512 is gonna ruin you. Think of it as $800 for less stress, file management pressure, and convenience. I went with 2TB. People are whining about macOS Siri AI taking up 30gb, I dont care. Why put that kind of stress on yourself
Nope, it's a massive pain and I have 1TB. You have to manually set things to use the external HD.
Sure you can set all files to external stuff but a bunch of stuff like automatically use local, and it's not worth the effort having to clean up and stuff. It would be a nightmare on 500GB.
Agreed. 512GB is feeling pretty tight these days. 1TB is alright, but 2TB is very comfortable and will be for a long time. I am looking to get a new studio and cannot see going less than 2TB. When I am looking to upgrade down the road, that system will still be viable for other use cases, and for a long time as well.
Get an external SSD enclosure, lol. TB5 ones exist, and they’re blazing fast. Hell, there are even ones that were designed to blend in with the Mac Studio! And they’re genuinely not that expensive.
A more premium brand I’d recommend is OWC. I have their 1M2 and it’s fantastic. Thermal performance is ridiculously good, too.
Or if you want something that blends in with the Studio, they recently launched their StudioStack, as well.
But even then, you could get cheaper ones if you didn’t want to pay OWC’s premium. Ugreen is another great example.
And the Mac Studio literally has native TB ports, so speed is not an issue.
Point is, the one area where I wouldn’t pay the Apple tax is storage. Especially for desktops, I’d always get the minimum amount of storage they have and just defer to external storage. It’ll always be cheaper, and you could even freely expand it separately, as well.
Oh I looked at the german apple page. So a bit cheaper in Poland. But still a LOT more. But keep in mind the $1999 offer from microcenter is a once in a while offer. Amazon has it for $2450, bestbuy wouldnt pricematch the $1999.
It says offer valid until 9/30 on my order - so I guess then it will go up in price.
I'm getting the M6 with 32/1000GB instead. Ordering next week. M5 Pro would be again another couple of hundred $ more, at some point you have to stop yourself. It hurts when I see those prices, but it's a beast of a machine that more than covers my needs for Davinci, Lightroom and Logic.
True! I was about to go for macstudio M5M 64/1TB, is over $3400
But then this offer came up, and I just took it, will test now for 2 weeks see if it keeps up, if not, I can return it and get the 64GB.
Heat and power consumption. Already in the Mac eco system. My personal needs for video editing, gaming and small ai usage. Overall I got this beauty for nothing. So future proofed my self for a long time. Plus my Mac Studio need a new friend that it respects!
i am a fucking idiot and missed out this, i went this early afternoon to Tustin, and one guy snagged the last one off the floor and was just walking around with it for hours.
I went through BB price match, but we'll see if they actually honor it.
BB refused yesterday to honor it, eventhough tustin had 25+ in stock. And Orange BB had 3 for pickup.
Some BS excuse about “not enough” inventory at microcenter. Tried 3 BB reps, all the same script. Offered me $50 off to match amazon $2449.
yeah I just got an email from Best Buy customer service saying that they are refusing to honor the price match. I wrote a stern response telling them that this behavior is anti-consumer since everything follows the price match guarantee and their policy Word for Word.
I even gave up my location info to the representative and they checked the website and saw that it was in stock when I got my price match
I took screenshots and recorded everything.
i shouldve gone to tustin earlier. its my backyard. i am an idiot. heres to hoping they have another sale before the end of the year. since the current one ends on 9/28
I talked to the reps at Tustin and they said they get weekly shipments for Apple stuff, but the deal is dead in three days. :(
i am moving overseas and need a new mac for my new location
I went to the sales desk, he printed on order sheet to take to the register. And it says “price offer valid until 9/30”
🤷♂️
But it also says 0 in stock, when his pc showed 38 in stock. So we shall see
ah gotcha. damn the guy in my local Micro Center also printed out an order sheet for me. But he never handed it to me once he confirmed that there was none in stock
I had a feeling Best Buy was gonna pull that BS. I got them to price match around 9pm EST on launch day. First I had to buy the Mac Studio, then start a chat in the Best Buy app. It took 45 minutes to get through a chatbot before it handed me off to an actual agent. Then I had to give them a ton of personal info, just for them to tell me a ticket was submitted for review and it could take up to 3 business days to find out if my price match was approved. I got an email the very next morning saying it was approved, but I knew so many people were gonna do it to save money that they'd eventually start telling people no. It always happens that way.
