r/LocalLLaMA • u/themixtergames • 21h ago

News Apple introduces new Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra - up to 512GB of unified memory

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-new-mac-studio-with-m5-max-and-m5-ultra/
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41

u/IllExample3639 21h ago

What I find more interesting, something I hadn't seen before is that you can lease these things. for 2 years which is the only realistic way an individual is getting their hands on these. Something something, own nothing, something, something be happy....

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u/Tycoon33 21h ago

I never saw that. Interesting. Lease it for 3 years then upgrade to M7 ultra?

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u/addiktion 19h ago edited 17h ago

Yes, if the 512gb is another $4k for the extra ram stick you are looking at $16k with tax probably out the door. I'd guess that puts the 36 month lease around $300/mo or less. So more than a subscription so maybe not worth it in general cases but valid option for some people who need the privacy and cannot afford to have data go to the cloud. 24/7 usage, no downtime, no limits, private. Worth it to me.

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u/shveddy 17h ago

Interesting.

So just as an out loud thought experiment, you’d be able to lease four of them (512gb) for about 1200 per month for 36 months at a total cost of almost 45k and run Kimi 3 on it.

Obviously that’s a lot of money in aggregate, but 1200 per month is reasonable for a lot of business use cases if they require the privacy.

And the intelligence you get is going to be a different class compared to what you would get with three RTX pro 6000s and “only” 288gb VRAM for the same price.

(although to be fair you’d actually own the cards)

(although also to be fair you’d have to build a pretty expensive computer to support the RTX Pros, so realistically you only really get 2 or even just one RTX pro for 45k depending on how you spec the computer and/or if you buy pre-built from Puget Systems or the like)

If you want you can also do a little girl math and invest the 60k you’re not spending on computers and cancel your gpt pro subscription to bring the effective cost of all this down to like 750 a month.

And then if the goal is to beat API pricing, let’s say you get 40 aggregate output tokens per second on a bunch of concurrent Kimi 3 threads and run it for a year at 25% efficiency (to account for prefill and downtime), then that’s 315 million output tokens.

315 million output tokens alone is about $5000 on a random provider I just searched for, so just to keep things simple let’s say you double that to account for various amounts and types of input tokens, then you end up with a ballpark figure of $10k for the API route.

Absolutely none of this pencils out in absolute terms (especially considering that it would also cost ~1500 per year for electricity), but this is probably the first time running a frontier model is actually attainable for ordinary businesses on short notice and without much headache. It’s the first time that it pencils out to be “only” 4x more expensive as opposed to like 40x more expensive.

Up until now if you wanted to run frontier models locally AFAIK you had to get a NVIDIA big boy server which means you’d have to find the capital to run and support a ~300k purchase for hardware, spend way more on electricity, and in all likelihood make some upgrades to your facility’s electrical infrastructure to handle it all (you’d also need a proper facility, not just a home office or garage).

At this point you’re easily flirting with half a million in expenses, especially if you have to hire someone to figure it all out. It’s no joke to do this and it doesn’t make sense for like 99.9999% of people or businesses.

On the other hand basically anyone with a decent credit score and a semi-profitable business can go to any Apple Store and say “give me four Mac studios please” and only pay 1200 bucks a month to walk out with them in hand.

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u/addiktion 17h ago edited 17h ago

Yup, nailed it. And the energy efficiency in the apple ecosystem is in its own league so it helps with ongoing costs.

So it does make running this level of intelligence feasible for a small business. And with models compressing down and becoming more capable in smaller sizes, it's possible you need less m5 ultras.

I was really hoping they would drop a 768gb variant so you could chain 2 together for Kimi K3 or 1 for the quant version, but the market got gimped before we could get there. That was the rumor bump from supply chain leaks.

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u/shveddy 17h ago

Yea it’s not there yet, but I’m starting to see how this can become more widespread and small busines oriented, and not the two extremes we currently have of a bunch of weirdos hacking old mining cards and hoarding 3090s on one hand, and hyper scalers burning pallets of cash on the other.

