You can now configure the Mac Studio with up to 512 GB of memory from Apple. But it will cost you, with the final price reaching a whopping $22,299. And that’s before you bump the storage to 16TB, which pushes the price to almost $30,000.
The jump from 256GB to 512GB of memory alone adds a whopping $11,500 to the price.
Apple upgraded the Mac Studio with its latest M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips in August this year. The machines went on sale in late September after being available for preorder for almost a month.
Back then, Apple only offered the Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra chip with up to 256 GB of memory. The company promised the 512GB option would arrive in late October, and it has now opened orders for that configuration.
This specific configuration is primarily meant for users who are into large local AI model development, run local AI on their Mac for complex tasks, machine learning and other such complex tasks.
Two Mac Studios with 256GB of memory each will cost you less
The base M5 Ultra Mac Studio costs $5,499 in the US. Upgrading to the 80-core GPU model bumps the price to $6,799. From there, configuring the machine with 256GB of memory costs an additional $4,000, bringing the total to $10,799. Going all the way up to 512GB adds another $11,500, taking the price to a whopping $22,299.
At that price, you could buy two 256GB Mac Studios for $21,598 and still have $701 left over. That’s two powerful desktops for less than the price of a single 512GB configuration. Plus, you are basically getting two M5 Ultra SoCs for the price of one M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of memory.
You can even connect the two machines using RDMA over Thunderbolt 5 and run supported AI workloads across them with software like Apple’s MLX framework. It takes some setup, though, and the two machines won’t automatically behave like a single Mac with 512GB of unified memory.
Still, this option could make more sense than buying a single 512GB Mac Studio.
Rajesh has been writing about consumer technology for over a decade, with a strong focus on iPhones, Macs and Apple’s ecosystem. He enjoys digging into Apple software updates, hardware changes, and discovering new Mac apps that make work faster and more enjoyable.
You can reach out to him at mail[at]rajeshpandey.me.