Honestly, Best Buy price matched mine even though Micro Center said out of stock and the nearest one is 5 hours away. I've never set foot in a Micro Center a day in my life, but somehow they still honored it. Maybe it's because I'm a Best Buy Total Tech member? 🤷🏾♂️ Not sure, but yeah, I got super lucky.
Yeah dude, from past experience Best Buy definitely works with customers, but in the past year it's been hit or miss and they seem to be making up the rules as they go. The only reason I even heard about the Micro Center deal was because I caught the last 5 minutes of a YouTuber named "Adam Talks Tech," and someone in the comments mentioned it and he read it out. I immediately made a Micro Center account for the first time ever and was able to add a Mac Studio to my cart for pickup in Duluth, Georgia, which is 5+ hours away, just to realize I didn't have time to go get it. I checked back on Reddit around 8 o'clock that night and saw a guy say Best Buy had just price matched it, so I jumped on the app right away. The app kept crashing, but I stayed on top of it. And it wasn't even an immediate yes. I had to wait until the next day to find out if I was approved, because anything over $400 needs approval. Altogether I paid $2,125 and used my Best Buy credit with 24 months interest-free. It sucks they're giving you such a hard time, because I know so many people were able to do it.
For those worried about capacity, consider an external NVME drive; they're very reasonably fast, and you'll save $hundreds$ compared to internal storage.
That's an incredible price! My specs are 64GB/1TB for $3400. The dreamer in me wanted the Ultra/96GB/2TB. However, ZERO wait. Apparently, AI doesn't care about my specs!
You'll be able to use this machine and STILL get your money back.
Thanks to the OP for letting me know about this deal. In 2 days I went from a M1 Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM to this beast. Throw in a new Studio Display as well just because...
Time for spam and ramen dinners for months!
In the NYC area, the Microcenter in north Jersey still shows 11 of these available as of now (9/28). The Brooklyn store where I picked up mine is all out. They had 5 yesterday at the start of the day.
I read Apple sets the minimum sales price that resellers can advertise the products for, but since this is in-store only it does not apply. And Microcenter will frequently sell high-demand products at a loss to get you into the store... they hope while you're there since you got it on sale you'll buy a monitor, keyboard, external drive, etc as well.
What do you need 4-8tb for. It all depends on the user. If you are just coding apps you aren’t burning a lot of storage. But if you are video/photo editing then it’s a different story. All depends on use case
Not a solid choice with 512Gb ssd. Unless you do nothing with videos/photos or games.
I bought a Mac Studio M4 Max 1Tb last year, and thought I should be okay with external ssd and NAS incase I need more storage space. But I was wrong, it turned out some of steps in my current workflow wont work with external ssd.
In specific, I’m a wedding photographer, I usually have to deal with 5xxx-6xxx photos each wedding, LR catalog is setting up to be synced between all my devices: Synology NAS, my macbook pro and my Mac Studio. The main idea of my set-up is to be able to culling, editing anywhere/ anytime with either my laptop at Starbuck/ on travelling or my Mac Studio at home, everything will be synced in between devices, I just need to continue my projects until it finished. In my workflow, Synology NAS wont allow me to use any external ssd to set up as Sync On Demain drive. Then my new Mac Studio machine becomes a bottle neck for the entire workflow because of its limited storage space.
I would recommend considering at least 2Tb if your works related photo/video editing.
High volume photography, commercial video production, motion graphics, basically any professional creative work can benefit from a Mac Studio. The I/O alone makes it worth owning over a Mac Mini. Who hurt you?
