Apple has surprised everyone today with all-new Mac Studio desktop, powered by the new M5 Max and M5 Ultra processors. The flagship workstation brings major upgrades to graphics and on-device artificial intelligence capabilities while keeping the same compact footprint.
This release came alongside a refresh to the Mac mini, now with M6 and M5 Pro chips. Are you confused yet the number of Apple Silicon chips here?
The baseline model equipped with the M5 Max chip features an 18-core CPU, up to a 40-core GPU, and supports up to 128GB of unified memory. For high-end creative and technical workloads, the M5 Ultra scales performance up to a 36-core CPU and an 80-core GPU. It supports up to 512GB of unified memory with 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, allowing users to run massive artificial intelligence models completely locally.
“Mac Studio is the ultimate desktop for on-device AI and the world’s most demanding pro workflows, relied on by users for its tremendous performance and extensive pro connectivity, all in a quiet, compact design that sits right on your desk — and today, we’re pushing the boundaries even further,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, in a statement on Tuesday. “With the powerful M5 Max and the incredible capabilities of M5 Ultra, Mac Studio ushers in a new era of desktop computing, delivering huge performance gains for pro workloads and AI inference with frontier-class models. By integrating Neural Accelerators directly into the GPU and offering massive amounts of high-bandwidth unified memory, the new Mac Studio is our most powerful Mac ever.”
Apple integrated Neural Accelerators directly into each GPU core on both chips. This design delivers up to 4.3 times faster AI performance and up to 1.8 times faster graphics compared to previous configurations. System storage is also up to twice as fast.
Both models upgrade wireless connectivity to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. Port setups feature Thunderbolt 5 technology, which allows users to cluster multiple systems together using remote direct memory access for faster distributed AI tasks.
Okay now for the price, which starts at $3,499 CAD for the Mac Studio with M5 Max ($3,219 education pricing) and a hefty $7,799 for the Mac Studio with M5 Ultra ($7,229 education pricing). We’re seeing a cool $800 price increase from $2,699 CAD from last year’s entry Mac Studio with M4 Max. Ouch.
The new Mac Studio will ship with macOS 27 of course. Pre-orders are open starting today, with official store availability beginning September 22.
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