Apple announced the new Mac Studio this morning — M5 Max and the first-ever M5 Ultra. Pre-orders are open, units ship September 22, and the headline for our corner of the world is this: up to 512GB of unified memory at 1.2TB/s, with Neural Accelerators in every GPU core.
Base M5 Ultra: $5,499. The config you actually want: closer to $10,000.
I've spent the morning reading the spec sheet and the pricing page instead of working, so let me save you the trouble. This is not a review — nobody has benchmarked one yet. This is a "should you open your wallet" analysis, aimed squarely at developers who run models locally.
What actually changed (and what's marketing)
Skip the 8K ProRes stream counts. Three things matter if you run models:
