Apple’s new Mac Studio costs $2,499 with M5 Max and $5,499 for M5 Ultra

Apple has launched a new Mac Studio alongside a new Mac mini. Pre-orders are now open with shipping starting from 22 September.

The M5 Max version costs $2,499 with a 512GB drive, unchanged from the model it replaces. The M5 Ultra version costs $5,499 with a 1TB drive, which is $200 more than the M3 Ultra it replaces. Education pricing is $2,299 and $5,099 respecitvely, and configurations with 512GB of memory arrive in late October, per Apple’s release.

The Mac Studio is Apple’s larger desktop, a square aluminium block about 3.7 inches tall that sits under a monitor. Like the Mac mini it ships without a screen or keyboard. It is for people whose work is heavy enough that a laptop becomes the bottleneck: video editors, 3D artists, developers, and people running AI models on their own hardware.

The chips

The M5 Max has an 18-core processor and up to a 40-core graphics unit, with up to 128GB of memory. Apple says graphics are up to 50 percent faster than the previous generation.

The M5 Ultra is the more unusual part. Apple normally builds Ultra chips by joining smaller ones together, and until now it joined two. This one joins four, a first for Apple silicon, giving up to a 36-core processor and up to an 80-core graphics unit. Every graphics core carries a dedicated AI accelerator, which is new at this tier. We explain both new chips separately.

Memory

The headline number is 512GB of unified memory with 1.2TB/s of bandwidth, 50 percent higher than before. Unified memory is a single pool that the processor, graphics and AI hardware share, soldered in at the factory and not upgradeable later.

Memory matters because of how AI models work. A large language model has to be loaded into memory before it can answer anything, and the largest freely downloadable models currently need hundreds of gigabytes. A high-end desktop graphics card tops out at a few dozen gigabytes of its own memory. Which is why Apple’s unified memory is a structural advantage for people running AI models locally.

Apple also supports linking several Mac Studios over Thunderbolt 5 using RDMA, which lets one machine read another’s memory directly. Apple says four clustered units deliver up to 3 times the AI inference speed of one. Cook told analysts on Apple’s July earnings call that customers already run such clusters, and that Disney’s creative teams use Mac for on-device AI to cut cloud costs and keep their material private.

The new Mac Studio also gains up to six Thunderbolt 5 ports, support for eight displays, storage Apple says is twice as fast, and Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for the first time.

Want one in Kenya?

At about KES 129 to the dollar, $2,499 is roughly KES 323,000 and $5,499 is roughly KES 712,000 before shipping and tax. Computers carry no import duty here. But we have lots of taxes including import declaration fee, railway development levy and VAT. So realistically, a proper M5 Ultra requires about KES 900,000.