A Maxed Out M3 Ultra Mac Studio Will Cost You $14,099

[dguisinger]

Ouch, the storage and RAM prices are crazy (well to me anyway). I needed a Mac with lots of RAM so I bought a 2nd hand 2019 Mac Pro with 384GB RAM for £1450, which should keep me going until I buy one of these 2nd hand with 512GB RAM in a few years

.... its not you

You can buy a 4TB SSD for around $225.... vs $1200 upgrade from Apple.

 

[poematik13]

if you need that much power, the projects youre working on pay you 14k a month or even 14k a week so it doesnt even matter. plus you can just finance it for 0% anyway

 

[creediddy]

I would like to see Apple get into the GPU game. Create a GPU docking station with a 400-500 watt power supply that would cost about $199 and attaches to Mac Studio and Mac Mini to give customers extra GPU power.

Apple should consider competing against the 5090 with potentially a G-series chips. Yes the GPU's would cost an arm and leg and start at $999 upwards to $3999, but will be worth it for customers to disable to the onboard GPU of the M-series chips to a dedicated GPU like a G-series chip for LLM, gaming, etc...I can see a G1-Extreme chip smashing a 5090 and running at half the power.

 

[dguisinger]

if you need that much power, the projects youre working on pay you 14k a month or even 14k a week so it doesnt even matter. plus you can just finance it for 0% anyway

I mean sure.... or it just means you hope someday some decent games will come to Mac and thats a really nice GPU. I would gladly pay for an M4 Max CPU core count with a M3 Ultra GPU core count. The way they are scaling doesn't seem optimized for many use cases, a lot of people don't need the extra CPU cores at that point.

 

[HylianKnight]

I dream of the day where Apple charges realistic prices for upgrading storage and ram.

 

[PlayUltimate]

Their storage prices are now beyond ridiculous. I had been planning on two mac upgrades this cycle, looking at the amount of money i'd have to throw away on their SSD pricing..... hard pass. Get rid of the finance guy as a CEO and we will talk again about buying new machines.

TC has an engineering degree and was known as an operations guy; never a finance guy.

 

[dguisinger]

TC has an engineering degree and was known as an operations guy; never a finance guy.

I guess thats true, I was for some reason thinking he was CFO, but he was COO specializing in outsourcing... so yay, he's got that going for him. And he has an MBA, I generally think of leaders with MBAs as leaches to their customers only looking for maximum shareholder short term gains and ultimately destroy their brands... so there is that. I still hate his leadership of Apple. The success is despite him, not because of him. He has funnelled so much money into the dumbest projects (Car?) and extracts massive premiums on commodities because his customers are locked in to just a single choice. Apple would be better off without him. I would say at least they didn't go full GE and turn into a bank, but thats not completely true either.... though they've pretty much gutted goldman sach's consumer financing side by putting all the bad decisions and risk on them.

 

[deathnite]

I wonder if Apple is having fab problems, getting the RAM and SSD's attached to the mainboard properly. That's the only reason I can think of where they charge so much for it.

This is Apple, they can charge anything, they don't need a reason.
Just look at the Pro Display XDR stand priced $1000 or Mac Pro wheels for $700.

 

[ghostface147]

Get the education bundle for Final Cut Pro. They don’t check.

 

[mannyvel]

512GB ram in a desktop form factor is crazy.. My Lenovo tower in the closet has 256GB, and warms my office.

 

[jimbobb24]

The people who need this make money from it so the prices work for them. I wish there were some user upgradable slots though...the ram prices are crazy. Unified memory for AI is a little subpar because if I remember correctly the bus speed is still a little slow compared to a dedicated Nvidia.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

512GB ram in a desktop form factor is crazy.. My Lenovo tower in the closet has 256GB, and warms my office.

The last Intel Mac Pro models could be configured to 1.5TB of RAM.

 

[HJM.NL]

Ouch, the storage and RAM prices are crazy (well to me anyway). I needed a Mac with lots of RAM so I bought a 2nd hand 2019 Mac Pro with 384GB RAM for £1450, which should keep me going until I buy one of these 2nd hand with 512GB RAM in a few years

Where do you use it for? Is that software specific for Mac or is it also available for PC?

I know I’m no windows fan either, but you can have great alternatives for a fifth of the price and have the same or more power.

 

[Hogswarts]

Sorry if this sounds like I'm exaggerating, but 512GB RAM doesn't cut it for me today, and I need 2TB for a reasonable degree of future-proofing. Maybe a Mac Pro in a few months will support that.

 

[JosephAW]

Checking the refurb store for better price

 

[svish]

Very very expensive. Some niche use cases will exist that demand the power of the M3 Ultra chip. But for a vast majority this model won't be required.

 

[Mac mini power user]

Given that this machine has 4 or 6 Thunderbolt 5 ports at 120 Gb/s, you're better off just connecting an ultra-fast external SSD and spend money on the memory upgrades.

 

[Hogswarts]

Given that this machine has 4 or 6 Thunderbolt 5 ports at 120 Gb/s, you're better off just connecting an ultra-fast external SSD and spend money on the memory upgrades.

This is true--the internal SSD isn't much faster than an external TB5 SSD would be--at least on the MBP with M4 Max. However, almost zero TB5 devices exist at this time.

 

[museic]

Back in the day, the 2019 Mac Pro could sell for over $50K if you went all in on upgrades. Of course there was also a time when you could buy said machine on one day and trade it in the next for a whopping $3500.

 

[TechnoMonk]

This my preorder price, I have 8TB thunderbolt storage. 1 TB is good enough. I wish I could go to a tax free state and buy the ultra studio to avoid $754 sales tax.

 

[TechnoMonk]

This stat is useless because I don't think anybody will ever buy that config.
But I remember when the maxed out Mac Pro was like $50,000 in 2019.

I am ready to replace my Linux work station. Nvidia dropped the ball with 5090. For those who need unified memory, it’s a steal compared to other options.

 

[stevebatter]

Where do you use it for? Is that software specific for Mac or is it also available for PC?

I know I’m no windows fan either, but you can have great alternatives for a fifth of the price and have the same or more power.

I use it for Logic Pro and have changed from using 2 x 2013 MP Pros (128GB RAM each) to just this 2019 MP. I think I could easily go for less RAM if I optimised my template but I like to have everything available to play (sample instruments).

I'm not up to date on possible Windows machines but are you saying that there are PCs that can handle 384GB RAM for a 5th of the price I paid for my MP? Or are you talking about the new Mac Studio with 512GB RAM maybe? That could be something to look into when I buy a machine in the future as I could use a cheaper Mac as the main Logic Pro host and a PC with huge amounts of RAM for the second machine.

 

[picpicmac]

That’s Cook’s Law these days. Same with all Macs. Gotta pay to play.

If people weren't so hot to just hate on everything, maybe you could figure out why the minimum RAM for the Ultra is 96GB.

 

[picpicmac]

Create a GPU docking station with a 400-500 watt power supply that would cost about ...

You missed the memo about reducing energy usage per computer.

 

[picpicmac]

Given that this machine has 4 or 6 Thunderbolt 5 ports at 120 Gb/s, you're better off just connecting an ultra-fast external SSD

If you've got six TB5 ports, dedicate two of them to two external SSDs and run them in RAID 0 and you'll get bandwidth that is greater than the internal storage.

That still leaves you with four TB5 for displays or whatever.