New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

Due to pricing insanity (not that Apple prices weren’t insane before the ram/ssd shortages) I’m not in the market but I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked. Might be better to just run a Studio and Neo for the very few times I actually need remote capabilities.

10 grand for 256GB memory. Likely double that for 512GB, but won't be available or finalized until October. Thunderbolt 5 is highest bandwidth external IO available at 120Gb/s. 1.2TB/s claimed max internal memory bandwidth.

Not exactly "future proof" for >1T parameter models but good for targeting specific lower-parameter models, or if you can rely on pipeline parallelism and run a cluster.

Reading this press release was almost physically painful, because of how much Apple loves to use the phrase "up to". In total it appears 46 times.

> Apple’s most powerful Mac raises the bar for local AI

Wow, "Local AI" mentioned in the subheading above the fold - it's really awesome to see Apple leaning into this use case and I think it will definitely pay off for them going forward. Fingers crossed Apple is able to put some engineering effort towards shipping with one of the frontier open weight models included and optimized exactly for the machine.

1.2 TB/s bandwidth of M5 Ultra comes from two dies of M5 Max (each 614 GB/s) connected together using 4.4 TB/s inter-die fabric.

For a non-quantized Deepseek V4 flash on an ultra, I would estimate about 1000+ tokens per second prefill and 50+ tokens per second on generation. This is actually quite usable and near parity to cloud.

They mention "adds the GPU Neural Accelerators." which, if exploitable for LLM loads, would probably help the prefill a lot

Unless profits no longer matter this is the peak of computer pricing. It will go down from here

The thing that intrigues me the most is this:

"Storage performance is up to twice as fast, with a next-generation SSD architecture built on PCIe Gen 6..."

This is the first personal computer I've noticed that has PCIe Gen 6 storage. I've only seen enterprise PCIe Gen 6 SSDs up until now. Gen 5 SSDs in consumer devices already have high temperatures and thermal throttling, so I'm worried about how Apple's implementation will perform (I know they don't use off-the-shelf SSDs anymore, but I'd imagine the temps would still be a problem).

It looks like speculation that Apple would raise the base chip’s maximum RAM from 32GB to 48GB was wrong.

Apple also launched the base M6 today with a 32GB RAM limit, suggesting 512GB may remain the maximum for Ultra chips for some time. Since these Ultra chips combine 16 base chips:

32GB × 16 = 512GB

Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499 (U.S.) and $2,299 (U.S.) for education. Additional configure-to-order options are available at apple.com/mac-studio. Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 (U.S.) and $5,099 (U.S.).

I am in Europe, and the Mac Studio M5 Ultra GPU 64 cores with 96GB RAM is up to 6.649,00 €. Ouch.

Sorry for being lazy, but is there a rough breakdown like "You get sonnet level for M5 and Opus for M5 pro, etc.", or is it still speculative. Or put simpler, do you get Opus level for the 256GB M5 Max?

> M6 supports up to 32GB of unified memory to multitask across demanding apps and run LLMs on device for secure and private agentic tasks. It also provides up to 170GB/s of unified memory bandwidth — a 10 percent increase over M5 and a 2.5x increase over M1.

Isn't 170GB/s slow for bandwidth?

Anthropic can't have their IPO soon enough (rumored October) if these Macs match their reported specs.

Maybe $17k for a 512gig system that can do 1.2TB/s seems like a pretty good deal for a small office.

Why doesn't Apple make a tower PC with a standard ATX motherboard, power supply, extension cards, etc, like in the old days? That's immensely more upgradable, easier to cool, and I don't believe most people expect their desktops PCs to be tiny.

Here's me trying to justify this when I can run frontier models in the cloud for less than the monthly finance charge for this beast.

Bizarre there isn’t a 1TB RAM option hidden away for the excessively frivolous or VC funded.

Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 - computing this expensive belongs in a server room serving multiple people not on a single person’s desk. (But still cool).

Incredible that LMStudio, an open and ever evolving (unstable) project, is cited as a speed reference.

M6 (base) in Mac Mini too:

https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/

It was not long ago all the illustrations in an M chip press release were graphs showing it flouncing the competition. Now it's just random screenshots of desktops. Skimming this I didn't see a single claim of performance advantages over competitors. The massive thing Apple still needs to solve is making sure customers don't miss being able to plug the latest greatest GPU into their tower, they should not be resting on their laurels.

Anyone considering the lease option? Anyone done it with Apple before? Could it be tax advantaged?

The new mac minis and mac studios are going to be in shortage for at least first 6 months from 9.22

512GB unified memory option coming available in October.

Their statement about sharing an Ultra for an office LLM server is a little misleading. The tokens/second would be too slow for any business use case. You'd want to buy multiple GPUs for that purpose, probably Nvidia, despite the extra cost.

8000 dollars for a 16TB harddisk? At that price point I can load out two full PC’s for the price of a single disk, even at these inflated prices.

Shocking pricing.

