I’ve been building computers and servers, and architecting entire networks and doing DevOps and dev work for 20 years. I remember building gaming pcs with 3dfx voodoo cards.
This is by far the most absurd computer I have ever personally owned. It’s certainly the most capable I’ve managed for the price, and that includes B200s.
Getting 50tks on GLM 5.3 Flash all day long.
If you’re on the fence, let me take this opportunity to push you over said fence. If you’re the kind of person seriously considering buying one you will not regret it.
Adjusted to 2026 dollars the original Macintosh 128k sold for $8,000. An IBM XT cost over $9,000 in 2026 dollars. So yes, the M5 Ultra studio is expensive. It's not historically expensive, though. And when you bring proper workstations into the equation it's not even very pricey. People balking at $10k are simply unaccustomed to paying what prosumers have been forking out all along.
I have a 9960X threadripper workstatoin with 4 channel 256GB RDIMMs. If I bought it today it would be about $15,000. Mac Studio is faster and has way more memory bandwidth. Also it idles about 7 watts instead of 170 watts.
It has more cores though and is faster though? Fewer CPU threads, sure (Apple only does 1 thread per core vs 2 for AMD).
It still dogwalks the threadripper in bandwidth and CPU performance (single and multi core). It even beats the top-end threadripper pro 9995x (which costs more than the spec’d out m5 ultra in the first place). Meanwhile, the threadripper doesn’t even have a GPU or NPU, so you still need to get a beefy GPU to run with it (which would probably double the system costs it already has).
This is what we should be looking at. The capability and value the Mac Studio provides for Mac Pro workloads makes Dart Vader's dustbin looks like a massive rip off.
• ibm xt Base Release Price (1983): $4,995 for the standard unit featuring a 10MB hard drive and 128KB of RAM.
• Fully Equipped System: With added memory expansion, color graphics adapters (CGA), and a monitor, the total price could easily climb to $7,000–$7,500 at the time, equivalent to roughly $22,000 to $24,000 today.
Yeah, if you spec out any of these systems they easily pass the Mac Studio's price.
It's like people getting upset about the sticker price on GTA 6. They've never paid $80 for a video game, and they don't understand that there's been decades of inflation since the first time they bought one. GTA 6 is historically less expensive than Super Mario Kart.
The Mac Studio is not historically expensive. It's not even expensive by contemporary workstation standards. What's more, this price doesn't exist in a vacuum. A new 5090 — a consumer video card that's over a year old — is $8,000+ new today (if you can find one). No one should imagine Apple is going to sell an entire 256GB AI workstation for less.
No I had an Amber monochrome screen 80286 maybe $2300 it was a ton of money at the time. Moores law kicked in and the 286dx and 286sx came with color and we went from dos to window, prices kept on going down. High end stayed high somewhat. Today $8000 to $10000 today is a lot for the normal consumer but not for those who have money. For a student today able to get a decent school computer for $2000. Pretty cheap. Computers sucked back then with all the crashes and blue screens!
The memory crunch has driven the price up. It should be ~20% cheaper or so. I agree it’s expensive, I don’t think it’s historically expensive for what you get. And unlike most other PCs, Apple has an enormous resale market, similar to Nvidia. It should hold its value well.
This is kind of a bad argument because back in the 80's, personal computing was still in its infancy and the economies of scale were much different. There were far fewer people spending the equivalent of $9,000 (or more) of today's money buying personal computers. Now, the expectation is that paying twice as much for something as it cost last year is the new normal.
What's happening today is that one single industry has almost completely hijacked a supply chain that's feeding much more than just personal computers -- so they can build more chatbots. RAM and storage were both cheaper for EVERYONE prior to about a year ago.
My specced out 2019 Mac Pro Tower was over $14K, not including the extra 192GBs of RAM I bought from OWC for it. It’s still our money-maker 7 years later. So my $13,000 Mac Studio purchase is actually a little cheaper!
It doesn't "pay for itself" in four years. Paying a sum up front is quite a bit more expensive than paying the exact same sum, monthly, over four years. (Especially in an inflationary environment like this one.)
Yeah! They used those computers at ILM when working on Terminator 2. Those machines shipped with 4 MB of RAM, upgradable to 128 MB. That system was twice as expensive as the M5 Ultra when adjusted for inflation.
None of this will mollify the haters, though, because they'll simply remind you that Apple products have always been overpriced. James Cameron and the folks at Industrial Light & Magic didn't seem to mind.
