Apple unveils Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, betting on on-device AI

Apple announced a new Mac Studio on August 25, built around M5 Max and the all-new M5 Ultra — the company's most powerful silicon to date. Apple says the desktop is up to 4.3x faster for AI performance, up to 1.8x faster in graphics and up to 1.3x faster in CPU speed, with storage performance doubled over the previous generation.

A desktop pitched at on-device AI

The machine's central argument is running AI models locally. Neural Accelerators built into every GPU core speed up matrix multiplication, and Apple claims up to 3.9x faster AI performance for M5 Max versus the prior generation, rising to up to 4.3x with M5 Ultra. The company also highlights clustering: using built-in Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA support, several Mac Studio systems can be combined into one shared memory pool, which Apple says allows users to load the largest open-weight models available. A cluster of four systems delivers up to 3x faster AI inference, according to the company.

For developers, Apple introduced Core AI, a new framework for building, running and deploying models on Apple silicon, optimised around unified memory, CPU, GPU and Neural Engine so that full-scale language models can run locally. The company's open-source MLX framework is also supported.

Specifications and benchmark claims

M5 Max pairs an 18-core CPU — six "super" cores and 12 performance cores — with a GPU of up to 40 cores; Apple says the new GPU is up to 50 percent faster than the previous generation. The system adds third-generation hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and its Media Engine supports hardware decode of H.264, HEVC, ProRes and AV1.

Apple's own measurements put LLM prompt processing in LM Studio at up to 10.7x faster than a Mac Studio with M1 Max, and 3.9x faster than M4 Max; text-to-image generation at up to 7.4x faster than M1 Max and 3.5x faster than M4 Max. On the M5 Ultra model, the company cites up to 15.4x faster CopyCat machine-learning training in Foundry Nuke versus M1 Ultra, up to 8.2x faster text-to-image generation and up to 4.7x faster scene rendering in Maxon Redshift.

Memory, connectivity and price

Mac Studio with M5 Ultra supports up to 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth, with twice as many video encode and decode blocks as M5 Max — aimed at real-time colour grading of uncompressed 8K footage and heavy AI workloads. Thunderbolt 5 ports offer up to 120Gb/s of bandwidth. The systems ship with the upcoming macOS 27, which brings Siri AI and updated Apple Intelligence features.

Pre-orders opened on August 25 in 30 countries and regions, with deliveries starting September 22; the 512GB memory configuration follows in late October. Pricing starts at $2,499 for M5 Max ($2,299 for education) and $5,499 for M5 Ultra ($5,099 for education). Apple says the new Mac Studio is made with 35 percent recycled content as part of its goal of carbon neutrality across its footprint by 2030.