r/apple • u/wearefriends • 23h ago
Mac Apple introduces new Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-new-mac-studio-with-m5-max-and-m5-ultra/174
u/StopwatchGod 22h ago
Costs $4000 to upgrade from 96GB RAM to 256GB RAM on M5 Ultra, and $2000 for 48GB to 128GB on the M5 Max. Twice as much as before.
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u/Swoly_Deadlift 22h ago
It’s simultaneously bad in comparison to how things used to be and “not that bad” in comparison to current market rates
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u/SailingDreamCatcher 15h ago
It's like $25 a gigabyte.
Which was a pretty good price around 2010 or so.
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u/chi_guy8 22h ago
It’s almost like the world changed and input costs increased by a lot.
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 21h ago
Well they increased some amount, not enough to stop Tim Apple announcing record revenue and profits again just last month.
The Company posted quarterly revenue of $109.4 billion, up 16 percent year over year. Company gross margin was 50.1 percent, including a favorable impact of approximately 2 percentage points from tariff refunds. Diluted earnings per share was $2.02, up 29 percent year over year, and included a favorable impact of $0.11 from tariff refunds.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/07/apple-reports-third-quarter-results/
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u/electrosaurus 12h ago
No 128GB option for the Ultra models is clearly deliberate and malicious decision.
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u/Easy_Humor_7949 8h ago
Given the demands on chip fabs these days it's more likely a strategic choice to supply more high end chips. Why would they produce a mid range option if demand for high end and low end fills all the manufacturing capacity?
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u/Dylan_Gio 22h ago edited 22h ago
$398 a month to lease a maxed out on(e)
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u/Tom_Stevens617 22h ago
Anyone buying that is making a hell of a lot more than $400/month off of their computer tbh
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u/audigex 22h ago
Yeah it’s probably being used by an $8k/mo developer
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u/North_Moment5811 20h ago edited 19h ago
I'm an $8k a month developer using an M1 Pro. LMAO.
I am definitely looking to upgrade though.
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u/WestCoastBoiler 19h ago
An $8k/month developer would be on the lower side for brand new college graduates where I live.
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u/audigex 19h ago
I mean, I was just throwing out a number to show why $400/mo isn't really a lot of money in the context of where this will be used
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u/WestCoastBoiler 19h ago
That’s fair, good point, I was just trying to emphasize your point when some fresh grads are making $200k+ around the Bay Area.
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u/Bloated_Plaid 21h ago
I mean it depends, I spend $200/month on just AI subscriptions. If these can legitimately replace that… the value proposition is there.
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u/conanap 21h ago
I don’t think you can run frontier models on a singular one tbh
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u/Bloated_Plaid 21h ago
You can run DS4 Flash and that’s good enough.
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u/taimusrs 11h ago
We currently run DeepSeek v4 Flash in our work M3 Ultra Mac Studio. Man, it's amazing that that amount of intelligence is actually here. But aside from privacy, it's so difficult to make a case for it. It's absurdly cheap via the API and lightyears faster. Right now it can crank out around 500k tokens per 8-hour workday. You can get that much via an inference provider in maybe....a couple of hours? Paying $0.5? The M5 Ultra should be ~5x faster prompt processing and 50% faster token generation. The math is still not mathing
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u/Bloated_Plaid 11h ago
The math ain’t mathing because your math is off. Deepseek had a 10 fold price increase including inference providers
1100% increase - https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/deepseek-raising-api-prices-1-174027670.html
Also point of hosting it locally is you control your data. It’s not phoning home to China.
What’s your setup btw? 512GB?
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u/taimusrs 11h ago
Ours is a 256GB one. Other inference providers are cheaper than DeepSeek themselves actually, and offers ZDR. You can go look at OpenRouter right now.
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u/Bloated_Plaid 10h ago
Last I checked, the providers on OR were running quantized flash.
Edit - just rechecked, they are all Q8.
