September 21, 2026
Mac Studio with M5 Ultra does not justify the premium: in AI tests, it is only 10% faster than M5 Max
Engadget benchmarked a $11,299 Mac Studio: in AI tests, it beats the M5 Max, which costs half as much, by roughly 10%.
A 70-minute podcast was transcribed on the Mac Studio in 18 seconds. That is less than a quarter of the time it took a MacBook with an M4 Max.
Apple asks $11,299 for that speed: a 36-core CPU, 256GB of memory, and 2TB of storage. A machine with an M5 Max costs half as much and trails by roughly 10% in AI tests.
The price rose 50%. A similarly specced Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra cost $7,499, and Engadget attributes the increase to memory prices. The processor gain is more modest than the price tag: Geekbench 7 multi-core scored 52,185 versus 39,145 for the M3 Ultra.
What to get instead. Engadget's Steve Dent recommends an M5 Max with 128GB for $5,099 to an AI developer. The Mac Studio with an M5 Max starts at $2,499, while the M5 Ultra version starts at $5,499. Sales begin on 22.09.2026.
Local models run fast on the Ultra. Federico Viticci runs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next through Apple MLX and gets more than 100 tokens/s at 4–5-bit quantization. The longer the prompt, the slower the response: 48 tokens/s at 8K and 24 at 256K. An RTX 5090 graphics card responds faster on short prompts, but the 256K context does not fit in its 32GB.
Apple promises a configuration with 512GB of memory, the Ultra's main argument for local models, by the end of October 2026.
