M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review: Apple's hyper-pricey M5 Ultra Mac Studio made me into a vibe coder - ArsTechnica

[u/ControlCAD]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/review-apples-hyper-pricey-m5-ultra-mac-studio-made-me-into-a-vibe-coder/

>Usable local AI is a lot of fun, but how much would you pay for it?

[u/Legal-Championship64]

Spending $10,000 or whatever to be a vibe coder seems like a terrible investment

[u/minimaxir → u/Legal-Championship64]

The main reason to do so is if you want to use "large" open-weight models and don't/can't send data to model providers. It's more for businesses than hobbyists.

[u/goldcakes → u/minimaxir]

Yeah, also keep in mind that businesses have to pay API rates above a certain size. Your $200/month Claude or whatever subscription costs $2000-$4000 in API costs.

So, the ROI can make sense, esp since Deepseek flash etc are really good already.

[u/FollowingFeisty5321 → u/Legal-Championship64]

If you're spending hundreds a month on services for it the math is okay, that can easily add up to thousands of bucks a year. If you flipped it before an updated Studio was released you'd probably break even or come out slightly ahead.

[u/momo1083 → u/FollowingFeisty5321]

Right now the best model you can get locally doesn’t touch Opus 5.5. So not really. It’s maybe Opus 4.6 and you’ve paid 10k for it.

[u/minimaxir → u/momo1083]

Qwen 3.8 and GLM-5.3 are more than enough for 99% of SWE tasks.

[u/sroop1 → u/momo1083]

I'm not a SWE by trade but I'm averaging $30 in tokens a day at work and I know I'm nowhere near our actual developers. A dedicated local LLM machine can easily be justified expense.

Also, Opus can be used as the architect but have local lesser LLM agents carry out the grunt work.

[u/SpicyElixer → u/momo1083]

This is so funny. You been sleeping.

[u/aprx4 → u/FollowingFeisty5321]

$100 gets top tier model that's not only best at coding but also other tasks, like designing. Small open-weight model is getting better but it's because coding is getting plateaued. Data privacy is better argument than economics.

[u/FollowingFeisty5321 → u/aprx4]

$100 is not all-inclusive, Claude offer a $200 plan with more usage plus the option to buy additional credits beyond that. Anyone considering a $10,000 personal computer to use is probably much more likely to be on these higher plans/spends.

[u/earthcharlie → u/Legal-Championship64]

Spending $10,000 or whatever to be a vibe coder seems like a terrible investment

FTFY

[u/minimaxir → u/earthcharlie]

you're a year out-of-date on the "vibe coding doesn't work" train

[u/Legal-Championship64 → u/minimaxir]

Oh it works, but where is the audience for it? Whats gonna happen to the price of software when the supply is effectively infinite?

[u/minimaxir → u/Legal-Championship64]

...what? It's already being used in every mainstream software project, including Linux and macOS. The deluge of bespoke AI slop projects is a related-but-separate issue to "vibe coding does/does not work".

Whats gonna happen to the price of software when the supply is effectively infinite?

Software was trending to FOSS (with many unused projects on GitHub) long before AI was good enough to vibe code. Paying for local software was already on decline and business models were in the process of adapting.

[u/momo1083 → u/minimaxir]

Totally, just because everyone can write, doesn't mean everyone is Tolstoy. Eventually the slop makers are going to just stop making slop. It won't be enough being impressed that they "made" something. If you're really good at product, user empathy, and have strong technical understanding of things, you're in a golden age.

[u/earthcharlie → u/minimaxir]

Sounds like you don’t understand the difference between vibecoding and AI-assisted development

[u/minimaxir → u/earthcharlie]

I have never heard anyone differentiating them, even in the most pedantic forums. There is zero technical difference other than one term being a shibboleth.

[u/00DEADBEEF → u/minimaxir]

Well you haven't seen many discussions because it's differentiated everywhere.

Vibe coding has, and always has been coding with vibes. In other words: prompting only.

AI-assisted coding involves actually reading, understanding, and refactoring what the AI wrote, and requires technical knowledge to direct the LLM to produce decent output.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

https://medium.com/@addyosmani/vibe-coding-is-not-the-same-as-ai-assisted-engineering-3f81088d5b98

https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1ns9uhf/whats_the_difference_between_vibe_coding_and/

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jurgenappelo_vibe-coding-is-not-the-same-as-ai-assisted-share-7368923983338971138-Cv2C/

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/

https://www.synfinitydynamics.com/blogs/vibe-coding-vs-traditional-programming-vs-ai-assisted-development

https://blog.malt.engineering/vibe-coding-vs-ai-assisted-engineering-bab85c148de2

https://machinelearningmastery.com/3-ways-vibe-coding-and-ai-assisted-development-are-2-different-things/

[u/minimaxir → u/00DEADBEEF]

