M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review

simonw

The numbers I was most interested in are tucked away in a chart towards the bottom - the speed comparison of the Mac Studios v.s. a RTX 5090: Qwen3.8 27B tokens/sec generation speed Prompt size 8K 64K 128K 256K RTX 5090 PC 59 51 44 n/a M5 Ultra 48 39 32 24 M3 Ultra 31 23.5 20 15 A whole bunch more comparison numbers in this section: https://www.macstories.net/stories/m5-ultra-mac-studio-revie...

sajithdilshan

On Apple website it says 512GB memory option is available in October. I guess bumping to that one would cost additional 4-6k US$. So an Ultra with 2TB storage would be north of 15k US$. That’s like 12 years worth of OpenAI Pro subscriptions

ApolloFortyNine

The model being tested is 18k as configured. I didn't expect this to make the 5090 to look like a good deal.

kokonokko1337

> "It also happens to be a Mac, with an operating system that looks nice and doesn’t suck" Yes Apple has some of the best hardware out there, albeit overpriced. But the software is such a hindrance and I can't take anyone that states otherwise seriously. If only it had proper Linux support (and the Asahi people do an amazing job but you can reverse-engineer only so many stuff with limited funding, and then you have to do it again for new models). MacOS is good if you just want to have a standard experience, which to be fair is most people. It's good for just setting up an LLM server I guess since the hardware is a perfect fit. I wouldn't touch it otherwise.

srcreigh

This is great as a first look, but the author is not a developer, so we don't yet know whether a dev can be as productive with local models on M5 Mac Studio compared to a 20x subscription plan. I'm also curious about any new low hanging optimization opportunities in the kernels for this new hardware. It's already clear to me that M5 Mac Studio is more cost-effective than anything you can run on open router, assuming decent utilization. The M5 Mac Studio will be the most cost effective way to run uncensored cyber capable open agents. An exciting tipping point will be if programmers can get an Astra-Ultra like experience all week with this hardware. That would be a real sense where this hardware exceeds the value of even 20x cloud subscriptions.

WarmWash

>Let’s address the elephant in the room first: why bother with local AI at all when cloud frontier models are better and often faster? Ehh, the actual elephant in the room is: "why bother with local AI at all when you can lease a GPU for $5/hr?" To which the answer is you shouldn't bother, unless you have a bunch of money to throw at hobby projects.

tempoponet

While I know it's not apples to apples, the target comparison right now is 2x DGX Sparks. Similar price, 256gb. The conversation has focused on memory bandwidth vs. compute in agentic loops, so for most people the raw numbers will mean less than the "time per task" in coding benchmarks. This is a great article and bodes well for the M5, but we should expect more like this comparing to other platforms before we truly understand where it fits.

sghiassy

Imagine spending a trillion dollars on data centers and then reading this article. Nightmare fuel for OpenAI

devy

This dream machine costs over $15k (not including the Apple Studio Display)? Nah, that dream is SO OUT OF TOUCH!

BatchJob

If you are buying expensive hardware to run LLMs "on your own machine" you will soon find your ladder is on the wrong wall.

addaon

Ordered one for OpenFOAM. Excited for it. Will be nice to not have my laptop running CFD 24 hours a day, but my M1 Max is currently my fastest machine… I’m expecting about 3.5x from the M5 Ultra.

SamuelAdams

I think Apple is really sleeping on making this run a Linux server. These things are very capable and draw very little wattage when idle. It would make an excellent homelab device, but MacOS currently holds it back in this regard.

crossroadsguy

My mac is 5 years old. I don't think I can comfortably buy a new one right now. It has a 16GB unified RAM. Honestly that would be enough for so many local models that I want to use but can't use. