I ended up leasing the base M5 Ultra for 3 years.

[dugbug]

I feel like the direction of apple silicone, particularly with their mad rush to get M7 fast tracked, even sacrificing M6 pro/max that I would want to revisit the landscape in a few years rather than my normal 5.

My M1 ultra base 1TB has been slam full for almost a year now, so this time I did spring for the 2TB option but that's all. The insane memory speeds make me feel this is a worthwhile investment. no external storage is going to really beat that. I do have 4TB NVMe thunderbolt external storage I just put together for giving my internal drive breathing room.

What did you folks do?
-d

 

[gigapocket1]

I feel like the direction of apple silicone, particularly with their mad rush to get M7 fast tracked, even sacrificing M6 pro/max that I would want to revisit the landscape in a few years rather than my normal 5.

My M1 ultra base 1TB has been slam full for almost a year now, so this time I did spring for the 2TB option but that's all. The insane memory speeds make me feel this is a worthwhile investment. no external storage is going to really beat that. I do have 4TB NVMe thunderbolt external storage I just put together for giving my internal drive breathing room.

What did you folks do?
-d

What did you end up leasing... and how much is the lease?

 

[enricoclaudio]

What did you end up leasing... and how much is the lease?

Leasing prices are exactly the same as purchasing the Mac Studio upfront or financing it with Apple Card. No processing fees, no interest and literally Apple is eating the item depreciation. It is so good that I just placed an order for a Mac Studio M5 Max with 2TB SSD and after trading in my M1 Max Mac Studio, I'm going to pay $55.12 for 36 months and after leasing period ends, $1120 if I want to owned it. Total comes down to $3104 which is the same total as if I have paid full upfront. It's basically purchasing a Mac with 36 months financing no interest.

 

[JesterJJZ]

Where are you leasing from?

 

[enricoclaudio]

Where are you leasing from?

It’s with Apple Upgrade Program. It’s a payment option at checkout on Apple Store.

 

[JesterJJZ]

It’s with Apple Upgrade Program. It’s a payment option at checkout on Apple Store.

View attachment 2655862

Just saw. Didn't know that was a thing Apple did with desktops, I thought it was only for iPhones. Pretty neat, I think I might get the Ultra/256GB beast now!

 

[gigapocket1]

I loooked into the leasing program after I read your first post. Those prices are insane. As someone who is always constantly upgrading their computer. It’s really not a bad deal……

 

[benholt]

The "no external storage is going to beat that" feels true for scratch/paging but I'd push back a bit for asset storage. A single-drive OWC Envoy Pro FX or Acasis TB4 will pull ~3GB/s sustained and I've been editing 6K R3D straight off one since my M2 Ultra internal got tight. What you actually lose on external is the parallel-read behaviour and the OS being able to freely spill into unified memory-mapped IO, so it really depends what's eating your 1TB.

If it's project media, external solves it. If it's app caches, LLM weights, and system growth, yeah the 2TB internal is the right pull — those aren't things you want on a bus that can renegotiate.

 

[4sallypat]

I loooked into the leasing program after I read your first post. Those prices are insane. As someone who is always constantly upgrading their computer. It’s really not a bad deal……

Yah, it's like the BMWs and Range Rovers I used lease back in the day but without interest (MF).

Apple sure makes it easy to lease to own if you want to buy it out at a very reasonable price. At the end of 3 years, you can roll into a new lease and not buyout which is what I will do since by then the M8 or M9 will be out.....

My pre-ordered M5 Studio base lease is $50/month with no trade in.

I am going to resell my M1 Studio base for almost the same price I paid for 4 years ago!

So with reselling my M1, the actual monthly drops from $50/month for 3 years into effectively $10/month and $735 + tax to buy it out at the end of 3 years.

Plus I get 3% back using the Apple Card !

 

[Sharky II]

Argh, no leasing option in the UK. My M1 Ultra lives on.