a 38-core GPU, 64GB of memory, and a 2TB SSD. It has several upgrades over the entry-level $1,999/£2,099 M2 Max Mac Studio, which puts the price of our review unit at $3,199/£3,299. Apple also sells a $3,999/£4,199 Mac Studio with an M2 Ultra, 64GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD.

Update 6/13: The M2 Max Mac Studio is now shipping from Apple.com and other retailers.

From M1 Max to the M2 Max

The Mac Studio debuted in March of last year with M1 Max and M1 Ultra models. The M1 chip series has had its time (there are only two Macs left with the entry-level M1 chip), and the M2 series is in full swing. The Mac Studio now comes with an M2 Max or M2 Ultra for the same price.

New chips mean, of course, boosted performance. The M2 Max has a 12-core CPU, which is split between eight performance cores and four efficiency cores. Its predecessor, the M1 Max, had two fewer efficiency cores (10 total CPU cores). Apple claims an improvement of up to 25 percent over the M1 Max.

We always start off our reviews with a look at general-purpose performance with the Geekbench benchmark. In our multi-core testing, the M2 Max was 18 percent faster than the M1 Max it replaces–not the 25 percent Apple claims, but Apple does hedge it by saying “up to 25 percent.” The M2 Max’s single-core result provides a 19 percent improvement.

A data point that sticks out is the multi-core result of the M2 Pro–this chip has the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Max. The M2 Pro that I tested in the 16-inch MacBook Pro is about 5 percent slower than the M2 Max Mac Studio, a difference you’ll barely notice, so it basically has the same CPU performance. The M2 Pro is a $300 option on the $1,299 Mac mini; if your work involves a lot of CPU processing and less graphics processing (which we’ll get to in a bit), the Mac mini can be a more affordable option over the Mac Studio.

We also ran Cinebench R23 to gauge CPU performance, and these are the results that matter most to buyers of the Mac Studio since Cinebench mainly uses 3D rendering and is a better performance gauge for creative professionals. We saw a 20 percent improvement of the M2 Max over the M1 Max–still not 25 percent, but closer.

We also again saw that the M2 Max Mac Studio and the M2 Pro Mac mini had the same performance. It’s important to reiterate here that even though Cinebench is a CPU-focused 3D rendering test and doesn’t rely on the chip’s GPU.

HandBrake is a video converter app that stresses the CPU or specialized video hardware, depending on how it is configured. In this test, we transcoded the 4K version of the royalty-free Tears of Steel video to H.265 using the CPU and the video encoders (the “VideoToolbox” framework version).

In the CPU encode test, the M2 Max blew by the M1 Max, improving performance by 32 percent. Our results also showed that the M2 Max has a slight edge over the M2 Pro, which is likely due to the amount of memory available. The Mac mini in our tests had 16GB of RAM, while the Mac Studio has 64GB.

The M2 Max’s boost over the M1 Max was a more modest 18 percent when using the video encoders. It also posted the same speed as the M2 Pro Mac mini.

With the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, we saw a small 5 percent improvement in the M2 Max Mac Studio’s SSD over the M1 Max. That’s a noticeable difference when dealing with large files. The Read results are basically similar. The M2 Max Mac Studio’s SSD also posted moderate boosts over the M2 Pro Mac mini’s SSD.

The GPU gets a boost, too

The M2 Max in this review has a 38-core GPU, which is an upgrade from the 30-core GPU in the $1,999 Mac Studio. The 32-core GPU in the M1 Max Mac Studio that we reviewed last year was also an upgrade option. So in our GPU comparisons, we’re looking at the new 38-core GPU versus the old 32-core GPU.

The Geekbench 6 Compute benchmark tests the GPU performance using OpenCL or Metal APIs. Metal is developed by Apple and it’s the API the company wants developers to use to get the best performance. OpenCL is an open-standard API that’s more widely used because of its cross-compatibility.

With both the Metal and OpenCL benchmarks, the M2 Max’s 38-core GPU provides speed that is over 21 percent faster than the M1 Max’s 30-core GPU. The M1 Ultra is included in this testing for your reference–with either 48 or 64 GPU cores, it zooms past the M2 Max. The M2 Ultra is available with 60 or 76 GPU cores.