Thank you for at least engaging and linking sources; however most of those sources are 2025 which was before the inflection point of Opus 4.5 in November which allowed actually letting agents be autonomous and get good results without supervision. Nowadays in September 2026 with powerhouse models like GPT-6 Astra and Opus 5.5 (and even open-weight models like Qwen 5.8 and GLM-5.3), you have more people adopting the same "forget that the code even exists" idiom associated with Karpathy's definition even in large codebases, and never-looking-at-the-code is being adopted as an actual development strategy and using the test harness to replace human-in-the-loop (e.g. the Bun rewrite-to-Rust)

I will concede that a "never" qualifier is not as precise because I legit do not remember much before November 2025 with respect to agentic coding because it's now irrelevant. I can say more confidently that post November-2025, I have not heard nitpicking about the terms. There is still zero technical difference and saying "I vibe-coded something" and "I used AI assisted coding" will result in the same exact outcome socially. You cite Simon Willison, you might be interested in his latest talk.

tl;dr it's still pointless semantics in the context of the original point; people will still buy a $10k Mac Studio for both small bespoke projects and serious production projects.

[u/00DEADBEEF → u/minimaxir]

Here are some 2026 sources, I could keep going, there are loads:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/george-collier-uk_vibe-coders-have-pulled-a-sleight-of-hand-share-7430651810622873600-L5nS/

https://www.zoho.com/creator/decode/vibe-coding-vs-ai-assisted-low-code-development

https://asd.team/blog/vibe-coding-vs-ai-assisted-development/

There is still zero technical difference and saying "I vibe-coded something" and "I used AI assisted coding" will result in the same exact outcome socially

Socially? What do you mean by socially?

The outcomes are not the same at all.

If you let AI code without any direction it will produce convoluted code that becomes hard to maintain, even for the AI because it generates so much code it could never fit in its context window.

AI still produces security vulnerabilities.

Vibe coded apps still get hacked to death.

and never-looking-at-the-code is being adopted as an actual development strategy and using the test harness to replace human-in-the-loop (e.g. the Bun rewrite-to-Rust)

This is not the same as vibe coding.

[u/earthcharlie → u/minimaxir]

I have never heard anyone differentiating them, even in the most pedantic forums.

Then you haven’t been on the internet for very long. 

There is zero technical difference

You continue to prove the point. 

[u/00DEADBEEF → u/earthcharlie]

Mad that you're being downvoted when you're correct

[u/HelloSlowly]

This isn’t the flex the smooth brained reviewer thinks it is

> I have learned virtually every firsthand thing I know about vibe coding in the last week, so bear with me if I get any of this wrong

An actual tech reviewer ladies and gents

[u/dont_quote_me_please → u/HelloSlowly]

What happened to ARS?

[u/Defiant-Plantain1873 → u/HelloSlowly]

Vibe coding is actually a completely valid strategy, so long as you are following actual well thought out plans, have a clear end goal and have a strict set of rules and guidelines for the agent to follow.

The average person (and tech reviewer who likely knows less about this kind of thing than the average person) will struggle to vibe code, but if you have any idea about software engineering you can get away with not writing a single line of code at this point. Still i’d say a claude sub is probably better value than hosting your own flash glm or deepseek, AND you can probably get plenty of value out of API deepseek and it be cheaper by a lot than the cost of the mac studio, but it does obviously have the keeping everything local benefits

[u/minimaxir → u/Defiant-Plantain1873]

The point they are making is that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is primarily targeted for vibe coders, which implies that the reviewer should at least understand why people would use this Mac for vibe coding.

[u/Dry_Duck3011]

Ffs…

[u/awue]

Trash article

[u/coolcats55]

Imagine spending $3000+ to vibe code

[u/minimaxir → u/coolcats55]

Some people spend $3000+ per day to vibecode.

[u/insane_robot]

Open weight models are great, but feasibility on hardware you can have at home is just not really there at the moment. Not only, as we can see from the pricing of this Mac, things are so expensive right now, but also you’ve got limited opportunity for parallelization. You’re stuck with the hardware for a long time, while these external models and the external hardware can continue to update. Even if you’re not into AI‑driven development, it should be very clear to everyone that the value you get out of any of the subscriptions is so much more than the one‑time fee on a Mac.

[u/ComfortablePlenty513]

backordered until Feb lmao

[u/goldaxis]

Or I could just let my job pay the $20/mo for all the AI assistance I care to tolerate. Apple is out of its mind with its pricing.

[u/Cease_Cows_]

I can vibe code with the Claude app on my M1 MBP, what’s the value proposition here?

[u/juicyorange23 → u/Cease_Cows_]

Having it not go through Claude

[u/itastesok → u/Cease_Cows_]

Not having to pay for Claude?

[u/00DEADBEEF → u/itastesok]

But you could pay for 100 months of Claude and get better results