Apple released the new Mac Studio, its most powerful desktop yet, with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips. The systems are available to pre-order now, with retail availability beginning September 22 and the 512GB unified memory configuration arriving in late October.
Per Apple, the M5 Max system starts at $2,499 (U.S.) and the M5 Ultra at $5,499.
M5 Max pairs an 18-core CPU with an up-to-40-core GPU that puts Neural Accelerators in every core, while M5 Ultra scales to a 36-core CPU, an up-to-80-core GPU, 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s of bandwidth, and Thunderbolt 5 ports let several systems cluster into a shared memory pool for distributed AI inference.
For local model work, the memory ceiling does the heavy lifting: a 512GB configuration holds frontier-class open-weight models entirely on device, which Apple frames as an answer to rising cloud inference costs. macOS 27, now in public beta, adds a new Core AI framework for building and deploying models on Apple silicon, alongside MLX and on-device coding agents in Xcode.
Apple claims up to 3.9x faster AI performance for M5 Max over the M4 Max generation and up to 4.3x peak AI compute for M5 Ultra against M3 Ultra. Johny Srouji, Apple's chief hardware officer, called the new Mac Studio a machine that "ushers in a new era of desktop computing."
Apple positions the refresh as the moment on-device AI stops being a demo: frontier-class models on a desktop, no token metering, and a cluster path for teams that outgrow one box. Whether 512GB of unified memory actually frees researchers from the cloud, or whether the largest open-weight models that fit it stay too niche to matter outside Apple's own demos, is the question the September 22 launch will start to answer.
