Rumor is that there will be no M6 Studios, as only a base M6 processor will be produced. So you may be waiting for the M7.
Given that the 256GB option is +$4,000. going to 512GB I believe will be a +$10,000. [I have no knowledge of what Storage you use], but I would guess that the Mac Studio with M5 Ultra chip 512GB and 1TB would retail for $20,799 [before tax]
You'd be paying to go from 256gb -> 512gb, and Apple usually structures this like a doubling, so it would be an additional $3600 over the previous tier, IF prices stay the same. I suspect a full price hike may come in October.
Another Mac Studio with M2 Max chip owner here. I had intended to upgrade this year but I’m having a real problem justifying it. My current machine has 64 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. I wanted 64 gigs again and 2 TB. Even with the trade-in for my M2 Max Studio, I’m just not sure I can do this.
A serious question (not being snarky):
I never trade my desktops back to Apple. iPhones and iPads, fine, it's convenient. But desktops I sell privately.
Like I said, I qualify for and am paying EDU prices, so we'll see where the chips fall. I do not think they'll abandon their pricing model, I DO think that we may see an increase in the memory including 256gb cost at that time once retail orders open up and we're past the preorder window.
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You can get an external storage unit. This way you can configure your storage as you like. (i'm not affiliated with Ugreen. I bought a OWC external 4x Nvme (raided via software) and read/write performance are similar to Apple internal storage on my Imac M4. With Thunderbold 5, speed jump tp 120GB/sec.
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You have to select the M5 Ultra to get 256 GB of RAM. Apple also adds this note: "512GB memory option for M5 Ultra coming late October"
They are thinking that flash memory is having its own pricing crisis. Perhaps not as big a problem as the RAM crisis, but still real.
This has more to do with what I see going forward. I recently retired (but still do a lot of my own video and photo work) and I was already realizing that a proper upgrade to my current desktop would become financially unviable a few years down the road. So this might have been my last Mac desktop purchase. And I wanted to do it now while I could, gaining another 5-7 years at a minimum. But it looks like the point of financial unviability arrived today. It’s now likely that when my M2 Max reaches the true end of its service life for me, it will not be replaced. I have arrived at Peak Apple in my household.