I made it a point to call out the M2 Max’s similar CPU performance against the M2 Pro, but here’s where the M2 Max Mac Studio separates itself from the M2 Pro Mac mini, which comes with either 16 or 19 GPU cores. If your work involves GPU processing, get a Mac Studio with as many GPU cores as you can afford.

Apple says it wants to bring more games to the Mac, and at WWDC, the company revealed some efforts to get more developers on board. It’s going to take some time before we can get some modern games to benchmark with, so in the meantime, we’re sticking to what we have: Tomb Raider and Civilization 6. The M2 Max Mac Studio posted some impressive framerates.

Resident Evil Village is a more recent game that features MetalFX Upscaling, which can boost graphics performance in software that uses Apple’s MetalFX API. It’s the type of graphics upscaling that AMD and Nvidia have done on the Windows PC.

To see it in action on the Mac Studio, I activated a Metal Performance HUD, which displays the frame rate. (You can do this in the Terminal by entering at the prompt defaults write -g MetalForceHudEnabled -bool yes and then hit Return. To turn it off, enter the same code in Terminal but replace yes with no.) I set the game display settings with the Prioritize Graphics preset and the screen resolution at 2560×1440. Then I ran the game twice.

The first time, I did not use MetalFX Upscaling and I had frame rates between 130 and 160 fps when moving around the game. The second time, I activated MetalFX Upscaling to the Quality setting, and the frame rates jumped up between 160 to 195 fps. What a sweet boost! Hopefully, Apple will do more to promote this technology to game developers so we can see the Mac gaming library grow and, more importantly, become more current.

Apple chips have video encoding engines, and we use iMovie to test them out. In our export tests, we didn’t see a difference between the M2 Max and the M1 Max, which isn’t that surprising since the engines between the two are very similar. The iMovie Stabilze test that we do puts pressure on the chip’s Neural Engine, and we see a 20 percent difference between the two chips.

The M2 Max has twice as many ProRes engines as the M2 Pro, which explains why it is so much faster in our tests.

A big difference with display support

The main thing that’s new about the 2023 Mac Studio is the system on a chip–almost everything else is the same as last year. Apple didn’t introduce any design modifications or change the number of ports, though there are some upgrades. The headphone jack now has advanced support for high-impedance headphones and you get Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 as with Apple’s other recent Macs.

However, there is a big change in the display support. The 2023 Mac Studio has an “enhanced HDMI” port instead of HDMI 2.0, and this enhanced HDMI implementation supports features in the HDMI 2.1 specification. This upgrade fixes the major flaw in the original Mac Studio: its HDMI port has a maximum resolution of 4K at 60Hz. Now, you can connect a display with 8K at 60Hz or 4K at 240Hz. And there’s support for variable refresh rate, HDR, and multichannel audio.

That’s not all! If you also use Thunderbolt, the M2 Max Mac Pro still supports four displays with 6K at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one display with 4K at 60Hz over HDMI. The new feature is that you can now connect two displays with 6K at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one display with 8K at 60Hz or 4K at up to 240Hz over HDMI. Did you get all that? Cool!

If you need to go hog wild with the displays, you’ll need to upgrade to the M2 Ultra Mac Studio. Since this is a review of the M2 Max Mac Studio, I’m not going to go over all the M2 Ultra display configurations. You can check out Apple’s website, but here’s a little teaser: you can connect up to eight 4K at 60Hz displays. Yowza!

You can read my review from, last year if you want a deep dive into the Mac Studio’s design, find out the details about the external ports, or get the nitty-gritty on Apple’s mouse, trackpad, and keyboard offerings. Here’s a quick bullet-point summary if you want the gist.

• The Mac Studio measures 7.7 inches square and is 3.7 inches tall. The M2 Max model is 5.7 pounds, while the M2 Ultra model is two pounds heavier because of the thermal system it needs.
• The back of the Mac Studio has four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10Gb ethernet port, two USB-A ports, enhanced HDMI, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack
• The front of the Mac Studio has either two USB-C ports (M2 Max model) or two Thunderbolt 4 ports (M2 Ultra model), and an SDXC Card slot
• The Mac Studio does not include a mouse, trackpad, or keyboard. You can provide your own but know that the Mac Studio works with the Magic Keyboard Touch ID and Numeric Keypad ($199). Touch ID is handy to have.

Mac Studio or M2 Pro Mac mini?