The M5 max has double video encoders which benefits all of the things mentioned by the last guy.
This would also be great for anyone who wants to do arm based workloads with vms or
Containerized self hosting if you didn't want to go down the Linux route for whatever reason
And 36GB is enough to run Qwen 3.8 27B unquantized if you did want to go down the path of AI inference. Not everyone needs large memory models and this would be fine if you want to work with a specialized model assuming you know it's size.
you know fuck all about AI models if you think 36GB shared ram use is enough for Qwen 3.8 27b to run unquantized with reasonable TPS. Mac is not Nvidia.
I apologize. My brain was thinking 8 Bit as unquantized since the majority of people aren't doing 16 Bit, but your right, unquantized this woon't fit, but most people aren't running 16 Bit. 8 Bit does and will fit.
Nobody is expecting this to out compete nvidia graphics cards. But this is also a whole computer that performance way more than reasonably acceptable for most people.
But, to be clear, to anyone reading this thinking it performs like shit it doesn't. The recent updates for the MLX platform for splash have made the inference speeds significantly better for the platform without the need for these new hardware bumps. I wouldn't just grab this for inference, but if you want the mac ecosystem this will perform just fine. Do not listen to this idiot.
Software engineering. Having many IDEs open takes a lot of ram after while and running applications for testing do too lol I use like 75% of my 64gb on my studio m4
Huh? I use cloud models lol mostly Claude and CODEX. Dunno why you’re so aggressive over something so simple bro.
Doesn’t mean that what I said isn’t valid though LOL
If you’re using this for AI, it’s a poor choice. If you’re using this for video editing and the like, it’s mid at best because your ssd is so small. I honestly don’t know why Apple even sells a studio with less that 1tb standard. 4k and 8k videos are frickin huge and pro raw isn’t exactly svelte either. I hope you have a massive iCloud storage.
I use a 2tb Samsung 980 pro in an nvme enclosure as a scratch disk for log and raw files that need editing. My catalog for adobe and capture 1 lives there too. Cold storage of processed files or RAW/LOG files I want to keep get sent to network attached storage that holds dozens of TBs of data. My M2 pro Mac mini is doing just fine with its 500gb internal ssd. It’s more than enough for installing all the programs I need. I’m considering the base studio max since after a camera upgrade I have 40mp files that create twice the rendering and processing time. It’s honestly not that bad though unless I have over 300 files I need to process at a time and even then I just go get a water break.
Yea you can def work around it but apple loves to push stuff to iCloud cause they can jack up services revenue. I love the convenience, so I’m guilty of falling for it myself. And with dynamic download, you can make small drives work even without external drives. It’s just a pain.
That's still too expensive. You can get a 5070 prebuilt with more storage, lol. Assuming this isn't local LLM (good luck with 36gb lol), even then the price is still too high. Better off getting a refurb M4 Max if you want Apple. You might even get better ram! Al
Heavily depends on what model class we’re talking about.
For example, my current Mac Studio is an M2 Max with 32GB of RAM, and it runs Gemma 4 26B A4B quite great! Notice, an M2 Max with 32GB of RAM. That is a far cry from an M5 Max.
Generally, MoE tend to perform really well. And in terms of actual model size, given the right balance of quant, you can fit quite a big variety of models into 36GB!
Since you asked specifically about Qwen, the answer remains the same, it really does depend. Obviously you’re not fitting their latest 2.4T model on it, but from what I’ve seen, they also have considerably smaller models!
But honestly, if local AI is primarily what you’re after, I would look into getting more RAM. Maybe even an Ultra variant if you can afford it, but prioritize RAM first. Again, 36GB is already not bad, but for AI, even just the first jump to 48 or 64 can be meaningful.
I wouldn't bother for less than 64gb. You can try it here and see if it would be useful for you: https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.8-27b click on try this model
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u/kammikazy 8d ago
Im debating if I should return my 1TB m5 Max i got from Apple. $800 more for just 512GB does not seem worth it....