Apple Mac Studio (M5 Ultra) review: incredible benchmark scores, high base memory, and a generous number of ultra-fast Thunderbolt 5 ports, but very expensive

The price of Apple's most powerful desktop machine has increased over 50%, making it a significant investment. This new Mac Studio starts at $5,500, with high-end configurations exceeding $11,000, potentially impacting budgets for creative professionals and AI developers.

Apple has released its new Mac Studio featuring the M5 Ultra processor, offering significant boosts in AI and graphics performance. This new model starts at $5,500, a substantial increase from the previous generation's $4,000 base price, with a fully configured model reaching $11,299. The M5 Ultra chip is essentially two M5 Max chips combined, providing up to a 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU, and 32-core neural engine, alongside support for up to 512GB of unified memory. Benchmark scores show a 20-30% improvement over the M3 Ultra, with exceptional performance in content creation tasks like 4K video export and real-time playback of multiple 8K streams. The machine also excels in AI workloads, with dramatically faster transcription times and the ability to run large language models locally. However, the performance gains over the M5 Max model are often not proportional to the significant price increase, making it a niche product primarily for extreme power users and AI developers.

The Mac Studio M5 Ultra positions Apple to capture the high-end market for AI development and content creation by offering unparalleled local processing power. The surge in its starting price, driven partly by memory costs and Apple's premium strategy, signals a potential shift towards tiered performance and pricing models in professional computing, where only the most demanding users will find the M5 Ultra's capabilities indispensable.

This release highlights the increasing importance of on-device AI processing, as Apple explicitly targets users needing to run 'frontier-class' models locally. The ability to cluster multiple Mac Studios suggests a push towards scalable, high-performance computing solutions for specialized AI tasks, potentially drawing users away from cloud-based solutions for certain workloads.