As shown by our testing, the M2 Max Mac Studio and the M2 Pro Mac mini have similar CPU performance. That makes sense since both CPUs have 12 cores, split into 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. With that being the case, if you know that the apps you work in the most are CPU dependent, the M2 Pro Mac mini could be a money-saving consideration–if you don’t customize it beyond the CPU upgrade.

To get the 12-core M2 Pro Mac mini, customers take the $1,299 standard configuration 10-core M2 Pro Mac mini and upgrade the CPU. That brings the price up to $1,599 on a model with 16GB of memory. If you then decide to also upgrade to 32GB of memory, the price is $1,999–the same price as a base model M2 Max Mac Studio with a 12-core CPU, 30-core GPU, 32GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD. For the same price, the Mac Studio provides more GPU performance, front ports, and expanded display support.

If you use a lot of pro-level software that is GPU dependent, then the Mac Studio is the definite choice with its better graphics performance. The M2 Pro Mac mini’s GPU tops off at 19 cores, while the M2 Max Mac Studio GPU starts at 30 cores and has an upgrade to 38 cores (which we tested here). If you need more, you can upgrade to an M2 Ultra with 60 or 76 GPU cores.

The M2 Pro Mac mini has other limitations that could sway you towards a Mac Studio. Its maximum memory configuration is 32GB, while the M2 Max Mac Studio can have up to 64GB, or 96GB if you upgrade to the 38-core GPU. Also, the M2 Pro Mac mini supports up to three 4K 60Hz displays, while the M2 Max Mac Studio can handle up to five, and the M2 Ultra Mac Studio can support up to eight.

Still a worthy investment

Thanks to the internet, everyone is a media creator nowadays, whether you’re tending to social media, making your own movies, producing music, shooting and editing photos, creating works of art, or developing software. The Mac Studio is the ideal Mac–it’s powerful, priced appropriately, has lots of ports for connecting devices, and it won’t take up a lot of desk space.

If you bought a Mac Studio last year, there’s little reason to upgrade, unless processing power is a never-ending search for you, or you need to connect more displays than what the 2022 Mac Studio can handle. If you can hold off until later 2024 or early 2025, we could get the M3 Max/Pro by then, and the M3’s new 3nm process promises to take Apple silicon beyond the 25 percent incremental improvement we usually get.

If you’ve been holding off on the Mac Studio all this time, what are you waiting for? The Mac Pro? Well, it’s here, have fun with it! Seriously, if the Mac Studio fits the bill when it first came out but you waited, you could keep waiting for the M3 I just mentioned. Or you can get one now and get some work done faster than ever before.

The Mac Studio starts at $1,999 with an M2 Max–you get a great number of features and power, especially if you compare it to the M2 Pro Mac mini. The Mac Studio with Apple’s most powerful chip, the M2 Ultra, starts at $3,999.

Mac

The Mac Studio had a splashy debut last year, a new desktop design with speed that filled the needs of the most demanding professionals. But it also raised a few questions at the time: Does it replace the Mac Pro? And if it doesn’t, will Apple continue the Mac Studio line once the Apple silicon Mac Pro arrives? Would the Mac Studio end up just like iMac Pro, a model that got little attention after its release and eventually was discontinued?

We now have answers that give the Mac lineup some much-needed clarity. Apple showed at WWDC that it is dedicated to upgrading and maintaining the high-end desktop Mac as a platform with the release of the M2 Max/Ultra Mac Studio and the M2 Ultra Mac Pro. The Mac Studio is Apple’s primary offering for customers looking for a high-performance Mac, while the Mac Pro addresses a niche that needs hardware expansion.

However, the M2 Pro Mac mini that Apple released back in January provides an interesting comparison with the M2 Max Mac Studio. Whether that Mac mini or the M2 Max Mac Studio is the Mac for you depends on the kind of work you do.

This review looks at the Mac Studio with an M2 Max chip, a 38-core GPU, 64GB of memory, and a 2TB SSD. It has several upgrades over the entry-level $1,999 M2 Max Mac Studio, which puts the price of our review unit at $3,199. Apple also sells a $3,999 Mac Studio with an M2 Ultra, 64GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD.

From M1 Max to the M2 Max

The Mac Studio debuted in March of last year with M1 Max and M1 Ultra models. The M1 chip series has had its time (there are only two Macs left with the entry-level M1 chip), and the M2 series is in full swing. The Mac Studio now comes with an M2 Max or M2 Ultra for the same price.

