My estimate of Apple's cost for the physical M3-Ultra chip is somewhere between $700-$1000. Take the high number and double it to get the cost of an Extreme chip: $2000. The current price of a M3-Ultra Mac Studio 96GB/1TB is $6,800. An Extreme chip would add an addition $1000+margin. Assume a high margin of 65%. Just on the price and margin, I would expect the base price of an M3-Extreme Mac Studio today would be: 6800+1650=8,450 dollars. Now, they could charge more based on the value to the consumer of having twice as many GPUs. But they are capped on how much more value that gives due to Nvidia's superior GPU performance. The real cost is the memory. Demand has pushed those prices up. A refurbed 512GB M3-Ultra Mac Studio with 1TB is around $15k. That means 15000-6800=8,200 is what you are paying for the additional memory. If you increase that to a 16TB SSD, the refurb price goes up to ~$21k. So that's 21000-15000=6,000 for the additional SSD space. Put all of that together, if Apple had an M3-Extreme today, a brand new 512GB M3-Extreme with 16TB SSD would be approximately 8450+8200+6000=22,650.
The M5 uses the 3rd generation of TSMC 3nm process. So, one would not expect to see significant price increases due a more expensive manufacturing process. Add some for inflation, my guess is a 512GB 16TB M5-Ultra Mac Studio will be priced around $22,999, with most of that increase being the price of memory. There's no way an Extreme version would reach $50k unless they more than doubled the memory.
