Review: Apple Mac Studio (M5 Ultra)

The Mac Studio has a new calling in life. For awhile, it seemed like overkill for just about anyone, regardless of profession.

But these days, computers with over 64 GB of RAM and tons of GPU performance have an entire playground of on-device AI tools to exclusively explore. With a Mac Studio, you can have a full-on agentic AI framework, generate high-end video all on-device, or run the latest foundation-level large language models (LLMs). The Mac Studio is relatively unique among the available options—at least, for now.

But beware: If you're tired of hearing about AI, turn away now.

Power Box

Apple has always catered to a high-performance crowd, and with the surge of interest in local AI, its systems are uniquely set up to excel in that area. But first, the box itself. It's about as tall as a coffee mug, but it's a 7-inch-square footprint. I bet most people have never seen a Mac Studio in person, and if you get the chance, you might be surprised by how large it actually is.

The Mac Studio remains the only Mac to keep USB-A ports around. That alone's worth the souped-up $11,000 model, right? (That's a joke). Here, you get two, along with four, Thunderbolt 5 ports, Ethernet, HDMI, and a headphone jack. You can connect up to four 5K external displays at 120 Hz using the Thunderbolt and HDMI ports, if that's your jam. Interestingly, as compared to the Mac Mini, the Studio swaps the front-facing headphone jack with a full SD card slot. Photographers and videographers will appreciate that.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

I do wish the Mac Studio came in more than one color, such as Space Black. Still, the Mac Studio comes in two distinct versions. The M5 Max model starts at $2,499, which comes with 36 GB of memory and 512 GB of storage. This is the reasonable configuration, designed for content creators, game developers, and media professionals. One way to think about it: It delivers the same performance as the MacBook Pro with M5 Max, but for substantially less money. There's a $1,250 difference in price even when similarly configured. The other benefit is that Apple offers more expandability in storage and memory options on the Mac Studio than on a MacBook Pro.

But that's not the model I tested. The configuration I was sent for review is that aforementioned $11,000 model, with the M5 Ultra processor and unified memory maxed out to 256 GB. That's definitely the most expensive computer I've ever had on my desk, but it's not even the priciest Mac Studio configuration you can get. The M5 Ultra is the most singularly powerful chip Apple has ever made (yet), and its first quad-die chip. It's absolutely massive. Over its high-speed interconnect, it essentially stitches together two M5 Max chips, for a total of 36 CPU cores. Think of this as the equivalent of Apple's $3,299 Studio Display XDR in terms of use case. It's extremely targeted.

Regardless of the configuration, the Mac Studio's true power comes from its obscene number of GPU cores and unified memory. You can configure it with anywhere from 36 GB to 256 GB of memory (a 512 GB model is coming in October), and up to 80 GPU cores. Let's be real—only AI enthusiasts and AI developers need more than 64 GB of memory. If that's you, there's reason to be excited about this version of the Mac Studio. While you've always been able to configure it with up to 256 GB of unified memory, the M5 Ultra adds unprecedented GPU performance to the mix. It has twice as many GPU cores as the M5 Max, the same amount as the previous M3 Ultra.

Don't think of the M5 Ultra as providing the same uplift as upgrading from the M5 Pro to the M5 Max, which is a more modest upgrade that focuses primarily on GPU performance. But two generations of GPU improvements in the Ultra chips have made each core more powerful, in both gaming and AI. Notably, each GPU core now includes a Neural Accelerator, a feature of the entire “M5” family of chips that further enhances AI workload performance.