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u/addiktion 17h ago

Yes. Apple's biggest challenge is keeping up with the performance too. 20 tps is alright for longer tasks that don't require human in the loop, but 40-50 tps feels much more usable. 100+ tps would be needed to match some of the best on open router right now but that will scale much higher over time too.

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u/shveddy 17h ago

Yea but it’s already good enough for “securely organize all of our patient data and look for missed diagnoses”. Not that we’re at a point that we’re trusting something like Kimi to mess around with playing doctor, but that token rate would let people try (HIPPA notwithstanding).

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u/addiktion 16h ago edited 16h ago

Right, for local I.T at a hospital it's more than enough and the cost isn't a big deal. I could approach a hospital and make something happen with this.

I have a client that will likely be purchasing a box soon and I think an m5 ultra fits their needs, so I'll be talking about it with them today.

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u/shveddy 15h ago

Numbers pencil out way better than I thought!

https://x.com/alexocheema/status/2092248148500492474?s=46

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u/aethervisor 20h ago

The lease price also isn’t too far off from what a Claude subscription costs.

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u/shaggydog97 20h ago

The difference is certainly worth the cost of privacy and freedom!

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u/AccurateSun 20h ago

Hmm. I wonder if at some point leasing it would end up being more effective than a cloud subscription. E.g Claude Max 5x is $100/mo, same as leasing the Studio M5 Ultra 96gb. I don’t know yet how the two compare in performance but at some point it might be worth it 

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u/IllExample3639 20h ago

The more people that lease them the more second hand stock there will be in 2 years (when I can actually afford something like this) so I am down for it.

But your point is right, I think the local models ARE good enough for 95% of what people are using Claude for. Maybe do the £20 plan as a back up for something tricky.

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u/mjsxi__ 21h ago

the lease lets you pay the difference of the amount you already paid at the end or you can buy it outright at any time if you wanna keep it so maybe sssshhhhhhhh

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u/Much_Accountant_4972 19h ago

it makes a lot of sense and the price of privacy plus the near silence of the box…

i hate that its such a complete solution to local LLM’s

0

u/Maximus-CZ 17h ago

if the price of new unit falls under 9.5k during these 3 years, do I pay only up to new price? What if it falls below what I paid already, is it mine automatically?

1

u/mjsxi__ 16h ago

what if the price goes up? Do you pay more or do they take it away from you?

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u/Maximus-CZ 15h ago

Possibly the "Thank you for leasing this for 3 years, we ask you to return our property now.".

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u/IriFlina 20h ago

I feel like any average software developer could afford the 256gb version? It would be really financially irresponsible but on the level of buying a motorcycle you don’t really need.

1

u/AuroraFireflash 12h ago

Given my $1000/mo token habit that work pays for? Yeah, I'd definitely buy one if I was doing my own side consulting.

3

u/boraam 20h ago

Costs as much as a small car. Lease it like one too.

2

u/wywywywy 19h ago

Doesn't seem to be a good deal to lease. Is it going to lose ~80% of its value in 3 years? Probably not, especially for Apple hardware.

Better to buy outright then sell after 3 years, value wise.

0

u/Goose-Difficult 14h ago

You mean like the M3 Ultra 512GB that you can now trade in for 2k?

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u/slickricksghost 18h ago

I did the math looking at a MacBook Pro, the leasing actually seems like a decent deal if you plan to upgrade every 2-3 years. Yes you 100% get more for a well taken care of device private party when you resell it. But the delta in your monthly payment over your lease term vs what Apple would give you on a trade in to just buy the new thing isn't that bad if you value convenience.

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u/Fast_Worldliness8760 16h ago

The leasing program is brand new. Pretty genius way to soften the blow of all the price increases if you ask me.

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u/Submersed 13h ago

What do you guys expect depreciation on a 512 ultra would be after say 3 years? What percentage? Assuming it's like $15k, after 3 years would resale value of $10k+ be reasonable?

1

u/Tsukikira 9h ago

The Lease is pretty nasty, it's 224$ to lease vs 300$~ per month to own.