Apple is announcing new models of the Mac Studio, now using the existing M5 Max and a new M5 Ultra. This reunification under one chip generation comes over a year after Apple awkwardly split the Studio between M4 Max and M3 Ultra offerings. (The older sounding M3 Ultra was actually the more powerful one, and there was never an M4 Ultra chip.) The new Studios look identical to previous generations, utilizing the same small form factor chassis since its introduction in 2022 (right down to the USB-A ports on the rear), but inside are Apple's most powerful SoCs.
The new Mac Studio with the existing M5 Max chip comes with 36GB of unified memory and 512GB of storage, starting at $2,499. That matches the current starting price of the M4 Max model after its $500 price hike in June. The new $5,499 M5 Ultra model starts with 96GB of memory and 1TB of storage. That's only $200 more than the starting price of the outgoing M3 Ultra model, but keep in mind the M3 Ultra launched at a much lower $3,999 last year.
These new Studios are set to arrive running macOS 27 Golden Gate on September 22nd, alongside the new Mac Minis. But its highest-end M5 Ultra configuration with a whopping 512GB of memory is coming in late-October with pricing TBD for now — though it's best we start bracing ourselves for the eventual sticker shock.
These are chip bumps, through and through, but what bumps they are. While the RAM and storage amounts for the new Mac Studios match their predecessors, like recent MacBooks they have storage that's twice-as-fast. In its press release, Apple describes the new Studios as, “A monumental step for AI†with a claim of up 4.3x faster AI compute in the M5 Ultra. But even when it comes to raw CPU and GPU performance, the M5 Ultra and its up to 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU are said to have up to 1.8x faster graphics and 1.3x faster CPU speed than the M3 Ultra. The memory bandwidth of the M5 Ultra is now up to 1.2TB per second — as if the M3 Ultra's 819GB per second didn't sound fast enough.
Apple achieved all this in the M5 Ultra by using its next-gen UltraFusion connection to merge two dual-die M5 Max chips together into a quad-die architecture. And it's why Apple isn't mincing words by advertising the M5 Ultra as “the most powerful chip ever.†But the Mac Studios also pack another, more pedestrian upgrade for a slight quality of life improvement: Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support.
With the recent sunsetting of its Mac Pro line of desktops, these Mac Studios are as powerful as Apple computers get. And they're small enough to fit under your monitor (or up to four of Apple's 5K / 120Hz Studio Display XDR monitors running at full resolution). But thanks to RAMageddon, Apple's most powerful chip and its fastest Macs ever are also much pricier than their predecessors were just a short while ago.
