Apple's $11,299 Mac Studio M5 Ultra Delivers 30% Gains as Price Jumps Over 50%
Updated
Updated · Engadget · Sep 21
Apple's $11,299 Mac Studio M5 Ultra Delivers 30% Gains as Price Jumps Over 50%
3 articles · Updated · Engadget · Sep 21
Summary
$11,299 buys a Mac Studio M5 Ultra with 256GB RAM and 2TB storage, but Engadget says its extra speed over the M5 Max justifies the cost only for select power users.
30% is roughly the performance uplift versus the M3 Ultra across CPU, GPU and neural tests, while AI gains over the M5 Max were only about 10% in synthetic benchmarks despite the much higher price.
36 CPU cores, an 80-core GPU and up to 512GB unified memory make it Apple's most powerful desktop, with 14GB/s write speeds and strong results in 8K editing, transcription and local AI workloads.
$5,500 is the new base price for the M5 Ultra model, up from $4,000 for the prior version, as rising memory costs and Apple's RAM markups push the machine further toward AI developers and top-end studios.