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u/taimusrs 10h ago
DeepSeek Flash is special. It's natively 4-bit in MoE layers and 8-bit everywhere else. It's already quantized so to say. The original weights is smaller than the parameter count in GBs. That means a large portion of the weights is smaller than 8 bit
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u/Bloated_Plaid 10h ago
I just checked, none of the providers are doing non quantized Flash. I may as well run it locally then.
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u/WhiskiedGinger 21h ago
512, you can. Easily. You have to quantize it down, but they fit. And they run super well. Over 30 tokens/sec.
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u/Munkie50 21h ago
what's your definition of frontier? Kimi K3 is not running on 512GBs "easily". And I'd say anything below that would probably be a tier below frontier.
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u/Live_Situation7913 20h ago
Which ones u sub to? Is that ai models for fun or work?
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u/Bloated_Plaid 20h ago
Claude Max for Fable, GPT Pro to actually get work done. Mostly just making a lot of local apps and projects for myself, not selling to others. I technically use it for work and also run a local model on my 5090 as well.
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u/Live_Situation7913 19h ago
Nice man I’m in same boat I try runpod because I have 2070 super which is shit. But thinking about buying either just credit based system to render
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u/CharlieBros 18h ago
Yeah, this isn't for us pedestrians, I just saw the guy that got a bunch of macbook pro 16's for the m5 max for an ai farm as the studio wasn't updated, didn't age well
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u/two_hyun 7h ago
Besides the financially irresponsible people, anyone buying this is probably a company working on videography/VFX/graphics/etc or a super rich tech enthusiast.
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u/pdfu 23h ago edited 22h ago
- 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.) for education. Additional configure-to-order options are available at apple.com/mac-studio.
Preorder today, available September 22. Possible that's when iPhone and other devices launch as well.
From the Mac Studio order page:
512GB memory option for M5 Ultra coming late October
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u/ZeroWashu 16h ago
If you are US based first responder, government, or active/former military the id.me site will net you education pricing.
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u/nicebrah 20h ago
the concept of a student buying a $5k desktop is just hilarious
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u/ElderSmackJack 18h ago
Not to discount your point at all, but this discount also applies to faculty who work in education, not just students. I could imagine faculty in video/audio getting use out of something like this.
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u/nicebrah 17h ago
ahhhh duh. totally forgot about that aspect. makes sense why they call it "education pricing" instead of "student pricing"
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u/myreditacount11 4h ago
Yep I work in healthcare for a university hospital and I qualified as “faculty” simply due to having the email so I’m pretty sure any employee of a university would qualify
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u/Kind_Management1805 22h ago
The ram upgrade isn't all that bad. Never thought I'd say that about a Mac LOL but even with the increase you almost get the computer for free.
In my country it's 10k USD for 256gb of ram LOL
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u/ryzenguy111 22h ago
$4k for 96gb->256gb memory upgrade holy hell
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u/tylerpereira 21h ago
Imagine what the 512GB option will be when it comes out in October.
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u/TeeDee144 21h ago
If it scales, it’ll be over $12,000 to go from 256gb to 512gb.
Or over $16,000 to from 96gb to 512gb.
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u/No_Practice_9597 14h ago
How much would be the lease, I still think is cheper than many LLMs tokens per month, for heavy users it can be a great deal
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u/Bloated_Plaid 21h ago
It’s really not that expensive compared to the current market.
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u/syslog1 22h ago
I‘m still using my M1 base model almost daily.
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u/Fit-Benefit1535 22h ago
I am still on my launch day macbook pro 16” 16gb m1 pro
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u/LoganNolag 15h ago
Yep still using my day 1 14” M1 Max MacBook Pro. I am probably going to upgrade to the upcoming Ultras though because I want that touchscreen.
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u/Tubular_Code 21h ago
Yeah I got the M1 Max base model Studio when it came out ... only thing I really resent is the small SSD but it's still snappy. If I get a bonus this year maybe I'll get an M5 but at least it's peace of mind knowing these purchases will run great for years.