Ugh. I was waiting it out on a very old Mac, but the pricing these days is insane, so now to wait it out for at least two years more and hope for better pricing or just suck it up and pay a lot for less.

How does this compare to NVIDIA DGX Spark? From what I see, if the performance is better than 2x DGX Spark, this could boost and in a way reshape Local AI in a significant way (along with all the OSS models wave that's happening) - look forward to that!

I was looking forward and hoping that the Mini and Studio would have 8K at 120Hz. Oh well, maybe the M7s will have that.

It seems super reasonably priced to me. It's only twice as expensive as my first Mac which only had 128K of memory.

Waited years for a decent Desktop lineup like this as I was hugely disappointed in the generation old M3 Ultra when it was released. Unfortunately it took Apple so long that the memory prices are now through the roof - USD $4000 for 164GB RAM upgrade is insane.

I may consider a M6 Mac Mini as a stop-gap whilst waiting out RAM Apocalypse to be over. Basically abandoning any ambitions of AI sovereignty and riding out subsidised LLM pricing for the next couple of years.

Not a surprise this is launching now. John Ternus is taking the reigns as CEO in a week and was previously SVP of hardware engineering.

I can't hate a direction where Apple becomes more about building great computers rather than trying to force more and more subscriptions. I do wish they would fix many of the long-standing OS and native app problems.

512GB unified RAM is going to be really good for running local LLMs.

Just insane RAM price. Can’t wait for the bubble to pop. AI is useful but not at the currently unsustainable price (too expensive for the provided value to corporate customers at too cheap per token vs the actual cost of creating it)

unfortunately it does not run linux

I wish they were offering 1TB of Unified Memory for the M5 Ultra. I already have an M5 Max MBP w/ 128GB of RAM for running local models, and while there's a /few/ models that I can run in 512GB that I can't run in 128GB that are interesting, where things really shift is at 1TB of memory which allows you run >1T parameter models w/ 4 bit quants reliably. 512GB is just on the edge of "enough", which is maybe the point of maximum frustration considering current memory prices.

Personally, I can't justify dropping the dosh for a 512GB M5 Ultra, but I would be able to justify it to myself if I could get 1TB of memory, because it'd guarantee the flexibility with local models I currently am missing. Seems a huge miss to not offer this... for a price.

It’d be great when they start releasing these machines with the local models ready for use!

It's game changer but it's too bad without enough memory

No looking to cheat, which is better: the MAX or ULTRA?

it cost a fortune with current memory cost. but i was waiting for this! whats the bandwith compared to a rtx pro 5000?

Eff AI! My next computer purchase will probably be in a decade!

Seems they’re actually advertising pcie expansion. Dang I’d love to switch to a Mac for my cuda kernel writing.

Insta-leased. I’ve ran over 1 million prompts on ollama to determine “is X website”. I’m ready to use use bigger models locally to do more thinking now. I have zero desire to give Dario anymore than $20 a month after his “you all are gonna be mass unemployed” spiel.

Nice for them to add Thread and 10G ethernet to base Mac Studio. If they allowed first class Linux, this could be a great home server machine. I ordered the base model. 512GB SSD scares me but would I even notice plugging in TB5 external drive?

Boy, oh boy Apple is the new shovel seller during AI gold rush.

Most people at Apple have already realized that their processors are already too powerful for regular users - heck, as a developer my M2 Pro with 32 GB RAM is more than enough for me.

Regular users don’t care about local AI either. So, they will probably extract as much money as possible during AI gold rush, but then we will most likely see Apple

a. Making their software worse (god forbid, forced updates)

b. Making their hardware impossible to repair (as they almost accomplished this already) and easier to break.

If I were to get one of these, realistically what is the most advanced AI model I could run locally?

buy a nice BMW 3 series or buy a 512GB m5 ultra... ;-)

I'm glad they brought the 512GB option back.

Really want to get my hands on a m6 32GB 2TB model but don't really have a need for one.

"512GB memory option for M5 Ultra coming late October"

Am I the only one that now finds press releases like this similar to "AI Slop"

I know there's tons of marketing language, buzz words and attempts at convincing me of some agenda that isn't super clear without lots of effort in "validating" the slop. I guess its not bad "slop" though if a human put in effort in editing it (imo >50% human curating = not really bad ai slop)

Though I still would prefer I could just get the prompt. What human thoughts, direction and "prompt" went into writing this article? in the same way as we ask for the prompt for AI generated outputs, I would prefer it for human generated output too. For writing at the least. I could have saved time, got the purity of the argument, and got more clear information. I wonder if we can get a future where humans just express their intent with each other and stop trying to hide our agenda; I want a world we can trust each other greater and interpret and act on our goals without the noise of trying to impress or market to each other & the additional words that go into that.

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Very well timed for John Ternus's first quarter.

Very much happy with my machine.Got a base m4 max studio in December. 2350eur what a deal

$5500 for 96GB of RAM? insanely expensive (the MacOs is really bad compared to Windows or Linux).

The article's headline contains an em dash. I wonder if it's AI-generated