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It's true. It's last generation's M3 based CPU instead of the M4. But the M3 Ultra has 32 cores vs the M4 iPad's 9 or 10 cores.

Apple doesn't make an Ultra version of the M4. The speculation is they'll do this every other generation.

It’s so dumb that their most expensive computer will always be a generation behind

Very high core count CPUs generally have slower single-core performance than their lower core-count counterparts.

Even on the x86 side, if your workloads are primarily single threaded then you will be better served by a consumer CPU than a $10,000 server CPU.

For heavy multi-threaded workloads there is no comparison.

I could be mistaken, but I think the mac studio comes with either an M3 ultra or an M4 max, and the ipad comes with an M4 chip. I think they decided not to make an ultra for the M4 generation, but don't take my word for it.

The article says Mac Studio M3 Ultra owners can’t update to macOS Tahoe. So while the lower-end Studio uses M4, the $4k-$10k M3 Ultra Version with all that great RAM for inference still runs M3 Ultra. It’s slower than the iPad Pro released 10 months earlier in single core performance and, for now, according to this article isn’t compatible with macOS Tahoe.