Apple Mac Studio M2 Ultra (2023)

What owners say

Two reviewers described the previous generation of this chassis in incompatible terms. One heard a low white noise at idle and ended up putting the machine under his desk to escape it; the other threw every stress test he had at it and only noticed the fans with his ear a few centimetres from the vents. Both were writing first-hand. The sensible reading, which neither offers, is that this machine sits right at the threshold of audibility, and whether you hear it depends on your room and your ears. On the 2023 model the first reviewer says Apple redesigned the cooling, and that he could only hear it with the vents pointed at him. The version sold here carries a copper heatsink rather than aluminium, which is why it weighs almost a kilogram more than the cheaper model at exactly the same size. The thing to know before ordering is the storage. It has two removable modules and they are not drives: they are raw memory chips, because the controller lives inside the processor. Move one between two machines and it refuses to boot, flashing an amber distress pattern, because the contents are encrypted to that individual chip.

For whom

Processor-bound creative work in a machine that is effectively silent in a normal room, with six Thunderbolt ports rather than four.

Not for

Anyone planning to add memory or storage later: neither is possible, and those removable bays do not take ordinary drives.

Our own summary of 6 published sources, reviewed Sep 17, 2026. We have not tested this Mini PC ourselves; the sources are listed under About this data.