New chips mean, of course, boosted performance. The M2 Max has a 12-core CPU, which is split between eight performance cores and four efficiency cores. Its predecessor, the M1 Max, had two fewer efficiency cores (10 total CPU cores). Apple claims an improvement of up to 25 percent over the M1 Max.

We always start off our reviews with a look at general-purpose performance with the Geekbench benchmark. In our multi-core testing, the M2 Max was 18 percent faster than the M1 Max it replaces–not the 25 percent Apple claims, but Apple does hedge it by saying “up to 25 percent.” The M2 Max’s single-core result provides a 19 percent improvement.

A data point that sticks out is the multi-core result of the M2 Pro–this chip has the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Max. The M2 Pro that I tested in the 16-inch MacBook Pro is about 5 percent slower than the M2 Max Mac Studio, a difference you’ll barely notice, so it basically has the same CPU performance. The M2 Pro is a $300 option on the $1,299 Mac mini; if your work involves a lot of CPU processing and less graphics processing (which we’ll get to in a bit), the Mac mini can be a more affordable option over the Mac Studio.

We also ran Cinebench R23 to gauge CPU performance, and these are the results that matter most to buyers of the Mac Studio since Cinebench mainly uses 3D rendering and is a better performance gauge for creative professionals. We saw a 20 percent improvement of the M2 Max over the M1 Max–still not 25 percent, but closer.

We also again saw that the M2 Max Mac Studio and the M2 Pro Mac mini had the same performance. It’s important to reiterate here that even though Cinebench is a CPU-focused 3D rendering test and doesn’t rely on the chip’s GPU.

HandBrake is a video converter app that stresses the CPU or specialized video hardware, depending on how it is configured. In this test, we transcoded the 4K version of the royalty-free Tears of Steel video to H.265 using the CPU and the video encoders (the “VideoToolbox” framework version).

In the CPU encode test, the M2 Max blew by the M1 Max, improving performance by 32 percent. Our results also showed that the M2 Max has a slight edge over the M2 Pro, which is likely due to the amount of memory available. The Mac mini in our tests had 16GB of RAM, while the Mac Studio has 64GB.

The M2 Max’s boost over the M1 Max was a more modest 18 percent when using the video encoders. It also posted the same speed as the M2 Pro Mac mini.

With the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, we saw a small 5 percent improvement in the M2 Max Mac Studio’s SSD over the M1 Max. That’s a noticeable difference when dealing with large files. The Read results are basically similar. The M2 Max Mac Studio’s SSD also posted moderate boosts over the M2 Pro Mac mini’s SSD.

The GPU gets a boost, too

The M2 Max in this review has a 38-core GPU, which is an upgrade from the 30-core GPU in the $1,999 Mac Studio. The 32-core GPU in the M1 Max Mac Studio that we reviewed last year was also an upgrade option. So in our GPU comparisons, we’re looking at the new 38-core GPU versus the old 32-core GPU.

The Geekbench 6 Compute benchmark tests the GPU performance using OpenCL or Metal APIs. Metal is developed by Apple and it’s the API the company wants developers to use to get the best performance. OpenCL is an open-standard API that’s more widely used because of its cross-compatibility.

With both the Metal and OpenCL benchmarks, the M2 Max’s 38-core GPU provides speed that is over 21 percent faster than the M1 Max’s 30-core GPU. The M1 Ultra is included in this testing for your reference–with either 48 or 64 GPU cores, it zooms past the M2 Max. The M2 Ultra is available with 60 or 76 GPU cores.

I made it a point to call out the M2 Max’s similar CPU performance against the M2 Pro, but here’s where the M2 Max Mac Studio separates itself from the M2 Pro Mac mini, which comes with either 16 or 19 GPU cores. If your work involves GPU processing, get a Mac Studio with as many GPU cores as you can afford.

Apple says it wants to bring more games to the Mac, and at WWDC, the company revealed some efforts to get more developers on board. It’s going to take some time before we can get some modern games to benchmark with, so in the meantime, we’re sticking to what we have: Tomb Raider and Civilization 6. The M2 Max Mac Studio posted some impressive framerates.

Resident Evil Village is a more recent game that features MetalFX Upscaling, which can boost graphics performance in software that uses Apple’s MetalFX API. It’s the type of graphics upscaling that AMD and Nvidia have done on the Windows PC.

