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Apple Unveils New Mac Studio With M5 Max and M5 Ultra Chips
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Three years ago I bought a studio M2 max with 96 GB RAM and 2TB SSD, price was 4500 euro. Now the RAM upgrades are so convoluted that the cheapest you can do is M5 max, 128GB RAM, 2TB SSD for almost 7000 euros. Despite the improvements of M5 max versus M2 max, this is not 1.5 times the computer for 1.5 times the price, so WTF Apple?
The good thing is that the M2 machine rocks - Given the new realities of the computer market I guess it will rock for a long time to come.
The good thing is that the M2 machine rocks - Given the new realities of the computer market I guess it will rock for a long time to come.
Apple fanboy
macrumors Ivy Bridge
Literally nothing to do with Apple. Price of RAM is not exclusive to them. Do you enjoy using AI? Because WE are driving up the costs, not them.
I don't much care for AI, but the point is that they are applying the RAM premium to the WHOLE computer price, which appears excessive to me. Meanwhile they appear to very well contain their price increase on the consumer-oriented products. So my (perhaps too emotional) feeling is that the pros are being milked here.
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Consumers don't like the price increases, but there's no way around the AI/datacenter/hyperscaling factor without the companies taking a significant hit to profits. I know consumers wouldn't mind, but it's a complicated situation for businesses that make profits, want to remain profitable, and want to keep profit margins.
This is also not just an Apple thing, as you know. I'm in academia and we've seen many computer configurations (i.e., upgrades) have a 4-5X price increase over the past year! Now many of the prices and upgrade prices from other computer companies are higher than Apple's. This is a huge issue because our budgets for computer hardware were set years ago (grant money).
I need to replace a couple of computers and Apple's prices are now significantly less expensive than my other options. I prefer Apple computers for several reasons but my IT department prefers Windows-based computers. Because of this (and because much of my work is done on a cluster computer), I was thinking of getting one Dell or Lenovo and one Mac; with how prices are now two Macs will save me money over a mixed approach. In fact, with prices how they are, I'll likely only get one computer and see if we can keep the old computer squeaking along for another year.
Thanks, this is interesting. I am also in academia and my concerns are the same. Haven't really checked the market status on the PC side, so thanks for providing this info.
Apple fanboy
macrumors Ivy Bridge
I think the general PC and chips market is crazy right now. But it’s a wider problem than Apple. I use AI when I need to, but it’s about as reliable as chocolate teapots sometimes!
I hadn't checked it either until I was talking with our IT team in the past couple weeks. I was shocked by them saying price increases were in the 4-5X range for upgrade configurations. There are also often 3+ month lead times on many machines (some standard configs are available).
I've been running different quotes since then and while I don't have this historical prices for the Dell/Lenovo/HP side, I'm seeing Apple's new prices beating the others for comparable machines with basically every roughly comparable configuration. In many cases it's not even close.
Here's just one quick example (this isn't cherry picked; this was just randomly selected). This HP has a Core Ultra 9 285, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. It's $3600.
That processor has 24 cores but an M5 Max should outpace it single-threaded and likely multi-threaded as well even with only 18 cores. The Studio with an M5 Max (18 core CPU, 32 core GPU), 36 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD is $2569.
I've done various comparisons and configurations and at the low end (Mac Mini vs similar Dell/etc.) the price savings for a Mac is at least $150. At the higher end, current Mac prices have been coming out thousands of dollars cheaper. To be fair, it might be possible to negotiate those Dell/Lenovo/HP prices down (versus Apple's which are set).
RAMmageddon is an apt name.
I'm just glad I was able to replace one of my computers last year before everything hit (but still need to upgrade 2 more).
obviouslogic
macrumors 6502
LPDDR supports ECC on-die and over transfers, but as with any “checks” it reduces capacity and speed. Whether Apple has activated it, no one seems to know? Apparently having the memory on-package helps reduce data corruption during transfer (shielded, short distance) so there is less need for error correction.
obviouslogic
macrumors 6502
It means a 30% increase. CPU’s do not scale 1:1 due to thermals/voltage. The more cores that run at once, the less power each gets, i.e. clocked slower. They’ve also changed core configurations; M5 s-cores sit way above M3 p-cores in performance, but there are less of them. And the p-cores in the M5 are probably slightly less performant than M3 p-cores. So it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
jakey rolling
macrumors 65816
TruthAboveAllElse
macrumors 6502a
atonaldenim
macrumors 6502
Yes I think your projected numbers are correct based on Apple’s statement “Storage performance is up to twice as fast” and the M5 Max MBP SSDs can get up to those ~13,000MB/s speeds.