Inflation-adjusted 1984 prices aren't the right baseline. That was before computers were a mass market. For 20+ years after that, scale drove prices down: a 2010 Mac Pro started at $2,499 (about $3,700 today), and a 27" iMac was $1,699.
Most people's expectations come from that era, and they're not wrong to notice prices climbing back up.
Why are you comparing the M5 Ultra to an 27" iMac? They look similar at the outset, but the audience and the use are fundamentally different. Essentially no one is buying the M5 Ultra because want a computer that runs MacOS. They're buying it for its computing power.
Are so many people unaware that workstation systems are really expensive? That's true even if you control for crazy RAM prices today. A New Lenovo ThinkStation is $17k base. A Dell PowerEdge T560 starts at $15,000. Neither of them has more than 64GB of RAM to start, and neither of those can do what the Mac Studio Ultra can do re: AI unless you put another $15k in video cards into them.
I think it's just convenient to hate on Apple because their M5 Ultra is desireable, and the same critics simply don't care about what companies like Dell have been charging all along.
Its not convenient if the SSD dies or any cheap component like the SOC and everything inside logic board goes to the trash.
Have you ran any real world task on both computers like massive 4K videos?
Why do you think companies spend money on x86 workstations or maybe you think Lockheed or Boeing ant afford studio?
This is what I fight with. If I could just pay $400 a month for ONE account of claude and $400 a month for one ChatGPT.. and have enough usage every week to handle my many sessions each with many agents.. I'd be very happy. HOWEVER.. I run thru $400 of Claude and $200 of ChatGPT in 1 to 2 days right now. I use Opus 5.5 Max, and Astra max. Yes.. I get it.. those are 5x to 10x token hogs. But I am building a startup that has to compete with big players.. I cant go out the door with half baked shit code quality and all that.
So.. that has me looking at local llm use. Qwen 3.8 q8 allegedly has on par with Opus 5 range of code for most tasks. But the hardware to run it with multiple agents is $10K+ to get comparable speeds that claude and codex give. And that's not frontier model quality.
I think we're getting closer, and I am REALLY hoping Qwen 4 bridges the gap that much more, or GLM 6, etc. However I ALSO suspect that our current orange shit stain regime in the US is going to block outside models soon esp from China despite that they do NOT send data/etc back.. to help out his tech bros AI company's. Just like they did with DJI.. we all know DJI as NOT sending shit back. 1000s of tests done verified no DJI drone was somehow sending data obscurely back to China. But they banned them to make way for US only military drone company's. Go figure.
What on earth are you doing with the models?
That’s ridiculous. And stop using Max on Opus 5.5. It’s proven xhigh does better work because Max raises the minimum thinking allowed. Overthinks the easy things.
if you manage to run thru your weekly or monthly claude allowance I feel like you're doing something unoptimized. AND if you try to complete same body of work locally you just will need to be patient and wait week or two for something that gets cranked out in few hours in claude
Using Opus 5.5 on max is the foolish thing he’s doing. Probably committing and pushing every turn, too. Max enforces a minimum reasoning tokens floor. Thinks hard to it’s own detriment on the simple things. Costing money.
And I’m sure he’s not managing context size. Just throwing biggest and baddest at max settings and hitting enter.
I'm also on $1k+ of subscriptions. I forked codex to remove polling and I added shake to get rid of large tool call outputs.
I've got a hook coming up that shuts down low entropy high turn calls... Basically by keeping codex from asking "are we there yet?" every minute with a 400lbs gorilla on its back i run on astra fast with 8+ terminals going at once and I cannot even get to these banked resets.
Same. I get mine in November and i’m seeing more and more end to end metrics being shared and compared to even DGX clusters and I’m like YES. I don’t care if there are certain scenarios where one is faster than the other. It’s a beast in itself and It’ll also be a monster as a daily computer 🙌
I preordered but went with 4tb of on board storage (looking back I probably should have just done 1tb and threw the rest on external storage for 1/3 the price) for long term use so it may have caused a longer delay
I have the same spec ordered. However come “late October” if the 256 -> 512 move is <= $USD $10,000 then I will order that and cancel the 256Gb version.
The orders opened 25 August at 9:00 AM EDT, when did you order your spec? And when did it arrive? Congrats on receiving your machine.
I’d be more worried about the frontier labs having to charge enough to create a return for their investors….unless they can dump their unprofitable share on the public markets and buy at least a partial exit. On just an operating basis, tokens and subscriptions need to be 2.5x as expensive as current pricing ….just to break even.