To see it in action on the Mac Studio, I activated a Metal Performance HUD, which displays the frame rate. (You can do this in the Terminal by entering at the prompt defaults write -g MetalForceHudEnabled -bool yes and then hit Return. To turn it off, enter the same code in Terminal but replace yes with no.) I set the game display settings with the Prioritize Graphics preset and the screen resolution at 2560×1440. Then I ran the game twice.

The first time, I did not use MetalFX Upscaling and I had frame rates between 130 and 160 fps when moving around the game. The second time, I activated MetalFX Upscaling to the Quality setting, and the frame rates jumped up between 160 to 195 fps. What a sweet boost! Hopefully, Apple will do more to promote this technology to game developers so we can see the Mac gaming library grow and, more importantly, become more current.

Apple chips have video encoding engines, and we use iMovie to test them out. In our export tests, we didn’t see a difference between the M2 Max and the M1 Max, which isn’t that surprising since the engines between the two are very similar. The iMovie Stabilze test that we do puts pressure on the chip’s Neural Engine, and we see a 20 percent difference between the two chips.

The M2 Max has twice as many ProRes engines as the M2 Pro, which explains why it is so much faster in our tests.

A big difference with display support

The main thing that’s new about the 2023 Mac Studio is the system on a chip–almost everything else is the same as last year. Apple didn’t introduce any design modifications or change the number of ports, though there are some upgrades. The headphone jack now has advanced support for high-impedance headphones and you get Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 as with Apple’s other recent Macs.

However, there is a big change in the display support. The 2023 Mac Studio has an “enhanced HDMI” port instead of HDMI 2.0, and this enhanced HDMI implementation supports features in the HDMI 2.1 specification. This upgrade fixes the major flaw in the original Mac Studio: its HDMI port has a maximum resolution of 4K at 60Hz. Now, you can connect a display with 8K at 60Hz or 4K at 240Hz. And there’s support for variable refresh rate, HDR, and multichannel audio.

That’s not all! If you also use Thunderbolt, the M2 Max Mac Pro still supports four displays with 6K at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one display with 4K at 60Hz over HDMI. The new feature is that you can now connect two displays with 6K at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one display with 8K at 60Hz or 4K at up to 240Hz over HDMI. Did you get all that? Cool!

If you need to go hog wild with the displays, you’ll need to upgrade to the M2 Ultra Mac Studio. Since this is a review of the M2 Max Mac Studio, I’m not going to go over all the M2 Ultra display configurations. You can check out Apple’s website, but here’s a little teaser: you can connect up to eight 4K at 60Hz displays. Yowza!

You can read my review from, last year if you want a deep dive into the Mac Studio’s design, find out the details about the external ports, or get the nitty-gritty on Apple’s mouse, trackpad, and keyboard offerings. Here’s a quick bullet-point summary if you want the gist.

• The Mac Studio measures 7.7 inches square and is 3.7 inches tall. The M2 Max model is 5.7 pounds, while the M2 Ultra model is two pounds heavier because of the thermal system it needs.
• The back of the Mac Studio has four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10Gb ethernet port, two USB-A ports, enhanced HDMI, and a 3.5 mm headphone jack
• The front of the Mac Studio has either two USB-C ports (M2 Max model) or two Thunderbolt 4 ports (M2 Ultra model), and an SDXC Card slot
• The Mac Studio does not include a mouse, trackpad, or keyboard. You can provide your own but know that the Mac Studio works with the Magic Keyboard Touch ID and Numeric Keypad ($199). Touch ID is handy to have.

Mac Studio or M2 Pro Mac mini?

As shown by our testing, the M2 Max Mac Studio and the M2 Pro Mac mini have similar CPU performance. That makes sense since both CPUs have 12 cores, split into 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. With that being the case, if you know that the apps you work in the most are CPU dependent, the M2 Pro Mac mini could be a money-saving consideration–if you don’t customize it beyond the CPU upgrade.

To get the 12-core M2 Pro Mac Studio, customers take the $1,299 standard configuration 10-core M2 Pro Mac mini and upgrade the CPU. That brings the price up to $1,599 on a model with 16GB of memory. If you then decide to also upgrade to 32GB of memory, the price is $1,999–the same price as a base model M2 Max Mac Studio with a 12-core CPU, 30-core GPU, 32GB or memory, and a 512GB SSD. For the same price, you can get more GPU performance, front ports, and expanded display support.