Interestingly, I see that Apple has deleted any mention of “PCIe gen 6” from their press release page. I think that PCIe 6.0 SSD speeds would be expected to be above 20,000MB/s, so actually I think we should expect to see PCIe 5.0 speeds, like the M5 Max MBP and the speeds you describe.
Apple’s initial press release yesterday claimed the new Mac Studio’s “Storage performance is up to twice as fast, with a next-generation SSD architecture built on PCIe Gen 6,” according to a cached Google search result summary for Apple’s press release page I just saw this morning. (And that spec has been repeated by MacRumors and other publications.)
But now Apple’s page just reads “Storage performance is up to twice as fast, with a next-generation SSD architecture,” with no mention of “PCIe gen 6” at all.
I don’t think Apple literally uses a vanilla PCIe bus to talk to their SSDs anyway. But since the Mac Studio’s SSD speeds haven’t improved much since the M1 Ultra, double the speed sounds like a nice upgrade.
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It is unusual that Apple has removed any mention of PCIe Gen 6 from their press release. This raises some questions, as the omission appears to be a deliberate step to ensure accuracy.
daveedjackson
macrumors 6502
I am wondering if I can go form 192gb ram on an M2 Ultra maxed out processor etc, to the m5 ultra with 96gb ram. The issue I have Is my work can be ram heavy, and I often use 80% of the ram the system I have. (motion graphics, VFX etc)
Vincent Hanna
macrumors 6502
More importantly, it gives you a six month window to align your buy out purchase or lease roll over with the next product release window. You aren't stuck getting a Mac mini 8, three months before the 9 comes out.
Vincent Hanna
macrumors 6502
Hobbyists are being milked. Pros are being give the best deal in the history of computing, even at these higher prices.
nateo200
macrumors 68040
Two of my buddies just got 64GB 14" MacBook Pro's. The original plan was to get Mac Mini's but anything Mac Mini was hard to find. They are quite happy with their purchases and they both do LLM's almost exclusively on their MacBook Pro's. My one buddy said he wanted at least 96GB's if not more but he would "settle" so far his expectations have been exceeded and both are kind of shocked what you can do with only 64GB's of RAM.
Plutonius
macrumors G4
It's about 5.5K for the base model and considerably more if you include more memory and storage.
I can see where some might not consider that expensive but I believe that a majority of people would consider that expensive.
Seriously? My M2 Ultra is feeling very slow in single-core tasks and I was desperate for the M5 model since I used the MacBook pros and saw how fast they are.
What single-core task are you doing that is so slow? I gave my partner my old Ryzen 7 5600X CPU along with the motherboard and RAM when I upgraded my PC to a Ryzen 7 9700X and that CPU is still fast and responsive today while having about 20% worse single-core performance than the M2 Ultra. It sounds like you're not the average person and rather are a power user outlier with a specific use case in mind.
The average person is using their computers for mail, spreadsheets, maybe a budget app, some casual games, messaging, a browser, some media consumption, very low power demand stuff. There's no way that even an M1 can't handle that well. In fact I hear it all the time that people who have M1 machines still aren't interested in upgrading unless they bought them with 8GB of RAM.
I mean honestly, my M4 Max is so ridiculous overkill for my needs that I just can't see it getting bogged down any time soon unless macOS becomes many times more demanding and if that happens, I'll just hold back on the old OS since Apple continues to push security updates for them for a few years anyway.
If you haven't done a complete reinstall of macOS in a while, it might be time.
Timeline scrubbing, general edits in Final Cut Pro and After Effects, just apps opening etc. Everything is way faster on the M5 Max
TruthAboveAllElse
macrumors 6502a
Vincent Hanna
macrumors 6502
But not the target market for this device, who, for the millionth time, will find it anywhere between a good value and an absolute steal.
“A majority of people” consider Ferraris expensive. What’s your point?
TruthAboveAllElse
macrumors 6502a
0.3x would be a decrease, not an increase. You just multiply the original number by the 1.3
100 x 1.3 = 130
100 x 0.3 = 30