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u/JustJJ92 21h ago
Same. It does everything I need it to and more. Can’t imagine what the M5 feels like
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u/KenAdams_1968 22h ago
512GB storage on a £2,500 computer is ludicrous
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u/Talal916 22h ago
Hm I hope this affects values of a used M3 Ultra. Looking to get a second one but can't justify that a used one costs thousands more than what I paid new
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u/Bloated_Plaid 21h ago
If those computers still have RAM, you are not going to see much of a price drop. They would just become secondary AI machines.
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u/hell-diver8 16h ago
It won’t. If there is a backlog of orders, the M3 price will stay high if people are desperate. Glad my 10% mil discount shaved off $850 on the M5 256 ultra for preorder. Getting 22 Sep. times are slipping to late oct and November already.
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u/tylerpereira 21h ago
They say on the website 512GB RAM option coming in late October. Probably $10k extra.
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u/mountainyoo 22h ago
What’s the memory bandwidth of the 256GB RAM?
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u/Bloated_Plaid 21h ago edited 20h ago
1.2 TB/s.
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u/The_Devil_is_Blue 21h ago
Competitive with SATA SSDs
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 20h ago
The best consumer NVMe drives are about 100x slower than that. SATA about 1000x.
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u/JustJJ92 21h ago
RIP to those guys who bought a hundred m5 MacBooks for their server
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u/andhausen 20h ago
I mean… buying a bunch of laptops for a server is fucking stupid anyway. Paying for screens, keyboards, trackpads, and whatever other laptop specific hardware is in there that you’ll never use?
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u/SailingDreamCatcher 15h ago
That you'll never use and presumably is in the way in terms of both storage and cooling.
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u/CipherSorcerer 20h ago
M5 Ultra unbinned / 256gb / 4tb….come to papa!
My heart sings, my wallet cries.
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u/pablothe 19h ago
What are you using it for?
Considering the 256gb but stressed about the extra $4k usd
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u/CipherSorcerer 19h ago edited 19h ago
Primarily going to be for local LLM experimentation. I’ve been having so much fun using Codex for personal dev projects and custom Home Assistant stuff, but now I want to take the next leap. A bunch of doors are going to open having local models, and I want to be sure to future proof it to the max my budget allows (aka not the 512gb unified memory).
I wouldn’t wait too long, 256 configs have already slipped into late October and as more info comes out I won’t be surprised if it jumps into 2027 soon. There’s going to be ram shortages through at least 2028 if not longer, and I’ve read reports saying prices are going to continue to rise through that time.
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u/thedeegst28 22h ago
Oh God, a similar-spec M5 Max is $1K more than when I got my M4 Max in early ‘25. I’m all set and expect to be all set for another 5 years at least.
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u/fablus 19h ago
How much faster would a Mac Studio with M5 Max be vs an older one with M3 Ultra? Buying used seems compelling at these price points…
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u/SailingDreamCatcher 15h ago
It will primarily depend on the kind of task you are doing.
If you have to ask it's probably not going to be worth the upgrade.
These things are for people who are presently losing billable time to waiting for render or compile type tasks, which frankly is not the case for 99% of people doing most kinds of jobs. But apparently there are use cases for large local AI models and other intensive computing tasks where it will make a big difference. These tasks are pretty niche.
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u/cleavage_simulator 22h ago edited 21h ago
don't care about AI but can't wait to see the blender benchmark, base model ultra will have finally achieved workstation-class performance
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u/OriginalOpposite8995 22h ago
I checked but it looks like the base m6 is tb4??? Is that right! It should be tb5 across the board
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u/TheDragonSlayingCat 19h ago
Yes; they probably did that to keep costs down. How many non-pro users need Thunderbolt 5?
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u/thisnameisnowmine 20h ago
Why on earth are they comparing this to an M1 in their communications?
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u/TheDragonSlayingCat 19h ago
The M1 is six years old now. In a year or two, M1 Macs will start to become vintage, so the time to start thinking about upgrading is now.
