Mac Studio M5 Max, M5 Ultra: price and specs

Apple's Mac Studio gains M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips with faster memory bandwidth and stronger AI performance, but starting prices rise 25 to 37.5% over last year's models.

Apple dropped four new M-series chips and two new Mac models yesterday out of the blue. The new chips were the M6, M5 Pro, M5 Max and M5 Ultra, spread across new versions of the Mac mini and Mac Studio. You can read about the new Mac minis here. Here’s everything relevant about the latest Mac Studio.

Mac Studio piles on the power

First up, it’s worth knowing that these are mainly new chip refreshes rather than anything relating to design and form factors etc. The new Mac Studios are the same as the 2025 models, only with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chip options and a steep price increase starting at 25% over the previous generation.

We’ve put a full comparison table below, but the headlines beyond performance are that the entry-level Mac Studio has increased by $500 to $2499 over the course of a year. Apple would rather you focus on the performance gains, which in bandwidth in particular are impressive. The M4 to M5 Max transition gains you 12% and peaks at 614 GB/s, while the M3 Ultra to M5 Ultra reflects that increased generational jump and provides a 47% boost up to 1.2 TB/s.

The M5 Max has an 18-core CPU (six super cores and 12 performance cores) and up to a 40-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, and up to 128 GB of unified memory.

The M5 Ultra scales further as you would expect, with up to a 36-core CPU (12 super cores and 24 performance cores), up to an 80-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, and up to 512 GB of unified memory. It supports up to eight displays, which is impressive, including four Apple Studio Display XDR panels running at 5K/120 Hz. Now that we would like to see.

Both configurations continue the speed theme with connectivity including Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

Performance improvements

Apple is really pushing on-device AI performance here (“A monumental step for AI” is how it frames it). With M5 Ultra, Mac Studio achieves up to 4.3x the peak AI compute performance of M3 Ultra, Apple pitching it as letting users run massive models entirely on device with complete privacy, without counting tokens, and without worrying about rising cloud costs.

Happily, all that power also translates into some very decent post workflow performance. Apple says that third-generation hardware-accelerated ray tracing, delivers faster, more realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows across pro 3D, VFX, and design workflows. Along with a whole series of its favored benchmark comparisons, it mentions that the M5 Max machine will provide 3x faster Magic Mask performance in DaVinci Resolve Studio than the M4 Max.

Meanwhile, its Media Engine will let you work on 8K comfortably in real-time. In fact, it claims that M5 Ultra will let you play up to 33 streams of 8K ProRes 422 at 30 fps, which is the sort of performance that rather boggles the mind to be honest.

Pricing and availability

The M5 Max Mac Studio starts at $2499 ($2299 for education), and the M5 Ultra model starts at $5499 ($5099 for education). A lease option is available through the Apple Upgrade Program, in the US at least, from $48.99 to $110.10 a month. Both machines are available to preorder, with availability from September 22, 2026.

Mac Studio: M4 Max vs M5 Max

Mac Studio: M3 Ultra vs M5 Ultra