If you use a lot of pro-level software that is GPU dependent, then the Mac Studio is the definite choice with its better graphics performance. The M2 Pro Mac mini’s GPU tops off at 19 cores, while the M2 Max Mac Studio GPU starts at 30 cores and has an upgrade to 38 cores (which we tested here). If you need more, you can upgrade to an M2 Ultra with 60 or 76 GPU cores.

The M2 Pro Mac mini has other limitations that could sway you towards a Mac Studio. Its maximum memory configuration is 32GB, while the M2 Max Mac Studio can have up to 64GB, or 96GB if you upgrade to the 38-core GPU. Also, the M2 Pro Mac mini supports up to three 4K 60Hz displays, while the M2 Max Mac Studio can handle up to five, and the M2 Ultra Mac Studio can support up to eight.

Still a worthy investment

Thanks to the internet, everyone is a media creator nowadays, whether you’re tending to social media, making your own movies, producing music, shooting and editing photos, creating works of art, or developing software. The Mac Studio is the ideal Mac–it’s powerful, priced appropriately, has lots of ports for connecting devices, and it won’t take up a lot of desk space.

If you bought a Mac Studio last year, there’s little reason to upgrade, unless processing power is a never-ending search for you, or you need to connect more displays than what the 2022 Mac Studio can handle. If you can hold off until later 2024 or early 2025, we could get the M3 Max/Pro by then, and the M3’s new 3nm process promises to take Apple silicon beyond the 25 percent incremental improvement we usually get.

If you’ve been holding off on the Mac Studio all this time, what are you waiting for? The Mac Pro? Well, it’s here, have fun with it! Seriously, if the Mac Studio fits the bill when it first came out but you waited, you could keep waiting for the M3 I just mentioned. Or you can get one now and get some work done faster than ever before.

The Mac Studio starts at $1,999 with an M2 Max–you get a great number of features and power, especially if you compare it to the M2 Pro Mac mini. The Mac Studio with Apple’s most powerful chip, the M2 Ultra, starts at $3,999.

Mac

I get it. You’re excited and/or angry about the $3,500 headset Apple might sell you next year if you’re in the right country. It’s worth getting excited about. But in terms of real-world, right-now impact, the surprise winner of the WWDC 2023 keynote is… wait for it… the Mac!

I would never have imagined it beforehand, but it’s true: Apple’s Mac announcements on Monday were huge news, despite being overshadowed by shiny future products and platforms that won’t let anyone do anything until 2024.

MacBook Air +2

While I’m acting all contrarian-like, let me double down. The most important Mac announcement on Monday wasn’t the upgraded Mac Studio or the Mac Pro, the final piece of the Apple silicon puzzle. It was the humble MacBook Air.

As Apple enjoys pointing out, the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air is a hit. Apple says it’s the best-selling laptop around, and even if you accept that Apple’s competitors are selling 30 different models while Apple sells only a handful, it’s still a real accomplishment. The MacBook Air’s combination of power and affordability is pretty much unmatched.

This leads us to Apple’s biggest laptop weakness, at least until this week: If you wanted a larger screen than that 13-inch display, you’d have to pay $800 more for the 14-inch MacBook Pro. And if you wanted an appreciably larger display, you’d be paying $1,300 more for the 16-inch MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro is an incredibly powerful computer with a best-in-the-world display, but even its dedicated fans would probably admit that buying one is overkill if all you really want is a little bit bigger display.

Now here comes the new 15-inch MacBook Air, bringing more pixels to the party for a mere $200 premium over the 13-inch model. (And let’s not forget the 16-inch MacBook Pro also weighs 1.4 pounds more than the 15-inch Air, so not only will your credit card feel better, but so will your back.) I guess you could argue that by offering the 15-inch Air, Apple is going to lose some sales from people so desperate for more screen real estate that they were willing to buy a MacBook Pro, but I think it’s far more likely that Apple was losing sales to 15-inch PC laptops, or selling 13-inch MacBook Airs to people who were unhappy about having to compromise on the size of the screen.

If you read closely between the lines of Apple’s announcement on Monday, you can see that Apple is positively salivating about the prospect of entering a large 15-inch laptop market currently occupied by a lot of Windows PCs. Apple is suddenly relevant in that category, and it would like to kindly point out that macOS works really well with that iPhone in your pocket. I’d imagine that Apple will soon be trumpeting how many PC switchers it captured via the 15-inch MacBook Air.