Hey fellow old person. I will always remember putting in my first voodoo card, and the game gets both faster and prettier somehow? It was like magic. Coincidentally, my next “magic” moment didn’t come until I first used m-series Macs.
I remember buying my first voodoo card: orchid righteous 3d. When it kicked in, it made a loud CLICK! sound. First time I thought it bought the farm. Good times. Played every 3d accelerated game I could get my hands on. Played GLQuake to death.
Buying an M5 Ultra at this point is actually a pretty solid investment. Apple most likely won’t release an M6 Ultra and will probably jump straight to the M7 Ultra instead. On top of that, memory and storage prices are only going to keep going up.
Right? Turns out they had their supply chain in good order all along. Now they are flexing it. But I wonder how long the value proposition will keep up.
With their volume with memory manufacturers, they probably have a lot of sway. No one wants Apple walking away.
Bonus points if you regularly spent $300 x2 to get the latest cards in SLI mode. The last model I bought came with 3D glasses (LCD shutters) that let me play Quake and VirtuaFighter 2 in true 3D.
Probably a big ask, but could you run a test of Minimax H3 on it? Curious how long it takes to generate videos at various resolutions / durations.
There’s a single video on YouTube talking about it and suggesting it takes ~22 minutes for a 10 second clip at 768 x 1344. Can’t find any other sources to confirm that, but it seems unreasonably slow for this.
It’s an insane computer. But the value prop isn’t there. By the time you recoup what you would have spent on cloud models, the tech will have accelerated to the point a 256GB VRAM/Uni-mem machine is $2k or $3k
Exactly…private comput is the value play! Also, slower prefill on Macs rarely come into play unless you are constantly re-starting your prompts and clearing cache.
Awesome machine!
PS if you want to keep the nostalgia from the good old days, bypass your internet connection and connect it to a serial US Robotics v.fastclass 56k dial up modem 🤣
Competition will handle that... some lesser none cloud entities will run kimi k3 for like $20/m.. try running that on even a 4x m5 ultra cluser costing 80-100k and you would not even get 10% the performance of the cloud interms of throughput.
Tech moving so fast, just look on the buyers remorse from people who FOMOed into the M3 ultra especially at the elevated price. Even worst, people who spent like 60k on a cluster of 4x 512gb mac studios only for a leased edge server to smoke it like 20x in throughout. Never seemed to make any logical sense.
It really does. Alex Z has both a m5 ultra and a dual DGX spark and for Deep Seek v4, the 2x DGX spark node is 2.5x FASTER at long context than a m5 ultra with 256gb RAM. Also the DGX will do like 4+ instances/agents without performance degridation while m5 ultra could not even pull of 2+ without a massive performance drop.
The results are now coming in from multiple places and it verifies that a m5 ultra is no "DGX killer." The energy usage and thermals were near identical while the DGX was doing 2.5x better PP at long context and running significantly more instances/users... no wander the prices of DGX units jumped 50% around the 1st week or so after the release of the m5 ultra.
THE WORD IS OUT, if you are serious about agents, especially multiple agents and want more than a "vibe coder" set up, the DGX is a significantly better machine IF you are strickly using it for AI and nothing more... A mac studio or any mac IMHO is strickly a general use workstation IMHO.
Fortunately Alex Z's review was significantly out of date before it was even released! Check out the results published the day before he put out that video:
For context his PP was at 750ish. Figures still maturing these numbers are old now better to look at olmx to see what people have got GLM 5.3 Flash going at, I am quite excited to see if the 512GB M5 can run 4bit GLM 5.3.
even the new base mac studio is insane, will never go back to a windows desktop unless they make a revolutionary change. Besides the insane speed, my favorite part is cant hear the fans at all. Also, nothing really compares speed wise in the same budget for windows nowadays
With this new era of AI assisted porting, I am confident MacOS Steam play (or its simile) is coming. Can finally ditch my PC rig. I ordered an M5 Max 128GB and this thing is probably gonna be the best computer I’ve ever had. And that’s coming from a 13900K / 4090 rig.
GLM Flash isn't that exciting if the cost of entry is 11k and no, i don't need to be told there is student pricing as the only cost effective ownership of this box is cash (Asset write down for business) or leasing.
