I’ve now had a new Mac Studio Ultra for a week and I am super impressed.
I didn’t purchase it - my work bought it - so the cost was never an issue. The performance boost is even better than I imagined. It was taking over a minute for me to render high quality stable diffusion images on my M1 Max, this is now 25 seconds (with the same number of steps). For video rendering, it is also just more than double the speed of my M1 Max (14", 64GB).
I was skeptical that the difference would be like the M1 Pro and Max. I have a Pro that I use when at work and not at my desk and a Max at home for my home office. There is no difference that I can perceive for normal tasks between these machines, there is only a difference when rendering or compiling. With the Ultra, the difference is really noticeable compared to the Max. The desktop is more fluid, including animations and effects, and everything is instant.
The only machines we use at work that can outpace the Ultra are Mac Pros with dual graphics cards (these are much faster than the Ultra for PyTorch, for example) and these were more than double the cost of the Ultra.
Overall, an extremely impressive bit of hardware that I will enjoy as my daily driver!