Chance Miller wrote for 9to5 Mac this week Apple has shared pricing information for the tricked-out Mac Studio with the most RAM. In August, the company announced new M5 Max and M5 Ultra configurations of the Mac Studio, saying at the time a configuration with the highest-end 512GB RAM would be available to order come October—and here it is.
“If you head to the Mac Studio configurator on Apple’s website, you’ll see the new 512GB upgrade option,” Miller reported on Wednesday. “As previously announced, the 512GB option is only available with the top-tier M5 Ultra chip that has a 36-core CPU and 80‑core GPU. It’s a $15,500 upgrade over the base configuration of that processor, which has 96GB of unified memory.”
He continued: “To put it another way: you’ll pay $22,299 for the Mac Studio with the top-tier M5 Ultra, 512GB of unified memory, and 1TB of storage. You can spec it up all the way to 16TB of storage, which brings the total price to $29,799.00.”
Miller’s story caught my eye not only for the eye-watering absurdity of the price tags, but because it reminded me how I generally approach RAM (and even storage) in my Macs and iPads. As a general rule, I try to max out the RAM whenever possible; my M2 MacBook Air, as one example, is outfitted with the maximum 24GB RAM to go with 512GB of storage. Likewise, I generally prefer iPhones with 1TB storage and my iPads with the most storage and cellular capability sheerly for optionality’s sake. The salient point here is only that maxing specs out where I can, and where appropriate, gives me peace of mind. As a nerd, I’d obviously love a Mac Studio on my desk—not to mention one with half a terabyte of RAM. But then again, I’m not running bleeding-edge AI models, so I don’t need such beefy compute, and, as a literal accessibility matter, $22,300 is far, far removed from the realm of feasibility for me. Even the new touchscreen MacBook Pros costs over $14,000 if you strive for the highest-end configuration. I love it, even if it’s not for me.
The moral of this short story is, yes, I’m very much a nerd who knows accessibility cuts both ways.
