Enlarge / Apple’s M2 Ultra Mac Studio. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The original Mac Studio, despite the absence of “Pro” in the name, was Apple’s most compelling professional desktop release in years. Though it was more like a supercharged Mac mini than a downsized Mac Pro, its M1 Max and M1 Ultra processors were fantastic performers, and they were much more energy-efficient than the one in the most recent Intel Mac Pro, too.

Apple is releasing the M2 version of the Mac Studio this week, and even though it’s being launched alongside a brand-new Mac Pro, it still might be Apple’s most compelling professional desktop. That’s partly because the new Studio is even faster than the old one—Apple sent us a fully enabled M2 Ultra model with 128GB of RAM—and partly because Apple Silicon Macs are designed in ways that make Mac Pro-style expandability and modularity impossible.

There is probably still a tiny audience for the redesigned Mac Pro, people who still use macOS and still use internal PCI Express expansion cards that aren’t GPUs; it should also be relatively easy to add gobs of cheap, fast internal storage, a kind of upgrade the Mac Studio is still frustratingly incapable of. There’s also a bit of awkward pricing overlap with the high-end M2 Pro Mac mini that didn’t exist last year.