Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 - computing this expensive belongs in a server room serving multiple people not on a single person’s desk. (But still cool).
New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
281–290 of 571 posts
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#282Very well timed for John Ternus's first quarter.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#283It looks like speculation that Apple would raise the base chip’s maximum RAM from 32GB to 48GB was wrong. Apple also launched the base M6 today with a 32GB RAM limit, suggesting 512GB may remain the maximum for Ultra chips for some time. Since these Ultra chips combine 16 base chips: 32GB × 16 = 512GB
they`re skipping m6 pro and ultra
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the question was low-end MacBook + mini vs high-end MacBook. The low-end one has all those nice things. I wouldn't sacrifice that. If it has to be MacBook + super old used mini as home server, so be it.
Except for LLM inference speed, macs suck as a server and are pretty expensive, why wouldn't you get a Linux box?
Because it's not exactly a server, more like a home PC / dev machine that I also remote into. Usually SSHing but sometimes VNC which is annoying in Linux. And the Mac mini is pretty fast. Yes a Linux box would win in terms of multicore CPU(?) or GPU if you need to run big batch processes, or a high-uptime service. My work is running those on cloud, not in my house.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#285Due to pricing insanity (not that Apple prices weren’t insane before the ram/ssd shortages) I’m not in the market but I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked. Might be better to just run a Studio and Neo for the very few times I actually need remote capabilities.
I’ve debated Mac Studio or MBP at each generation. For equal spec machines the price premium to get a MBP over the Studio is always smaller than I expected, so I pay the extra amount and get the MBP.
This changes when you get into connotations that aren’t available in the laptop form factor, but with RAM prices the way they are those configurations are more than I want to spend on a local machine right now.
For running local LLMs the high memory Mac options always look appealing, but the processing speed (prefill) is so much slower than GPUs that it hurts. For situations where you have no rush and can let something work in the background for 24 hours it can some times be ignored, but the speeds I get from a real GPU setup are so much faster that I never use the larger models on a high memory Mac any more.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#286It seems super reasonably priced to me. It's only twice as expensive as my first Mac which only had 128K of memory.
Base models are okay-ish. But +4000$ for an additional 128GB of ram is simply milking the customers, as they know they will have many of them.
Still absurd, but it's $4K for an additional 164GB RAM.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another option is a 'maxed out' mini e.g M5 Pro/64GB. Mini is super easy to travel with if you know there'll be a 'dock' at the far end e.g office home or whatever.
A part of my brain can’t process acquiring a Mac Mini M5 Pro knowing that they sell M6 despite being aware that it is just a weaker processor. It will get worse with the MacBook ultra rocking a M5 too. Apple’s marketing department is gonna kill me.
Think about it maybe like:
I want a 2026 pickup truck. The dealer also sells a 2027 hatchback.
I am not shopping for a hatchback.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#288Seems they’re actually advertising pcie expansion. Dang I’d love to switch to a Mac for my cuda kernel writing.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 10 grand for 256GB memory. A NVIDIA RTX 6000, 96 GB at 1.7 TB/s, is 13 grand. This 256 GB at 1.2 TB/s Mac is extremely competitive, it will be sold out everywhere.
Except the RTX 6000 will run circles around the Mac studio in just about every way. Memory bandwidth is literally the only spec where Apple is competitive, and while high memory bandwidth is necessary for LLMs to perform well, many people strangely don't understand that memory bandwidth alone is not sufficient.
Energy efficiency is in another league with the Mac Studio for local workloads.
I can run agents using deepseek v4 flash or Qwen 3.8 on my m3 ultra and it will be lukewarm and the fan will eventually start blowing softly.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#2901.2 TB/s bandwidth of M5 Ultra comes from two dies of M5 Max (each 614 GB/s) connected together using 4.4 TB/s inter-die fabric. For a non-quantized Deepseek V4 flash on an ultra, I would estimate about 1000+ tokens per second prefill and 50+ tokens per second on generation. This is actually quite usable and near parity to cloud. They mention "adds the GPU Neural Accelerators." which, if exploitable for LLM loads, wo…
How much would is the cost for that machine though, I'm pretty sure I could just buy tokens from a provider and never run out of money for 10 years, and get far better quality output because inference is being served by professionals on far better hardware and this machine would be obsolete long before that as well. Hosting local seems like a possibly the dumbest thing you could possibly do from an economics perspective. And don't hit me with the privacy argument because everyone saying they care about privacy uses fucking gmail, whatsapp and instagram all day long.