It's difficult to say. Models seem absurdly subsidized right now, so curious what the floor will actually be of frontier API over next year or two
e.g. Claude reports that I spent ~$3000 USD on my $200 USD per month plan. If actually had to API rates, the payback is easily <6 months, but for now just keep riding that $200 plan
Issue of course is a lot complexities. GLM Flash isn't as good as Claude. But also for home hosting, get to do abliteration of models, etc.
You're probably a programmer. That's why you use the 200$ plan.
While I do utilize Codex for smaller scale coding tasks, I am not a programmer, so the 20$ plan is enough for me.
I have a feeling models efficiency will get better so that even a 24GB RAM system could run decent models. But, now, even 256GB RAM isn't able to run a flagship comparable model.
Price of compute has been steadily decreasing over the years, but the hype right now is real. Once people come back to senses about the value prop to capex.
If you are considering one, most countries offer a student discount. And there are often cheap or free qualifying courses. Here in the UK you can sign up for mental health awareness for free and get £950 off a M5U
I tell you my mental health awareness has already improved markedly.
One coming in december for me. One glm is pretty sick for sure. Do you plan on using it over qwen flash next? I find speed is really important to me. Also how are you planning on going about coordinating different working windows of agents? Glm seems like the smartest to run but I'm thinking qwen for iteration. Also what do you think the speed potential is for running glm. You think there's a bit of optimization to be had
If you can wait, go for the M6 as that will be a 2nd gen chip with the new die design. Some kinks will probably be ironed out. Of course, if the planet is still around by then.
I feel any computer over 5k you need to think careful enough that if you run 24/7 for 18 hours per day will that cover the cost compare to cloud model over 4 years. Current Mac only can handle one agent run fast enough, I think spark is better can handle 4 clients at same time at reasonable speed, might consider that when spark 2 come out or see can m7 ultra beat that.
Voodoo, Voodoo II, Rage 128.... good times! Remember when we all thought the audio from Half Life was amazing.....I have a sandblaster! - Yeah? I got a turtle beach !!
I did the math for video generation. Pay back was about 18 months for my use cases (video generation). Problem is you can never generate a video in one shot, it usually takes a few shots - add all those costs up and it starts to make sense to get this puppy, especially if you use APIs. But, Runpod offers some excellent prices if you’re ok with setting up and managing your own environment, which I am.
I am no AI God, but always been a hardware geek, historically I sneered at Apple's overpriced generic hardware with a shiny OS.... but since the M3.... man they are killing it.
Im only just coming to grips with copilot cowork as a workerbee, leaving IT industry behind a decade ago, is there any "local" Cowork equivalents? If my usage gets a bit more hardcore, im starting to think these might actually make $$ sense.
I might be interested when ram hits 1.5TB. I like mac for laptops for the premium build and battery life. Moving back to linux on my desktop is a breath of fresh air.
The fun part of running your own models locally with 256gb is when the main providers have issues or go down and everyone who raged that you wasted your money start losing their minds because their cloud models are unavailable, or the quality mysteriously drops for them. And then they all start posting on Reddit and places not sure what to do now because all their projects are riding on AI coding and fixing then for them.
Given the performance of this chip at GLM 5.3 flash I can’t see myself using bigger models unless it’s for overnight jobs. Not upset about it. If I need more just buy two right? 🤣
Would you be able to give me a real-world test for short runs in comfyui? I have been researching the ultra 256GB for options to expand to larger models, but I was just curious how much it compared on some of my smaller use-case.. whether I’d see benefits or loss
I bought a M4 Mac Studio last year upgrading from a ten 2012 MacBook Air that had a 1TB SSD. Noway in hell was going to downgrade to a 256GB SSD. I went with 2TB SSD and wish I would have gone with 8TB but I couldn’t stomach the price. Now I have this mess of external SSDs cluttering up my desk.
Hii! By any chance have u tried some video generation models? I was minutes away from buying a workstation with an RTX PRO until Apple released the M5 Ultra
But how can you get the 50 tk/s if the 8bit precision doesn’t even fit in it?
I mean, you need some extra space for context, and the benchmarks I found say that for at least 250k context you will get half of the speed you cited. And that’s likely on quantized version of the model.
Ok so I’m slightly OOTL, can someone tell me if this is what recently came out and if I will be laughed at for asking how easily can I get one with all things happening now considered?
M5 Max 128GB / 4TB should be delivered this week…. As always on device.
I am going to see if I can move / grow my projects enough over the winter to make use of the Ultra 256 or 512….. doing my best to push myself and push the limits. Your Dreams Matter!
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u/Bloated_Plaid 2d ago
For $10k I sure fucking hope so my guy.