Apple Unveils New Mac Studio with M5 Ultra

Apple introduced the updated Mac Studio with M5 Max chips and the all-new M5 Ultra: up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU with neural accelerators, unified memory up to 512 GB, and memory bandwidth of 1.2 TB/s, enabling very large open-weight LLMs to run entirely locally.

Compiled by Sergey KostenchukPublished 2026-08-25Updated 2026-09-18

2026-08-25 Coding Apple

💻 Apple Unveils New Mac Studio with M5 Ultra

Apple opened pre-orders for the machine with M5 Max and, for the first time, with M5 Ultra: up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU with neural accelerators, and an UltraFusion configuration. Memory bandwidth has increased to 1.2 TB/s, and unified memory is up to 512 GB: large open-weight LLMs fit entirely within it.

🌍 Apple is positioning the Mac Studio as a desktop for local AI: a PCIe Gen 6 SSD, the Core AI framework alongside MLX, and clustering of four machines via Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA accelerates inference by up to 3x — as an alternative to the cloud for open models.

👤 The 96 GB version is $5499, and the base M5 Max is $2499. Pre-orders are open in 30 countries, with deliveries starting on September 22, and the 512 GB version arriving at the end of October.

Source 1: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-new-mac-studio-with-m5-max-and-m5-ultra/ Source 2: https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/25/apple-unveils-next-generation-mac-studio-with-m5-max-and-m5-ultra/

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