All the AI

The astounding part about the Ultra is that, in some cases, it really doubles performance over the Max. While single-core benchmarks don't show much difference, the doubled CPU cores allow the M5 Ultra Mac Studio to outperform the M5 Max (as tested in a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU, plus 48 GB of memory) by 51 percent—as tested in Cinebench 2026. I'm still a bit shocked by that. The GPU performance doesn't scale quite as perfectly, but it was 32 percent faster than the M5 Max. Gaming tests put these two scores together and really show how vastly superior the M5 Ultra is. The industry-standard 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark put the M5 Ultra at a 41 percent higher score than the M5 Max.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

But it's in actual games where the Mac Studio really impresses. It can run Cyberpunk 2077 at 160 frames per second on the M5 Ultra, which is 61 percent faster than on the M5 Max. The happy-medium preset I landed on was running it at 2560 x 1400 resolution on Ultra. The game looks incredible, especially on an HDR screen. (I just so happened to be testing it with a Studio Display XDR). It can even run the game natively in 4K at 53 fps at this same preset, though I found myself most comfortable in 1440p on Ultra. Having options on how you want to tweak a game is always ideal, and for the first time, the M5 Ultra is fast enough to do just that. It's no RTX 5090-powered gaming PC, but this is as close as a Mac has ever been.

No one is buying a Mac Studio for gaming, of course. And while it's a useful test of performance, I really wanted to see how the system could handle on-device AI workflows. This Mac Studio configuration offers huge amounts of memory, but the bandwidth is another major benefit the M5 Ultra Mac Studio has over the M3 Ultra (Apple skipped the M4 Ultra). It's 1.2 TB per second compared to 89 GB per second, which is crucial for running models on-device.

I set up a simple agentic AI task in LM Bionic to summarize a dozen local files, running on a fairly small 9-billion-parameter Qwen 3.5 model; it completed the task in 2 minutes, compared to almost 10 minutes on the M5 Max MacBook Pro. But here's where I got sufficiently impressed. I loaded up a much larger, 122-billion-parameter version of Qwen 3.5, and I was blown away by the speed. It felt very much like using a frontier-class LLM right on my computer, completely offline and without accessing the cloud. And, of course, being local means it has access to your machine. So I set up the same simple agentic task using this much more expansive model, and it still finished in under 2 minutes (with much more accurate and useful results, too).

Over in Draw Things, I ran some on-device image and video generation to really see what an 80-core GPU can do. Using the MiniMax H3 model, it took over 11 minutes to generate a 15-second video completely on-device. There's a long way to go before this feels like a viable alternative to cloud-based options or needing a high-powered discrete GPU like an RTX 5090 or 5080 for this kind of task. Obviously, paying this much to run AI locally is a niche endeavor. But as models get more efficient and quality improves, the M5 Ultra Mac Studio's capabilities should improve over time. We're still in the early days.

During these AI tests, in particular, I noticed how warm the Mac Studio gets when it's fully under load. You definitely don't want to touch it or set anything on top of it. You also want to leave some room behind it, since it blows a lot of hot air out of the vents. The fans can spin up quite loudly too—though, like all modern Macs, it takes a couple of minutes for the fans to really get going. The front-facing ports stay cool, though, thanks to the vents in the thermal system sitting right underneath the Mac Studio.

Only the Beginning

The Mac Studio is certainly unique. Because mini Windows PCs typically use laptop chips, they don't typically support more than 64 GB of RAM. That's where this top-end M5 Ultra Mac Studio really feels unbeatable (and even earns its sky-high price from that perspective). Add the upcoming option for 512 GB of memory (and the ability to connect four Mac Studios and use them as a single computer), and you have something extremely niche—but wholly unrivaled.

The base M5 Max Mac Studio does have stronger competition, though. For $2,399, you can get a Geekom A9 Mega Mini PC with 64 GB of RAM, 1 TB of storage, and AMD's new Ryzen AI Max+ 388. That's more memory and more storage for less money. Importantly, that AMD chip uses unified memory the same way Apple Silicon does, which is crucial for running local AI workloads. We'll hopefully be getting the Geekom A9 in for testing to see how it stacks up in real-world tests.

More competitors are coming soon, too. Nvidia's RTX Spark “superchips” are the main upcoming rival, offering up to 128 GB of unified memory in both laptops and mini PCs. They still can't do 256 GB of memory like the Mac Studio, but these will hopefully turn up the heat on the Windows and Linux side.