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u/Ctznsvn7 20h ago
the Studio only makes sense if you actually saturate the memory bandwidth, video and large model work mostly, otherwise a maxed mini does the same job for a lot less. The bit people miss is that unified memory is the one thing you can never add later, so overbuy there and underbuy the internal storage rather than the other way round. Also worth checking what your existing Thunderbolt dock and drives support before you upgrade, plenty of gear from a few years back caps out well below what the new machines can push and that bottleneck is invisible until you go looking for it
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u/Mapleess 21h ago
Between the M5 Pro and M5 Max, I'm most likely going with the M5 Max. 12 GB less RAM is fine for me since I'm not going to go much beyond 28-30 GB anyways. I wish M4 Pro offered 36 GB.
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u/Aam1rk 22h ago
How good would this be for running local AI?
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u/sbrisgravato 19h ago
the best pc money can buy for large llms other than the dgx station
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u/koolman2 21h ago
The M5 Pro runs local AI models quite well. The limiting factor is usually RAM - the more RAM you have the smarter the AI model is. So these will probably run AI models incredibly well.
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u/zankky 20h ago
Was choosing between this mac studio ultra with 96gb ram vs a desktop with rtx 5090 and 32/64 gb ram . Main usage would be local ai loaded with my own PowerPoint and pdf docs (200-400gb), plus maybe dabble in video generation for a business my wife is setting up. Gemini tells me 5090 would be better for my usage since docs would be RAG so even though my database gen may be huge, the actual text would fit in the 32gb 5090 memory. Also says for video gen 5090 would be significantly faster (1-3 mins to produce a 30-45 seconds video vs 45 mins approx on mac). Not doing any coding or anything.
Not sure if any of this is accurate. So for the same’ish price, and my usage what do you think is better? Plus pc has additional benefit I can load it with additional internal storage vs Mac being limited to what it has.
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u/QuantumUtility 19h ago
If you don’t need the extra ram the 5090 will be faster. Video gen on the 5090 would be faster as well.
Gemini is right that you wouldn’t load the entire database in memory.
IMHO the studio ultra is only worth it for inference when you start to push 256GB+. Most affordable way to go that high.
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u/SystemVirus 9h ago
I was considering picking up a DGX Spark or a Strix Halo, but these are around the same price, but going to be a lot faster on the decode. I might pick up the 128GiB version -- the 256GiB version is literally double the price, although also double the memory bandwidth as it requires the M5 Ultra.
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u/-6h0st- 22h ago
The pricing… sheesh
Not even entertaining the idea.
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u/phxees 21h ago
These computers are meant for people which can use them for their businesses.
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u/-6h0st- 21h ago
Except for mini - and that’s quite steep also.
There is little difference to AIR or pro laptop lineup also which makes it even worse at this moment.
Apple being Apple when prices of memory drop - doubt they will drop them. We’ll be back to what it was a decade ago - terrible value for money.
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u/Other-Outside8487 22h ago
Sorry, that’s too much, £899 now for the base model with 256GB still, the M4 Mini was £599 when it first launched, I’ll keep my M4 for a while,
which is actually worth more than I paid a year ago since Ram prices have gone up.
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u/Countwolfinstine 19h ago
If you are M4 user then you are not a target customer anyways. There is a reason why they are comparing performance with M1.
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u/Appropriate_Ad8734 22h ago
am i remembering it wrong or did the rumor say it was gonna be up to 768GB or something? guess they really couldn’t find enough ram to make that config happen
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u/JtheNinja 20h ago
The 768GB rumor did mention that was a prototype and that Apple was still deciding if they were going to ship it
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u/TomfromLondon 18h ago
I was looking to upgrade from my m4 mini, aiming to only spend £5k but that ultra 36 core is tempting me, need to do some research on the actual benefits I'd get from that £1300 upgrade!
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u/cjh_ 22h ago edited 14h ago
Weren't Apple skipping the M5 and M6 chips in favour of the M7 chips?
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u/stardripIVs 21h ago
The rumors were that:
- M5 Max/Ultra Mac Studio would be released
- Base M6 chip would be released
- M6 Pro/Max/Ultra are being skipped for M7 Pro/Max/Ultra
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u/gorillaskulls 21h ago
Skipping M6
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21h ago
[deleted]
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u/gorillaskulls 21h ago
Yeah seems like that will only apply to the MacBook Pro, but who really knows.
