Mac Studio M5 Ultra: 512GB, Price and Release Date

Mac Studio M5 Ultra release date, pre-order and price

Pre-orders for the Mac Studio M5 Ultra opened on August 25, the day Apple announced it, and arrivals begin September 22. Only the 512GB configuration comes later, in late October, according to Apple.

You can pre-order at apple.com/store or in the Apple Store app in 30 countries and regions, including the United States. Treat September 22 as the date Apple plans for arrivals to start, not as a confirmed delivery.

Mac Studio M5 Max and M5 Ultra price, with education pricing

In the U.S., the Mac Studio M5 Max starts at $2,499 and the M5 Ultra at $5,499. With education pricing, they start at $2,299 and $5,099.

That puts $3,000 between them at standard prices and $2,800 at education prices. Apple sends buyers to apple.com/mac-studio for configure-to-order options and gives no price for the 512GB build, so $5,499 is the M5 Ultra's entry price, not the cost of the biggest configuration.

The 512GB M5 Ultra release date: late October

The 512GB M5 Ultra comes in late October, about a month after the rest of the lineup starts arriving on September 22, and Apple gives no reason. If your work needs that much memory, plan around the wait; if not, every other configuration begins arriving on September 22.

Mac Studio M5 Ultra specs compared with the M5 Max

The M5 Ultra goes up to 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores and 512GB of unified memory, while the M5 Max tops out at 18, 40 and 128GB. In both chips, every GPU core has a Neural Accelerator, which Apple says makes matrix multiplication dramatically faster. The M5 Ultra is the first Ultra chip to get them.

M5 Max vs M5 Ultra

Spec	M5 Max	M5 Ultra
CPU	18 cores (6 super, 12 performance)	Up to 36 cores (12 super, 24 performance)
GPU	Up to 40 cores	Up to 80 cores
Unified memory	Up to 128GB	Up to 512GB
Memory bandwidth	Up to 614GB/s	1.2TB/s
Starting price (U.S.)	$2,499	$5,499

Apple lists up to six Thunderbolt 5 ports at up to 120Gb/s each, and Apple's N1 chip brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 to the Mac Studio for the first time. It supports up to eight displays. Apple also measured storage at up to twice as fast as an earlier M3 Ultra system.

M5 Ultra 512GB RAM and 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth

The M5 Ultra takes up to 512GB of unified memory running at 1.2TB/s, and unified means the CPU and GPU share one pool of memory instead of separate banks. People search for it as RAM, but Apple calls it unified memory. Apple says 1.2TB/s is 50 percent more than before, without giving the earlier number.

The M5 Max stops at 128GB and 614GB/s, so the Ultra holds four times the memory. Apple's pitch is that massive models run entirely on the machine, with complete privacy, no token counting and no worry about rising cloud costs. An Ultra chip with 512GB is not new, though: the M3 Ultra system in Apple's own comparison footnote already had 512GB of unified memory.

Local LLM on a Mac Studio: model size against RAM

Running an LLM locally on a Mac Studio comes down to whether the model's weights fit in memory, up to 128GB on the M5 Max and up to 512GB on the M5 Ultra. Local inference means running a trained model on your own machine, and a model too big for the memory will not run. For weights larger than 128GB, Apple's release points to two options: the M5 Ultra with 512GB, or a cluster of machines.

Apple's release does not name any model or say which sizes fit. Instead it points to two Apple frameworks: Core AI, a new framework for deploying full-scale LLMs locally, and MLX, Apple's open-source machine learning framework. LM Studio appears as the app Apple used to measure LLM prompt processing.

M5 Ultra vs M3 Ultra benchmark: every multiple is Apple's own test

Apple ran these tests itself in July 2026, against older Apple chips, and its release cites no outside source for any figure. For storage, Apple's footnote describes the M3 Ultra system it compared against, with a 32-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, 512GB of unified memory and an 8TB SSD. The headline claims are up to 4.3x faster AI performance, up to 2x faster storage, up to 1.8x faster graphics and up to 1.3x faster CPU speed.

On peak AI compute, Apple rates the M5 Ultra at up to 4.3x the M3 Ultra and 9.8x the M1 Ultra. For the M5 Max it claims up to 3.9x faster AI performance than the previous generation, and names prompt processing as the task that speeds up.

Performance figures Apple published for M5 Ultra

Workload	Up to, vs M1 Ultra	Up to, vs M3 Ultra
LLM prompt processing in LM Studio	9.8x	4x
CopyCat ML training in Foundry Nuke	15.4x	3.3x
Text-to-image	8.2x	4.3x
Scene rendering in Maxon Redshift	4.7x	1.7x

Performance figures Apple published for M5 Max

Workload	Up to, vs M1 Max	Up to, vs M4 Max
LLM prompt processing in LM Studio	10.7x	3.9x
Text-to-image	7.4x	3.5x
Magic Mask in DaVinci Resolve Studio	5.3x	3x
Basecalling in Oxford Nanopore MinKNOW	3.5x	1.9x
Scene rendering in Maxon Redshift	Not given	1.4x

Mac Studio M5 Ultra cluster benchmark: four systems for a local LLM

Linking Mac Studio systems over Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA turns their memory into one shared pool, and Apple says four systems run AI inference up to 3x faster than one. RDMA, short for remote direct memory access, lets one machine read and write another's memory directly. Apple's release says two separate things about clusters, and only one of them is backed by a measurement.

One concerns size: the shared pool can hold the largest open-weight models available today, meaning models anyone can download and run. The other concerns speed: the 3x for four systems comes from Apple's own July 2026 testing, and Apple does not name the model it ran on the cluster.

Mac Studio M5 Max vs M5 Ultra: which one to pre-order

Pick the M5 Max if your model fits in 128GB, an M5 Ultra if it needs more, and a cluster if one machine is not enough. Every branch comes down to one question: do the weights fit in the machine's memory?

1. Fits in 128GB: get the M5 Max, from $2,499, arriving from September 22.
2. Needs more than 128GB but less than 512GB: an M5 Ultra under 512GB also arrives from September 22. The release does not list memory sizes below 512GB, so check the configure-to-order options at apple.com/mac-studio.
3. Needs up to 512GB: get the M5 Ultra with 512GB, due in late October. Apple gives no price for that build.
4. Needs more than one machine can hold: connect several Mac Studio systems over Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA, which Apple presents as the way to load the largest open-weight models.

If you are thinking of moving up from an M3 Ultra, Apple's release gives three figures: up to 4.3x the M3 Ultra's peak AI compute, up to 4x faster LLM prompt processing in LM Studio, and memory bandwidth 50 percent higher than before. Apple does not say which chip that last comparison is against.