Holy price increase, in 2025 the equivalent M3 Ultra (32-core CPU / 80-core GPU with 512GB of RAM) cost $9,499.<p>Now the equivalent M5 Ultra (36-core CPU / 80-core GPU with 512GB of RAM) is priced at $22,299.
Top spec build is $29,799 + tx. While local AI is certainly an enticing prospect I can’t really imagine myself ever seeing a return on that investment.<p>Further they’ve already begun hyping the M7 Ultra and even if that got delayed until 2028, this machine only being SOTA for 1.5yrs is a hilariously short window in which to maximize your investment.
Enthusiasts generally don't see a "return on investment" on their luxury cars or their boats either, but they enjoy what they're able to do with them and aren't exactly embarassed about the class signaling of being a high spender.<p>Add to that the smattering people with genuinely justifiable use cases, and you have more than enough demand for a limit-pushing, highest-margin model of your product platform.
I'd be willing to spend that much if it unlocked the ability to run top-of-the-line open weight models at their best quantization at a decent enough speed for personal agentic use. We're clearly not there yet, and I just can't imagine dropping the price of a brand new car on something that will only get me heavily quantized versions of the smaller models.
It is not exactly an investment, but I guess a lot depends on what you actually would want to do with it.
Those are corporate dollars making that spend, thats the only people.
Wait, where is Apple hyping the M7 Ultra?
The 256GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio can (AFAIK) run the latest open weight Flash models but only 2 bit quant. This by extension will be able to do 4 and that's a big difference. We're not at the point of running 1T+ parameter models locally <i>yet</i> but we'll be there by 2030 easily.<p>I personally believe that local LLMs have a huge captive market for people who cannot or should not host that data with a third-party. For example, it's an open question of whether or not using cloud LLMs by lawyers breaks attorney-client privilege. HIPAA with medical records is another one.<p>But I want to expound on one point that you made, which is really important. You say that this spec only has a SOTA life of ~1.5 years and that's an issue. Take that to its natural conclusion. Why isn't it an issue for hyperscalar data centers, particularly as NVidia wants to move to <i>annual</i> chip updates.<p>I believe the hardware is going to be commoditized. At that point the only thing that matters is performance-per-Watt. NVidia's R100/200 doesn't make the B100/200 obsolete but if the R series gets 50-100% PPW more and these DCs are using gigawatts of power, that's a massive difference.<p>What really is the effective life of AI hardware?
> Take that to its natural conclusion.<p>What on earth is a "natural conclusion" in this context? I'm going to assume that part of your comment was written by AI.<p>> Why isn't it an issue for hyperscalar data centers, particularly as NVidia wants to move to annual chip updates.<p>Because he's not a hyperscaler? He's not operating data centers where compute is fungible, he's buying an individual machine that he wants to use for years. He can't just keep buying a new machine and fob off the old one to someone else's less demanding workload.
Enterprise GPUs have a lot longer effective life than these consumer chips (although even the old 3090s are reasonably useful, especially with the recent driver unlock tech). I'd argue that these consumer chips have only now gotten to the memory capacity/processing capacity to make local LLM use actually reasonable.
Is this good enough for light web browsing, emails and word editing?
How many parameters are you planning to use for your doc editor? Email prose is optimal on a different model. Web parser? You might only be able to do one at a time with switching, which will work, but could be tiresome.
> <i>Is this good enough for light web browsing, emails and word editing?</i><p>How many Chrome tabs do you have open?
And 2 electron apps.
Might even work as a basic Facebook machine.
Bought it without looking too closely to make sure I got in before the rush (comes Nov 25-Dec 3 before my M5 Ultra 256GB which is supposedly shipping end of January).<p>After taking a look the $11.5k premium over the 256GB might not be worth it. Gonna have to mull over the decision and possibly buy two 256GB machines instead (which might be the smarter option).
As someone also considering getting one, what would make it worth it in your opinion?
Wish I had your economy for sure.
Eye watering prices as we expected.<p>The 512 GB ultra seems too expensive. You can buy multiples of the cheaper one. Like 4 of the 128 GB max, or 2 of the 256 GB ultras for less. (And end up with more total bandwidth and storage and compute).<p>Unless there is some sort of restriction on number per customer.
chinese memory providers can't come online soon enough.<p>prices shoot by just choosing the 128gb option and even worse the 512gb option.
I've had my eye on the normal Mac Studio M5 Ultra (normal plebeian 96GB RAM) and the release (edit: ship) date there keeps slipping, now into January. I'm surprised Apple is pushing the backlog even more.
Release date? I know someone that has one right now.
I have one. It can run lots of smaller models really well. I’ve been loving Gemma4 especially. My needs more more large scale information extraction and not trying to replace Claude code locally though.<p>If anything the interesting models that can run in about 64gb of memory are increasing because most people can’t access more memory than that. I’m especially excited for clef and cleric as they continue to improve. Yeah, you don’t get 1mil token context length, but even frontier models can lose focus at that level
Two things I wish I knew:<p>1. Will the RAM shortage turn into a RAM glut & crash in the next year?<p>2. Even if that happens, will Apple just keep prices sky high anyway?
ALL the Studio configurations are cheaper than a Lenovo P4 with AMD consumer CPU, no GPU and shit storage.
I guess I'll drive my 15 year old Honda CRV for a few more years.
* 96GB - $6,799<p>* 256GB - $10,799<p>* 512GB - $22,299<p>(M5 Ultra with just 1TB of storage)
Been waiting for this!
The fully loaded version costs $29,799.00!!!!
Laughed at the 2499 starting price until I saw the 5499