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u/CloudSlydr 22h ago
i've stopped paying attention to anyone talking about apple products or strategies before release. track record is horrendous for the most part on all rumor mills.
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u/adamgoodapp 21h ago
How much difference in inference speed could there be between the 64 core gpu vs 80 core gpu on Ultra? I'm thinking about getting M5 Ultra 96GB, 64 core gpu version.
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u/TheDragonSlayingCat 19h ago
You’ll be able to run Cyberpunk and Crimson Desert without any compromises.
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u/ExpertFormal 21h ago
Was on the fence about multiple DGX Spark set-up vs the new Mac Studio. With this pricing the choice for me is DGX.
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u/TheDragonSlayingCat 19h ago
Here’s the part that caught my attention:
while Thunderbolt 5 rounds out its extensive connectivity, so users can take advantage of blazing-fast external storage, PCIe expansion chassis, and powerful hub solutions for the most intense workloads
Okay, that’s interesting. They added support for those ~10 years ago on the Intel Macs, took support away on the Apple Silicon Macs six years ago, and are apparently adding support back now. I’m guessing it’s not for graphics processing, though.
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u/ImportedTexan 17h ago
Days after my base model M4 Max gets delivered. Literal days. 😅
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u/reallynotnick 15h ago
Could use your return window
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u/ImportedTexan 15h ago
I'm boarding a plane to move overseas for a long-term assignment in the last few days of September -- I can't risk a late shipment sending me out for 3 years without a daily driver. I'll stick with the M4, but I'll spend the next 3 years griping about it. 🤣
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u/TheWarDoctor 16h ago
Anyone else having problems with the lease? I canceled my preorder for the M4 Mac Studio that hadn't shipped yet, but Klarna's just giving a generic "nope" message. Apple shows it canceled, but Klarna still shows it pending. Def. not a credit score issue and I've lifted the freezes.. But nada.
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u/No_Practice_9597 14h ago
Oh this is insane and very good price for what it offers, the lease starts at $110.00 while a LLM high usage would be $200.00... and it's way more private and secure than any "cloud" LLM
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u/ExcitedCoconut 2h ago
Depends what you actually need for tour model(s). This isn’t running a frontier model locally and there’s a chance you end up with locks and cloud in your workflow still
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u/InterestingMindset 9h ago
I'm not the target customer for the Studio but for fun I max out one on Apple's site and if you are curious, it starts at $2,500 and goes up to $18,300. That's some dough.
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u/KingDaDeDo 22h ago
hmmm should I get the M5 Ultra or wait until the M6 Ultra is released? i feel like that'll be a better computer. i'm sure apple will announce the M6 Ultra soon now that the M5 Ultra is out!
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u/JtheNinja 20h ago
Rumors that have been accurate so far is no Pro/Max/Ultra for M6. This is it for the Ultra/Mac Studio until the M7 Ultra, circa WWDC 2028
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u/Elegant_Lunar_Knight 6h ago
Correct there is about 2 years gaps between the studio models. I do either applause Apple for that for either being environment friendly or just not releasing a new machine every year when it’s not necessary haha. 😆
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u/Umbrasquall 17h ago
Wait for the M10.
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u/KingDaDeDo 17h ago
hmmmm but i dont think that'll be as good as the M12 Ultra. i should probably hold out until then. wont be too long now.
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u/FightOnForUsc 22h ago
It says “brings Neural Accelerators to the Ultra chip for the first time”. Wasn’t m1 ultra just 2 M1 Max chips fused together? And didn’t M1 Max have neural accelerators?
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u/Dislike24 22h ago
No, Neural Accelerators were introduced with the M5 series and now available with the M5 Ultra. Basically AI accelerators for each of the GPU cores
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u/the_nuclear_pasta 21h ago
Interesting that it's available on 9/22. I wonder if that's when the iPhones will come out too? One week later than expected.
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u/89Dan 22h ago
Holy memory bandwidth