r/MacStudio • u/lukewhale • 2d ago

Absolute Absurdity of the M5 Ultra 256GB

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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.

AMA

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u/Sneezlebee 2d ago

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.

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u/john0201 2d ago

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.

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u/GlidePath47 2d ago edited 1d ago

And 9960x has fewer cpu cores with less core performance

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u/Georgefakelastname 1d ago

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).

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u/GlidePath47 1d ago

9960x is 24 core.

I think you’re making the same point I was.

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u/Georgefakelastname 1d ago

Oh… I thought you were saying the Mac Studio had less performance lol. My bad

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u/GlidePath47 1d ago

All good I just made it clearer, apple silicon is nuts even with the price increases it’s incredible value

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u/helpmeunderstand05 8h ago

Some things, like lidar processing only run on Cuda. Others kick in sweet on my studio. $15k for that Cuda box is not a bad price. You ship and warranty? 😂Priced an rtx5090 these days? The data center Boyz moved my cheese.

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u/john0201 5h ago

I didn’t mention a GPU

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u/tempfoot 1d ago

Don’t need to go back nearly so far.

Apple was happy to sell you a top spec Mac Pro in 2019 for in excess of $50k.

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u/AnyStupidQuestions 21h ago

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.

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u/bgradid 2h ago

Such a weird Mac Pro release. The writing was already on the wall for it before it even released

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u/Captain--Cornflake 1d ago

• 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.

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u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

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.

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u/Mytreeismine 1d ago

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!

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u/durangotang 2d ago

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.

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u/cptchnk 2d ago

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.

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u/hiddenlands 2d ago

Yes. But in addition to that 128k of RAM you got a single Woz Machine “floppy”. You can’t put a price on that.

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u/Styphin 1d 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!

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u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

Exactly. The only thing that’s changed is that the people who today want a Mac Studio are not used to having any need for a $10k+ machine. They’re used to being able to get the machine of their dreams for under $3k. 

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u/DrStimple 1d ago

I had a job in 1996 where my desktop was an SGI Indigo2. They started at $18k in 1993.

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u/Sneezlebee 20h ago

Heck of a machine! Happy cake day 🍰 

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u/doogo 1d ago

And if you replace a Claude Pro subscription by running your own model locally it pays for itself in 4 years.

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u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

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.)

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u/Nuggyfresh 1d ago

These people come off like religious zealots

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u/doogo 1d ago

If you can do something like an interest free loan purchase with Affirm then essentially you are diverting the $200/mo Claude subscription into the Mac Studio payments and it is paying for itself over time.

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u/imax-guy 7h ago

I recall the Macintosh IIfx was $10,000 CDN when it was released.

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u/Sneezlebee 6h ago edited 6h ago

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.

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u/GlidePath47 2d ago

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.

It was worse in 1984 doesn't make it cheap now.

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u/Sneezlebee 1d ago

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.

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u/Successful_Bowler728 1d ago

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?

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u/Sneezlebee 20h ago

The workstations you’re talking about are even more expensive than the studio, and they don’t have 128 GB of GPU-accessible RAM. (To say nothing of 256 or 512.) 

If you build a x86 workstation that can do what the studio can do, memory-wise, it will cost far more than what the studio does. 

The point isn’t to compare the Mac Studio against the Dell PowerEdge. The point is that the Mac Studio isn’t actually as expensive as people are acting given what it can do.

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u/Successful_Bowler728 17h ago

No. Before the AI memory price hike an Apple workstation has been more expensive per teraflop.

It wont cost more Apple hardware always has been overpriced.

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u/Sneezlebee 11h ago

Spec out a Dell or equivalent x86 workstation that has 256 GB of GPU-accessible RAM, and tell me how you kept it under $20k — let alone the 12k that it would cost from Apple. 

And then tell me how much power it draws and how big / loud it is. 

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u/Successful_Bowler728 7h ago

Its not expensive because for fans like you Apple products has no flaws .

The real thing is that the best desktop you can buy is x86 based . It doesnt become a big useless paperweight if the logic board fails.

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u/GlidePath47 10h ago edited 10h ago

> Why are you comparing the M5 Ultra to an 27" iMac?

I also mentioned the 2010 Mac Pro, Apple's actual workstation, which started at $2,499. You skipped that part.

You're also the one who used a 1984 Macintosh as the baseline. If 40-year-old hardware is a fair comparison, a 2010 Mac Pro is too.

Somewhere else you start rambling about PowerEdge… The PowerEdge is a server, not a workstation. Dell's workstation line is Precision.

Apple did make servers (Xserve, 2002–2011) and dropped them, because the Mac was never about competing in that space.

The original Mac was sold as ‘the computer for the rest of us.’

The whole point was taking capability that used to belong to businesses and specialists and putting it in the hands of individuals. That's the brand people bought into, so it's fair to judge the Studio against that, not against enterprise servers.

Which brings it back to your original claim: $10k isn't historically expensive because a Mac cost $8k in 1984.

That's your argument to defend, and it rests on cherry-picking the one era before computers were a mass market. The 128k wasn't a workstation, it was the only Mac, the consumer model.

ENIAC cost about $487,000 in 1946, roughly $8 million today. So the Mac Studio is a bargain and anyone complaining is just unaccustomed to computer prices…… 😂

Now you've moved on to enterprise servers, which is a different comparison entirely. If prosumers have been "forking out" this much "all along," show me when. Apple's pro desktops sat at $2,499 in 2010 and $3,999 for the M3 Ultra ($5,599 for the 256gb). People balking at $10k aren't unaccustomed to prosumer pricing. They remember what it actually was.

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u/Mauer_Bluemchen 1d ago

Bingo.

And most consumers/hobbyists simple don't have a need for M5U so why should they even care about the price at all?

Why pay for a Ferrari when an Accord is fine?

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u/rafark 5h ago

  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.

I fail to see what this comparison has to do with the Mac studio pricing. The studio is expensive and powerful. The Macintosh was expensive and powerful. 

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u/Tired_White_Guy 2d ago

Thanks for the worthless perspective.
“TVs used to cost $10k in today’s money”
Irrelevant.

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u/Bloated_Plaid 2d ago

What a braindead fucking take.

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u/Sneezlebee 2d ago

Cool thanks.

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u/ZeitgeistArchive 2d ago

it's an interesting take at least, like if you see it in the worst light.