But that’s not all the MacBook Air goodness! In what might be the surprise move of the year, Apple cut the price of the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air from $1,199 to $1,099. Last year, I think we were all a bit disappointed that Apple couldn’t manage to release the M2 Air at the same price as the previous M1 model. This year, things look a lot better. (And the M2 13-inch model is now $999 in education, a key price point.)

Let’s reflect on this move for a moment. In an era of inflation, Apple took its most popular Mac and cut its price by $100. I sure didn’t have that on my bingo card.

A new era of pro Macs

Rather than dropping a load of confetti and celebrating the end of the Intel Mac era with the announcement of the M2 Mac Pro, I’m going to be a lil’ stinker again: I’m more excited by the announcement of the M2 Mac Studio.

First off, after the iMac Pro came and went as a single model, I admit to being skittish about the potential future of the Mac Studio. It hadn’t yet received an M2 update, so was it going to, ever? And would Apple perceive it as standing in the way of the Mac Pro, leading the company to hold it back in order to keep the Mac Pro firmly established as the top of the Mac product line?

None of that happened. The new Mac Studio doesn’t just come in an M2 Max base model that, for my money, might be the best balance of power and price in the entire Mac product line. It also comes in an M2 Ultra model–the very same chip that powers the new Mac Pro.

To be clear, the new Mac Pro shares the title of Fastest Mac Around with the M2 Ultra Mac Studio. They are joint champions. There is nothing about the Mac Studio that’s compromised to allow the Mac Pro to eke out a victory. Both Macs have enough cooling to let them run at full speed, unthrottled, all of the time. The king isn’t dead, but the crown has to be shared from now on.

This is not to say that the Mac Pro won’t have its adherents. If you’re someone who needs more ports, more internal storage, PCI cards, and the like–and there are a lot of people in pro audio and video who do–then the Mac Pro will be a better (albeit more expensive) choice. But the Mac Pro audience keeps getting increasingly esoteric, and all the other factors that affect computer performance–memory, CPU, and GPU–are identical in both systems.

So all hail the mighty Mac Studio, sharing the throne with that new Mac Pro. And three cheers for the new 15-inch MacBook Air and its now-more-affordable 13-inch sibling. Everyone else in the world is talking about the Apple Vision Pro and the promise of 2024, but all these new Macs will be here next week. I can’t wait.

Mac

AirPlay lets you stream audio and video over a local network connection between an iPhone, iPad, or Mac to an Apple TV, HomePod, and lots of third-party devices with built-in AirPlay or AirPlay 2 support. When you first connect to an AirPlay destination, you may be prompted to enter a security code.

This security code is not designed to protect you from hacking attempts. Rather, it serves as a buffer in situations where multiple users with their own devices are in close proximity (like in a dorm or apartment building) and could see and inadvertently select your AirPlay destination. (Someone might also try to play a prank by accessing your device and sending unwanted content to it.)

You can see that it’s not an anti-hacking method because when you select an AirPlay device that has passcode protection, the display for that device will show the code. You can then enter it at the prompt on whatever Apple equipment you’re using.

After entering the security code for the first time on a device, you shouldn’t be asked for it again unless the code changes.

Every streaming box, app, or smart TV that supports AirPlay has a different interface to set and change the code.

Here’s how to make the change on an Apple TV:

1. Go to Settings > AirPlay and HomeKit.
2. Choose Allow Access.
3. From the Allow Access options, select Require Password, whether it’s set to Off or On.
4. If the password is set you can change it; otherwise enter a new one. It’s best to pick a short one that’s all numbers for ease of entry.
5. Choose Done.

You can also find instructions on some popular devices made by other companies using these links:

• Amazon Fire TVs
• LG smart TVs
• Roku streaming boxes
• Samsung smart TVs
• Sony smart TVs
• Vizio smart TVs

This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader William.

Ask Mac 911

We’ve compiled a list of the questions we get asked most frequently, along with answers and links to columns: read our super FAQ to see if your question is covered. If not, we’re always looking for new problems to solve! Email yours to mac911@macworld.com, including screen captures as appropriate and whether you want your full name used. Not every question will be answered, we don’t reply to email, and we cannot provide direct troubleshooting advice.

Apple TV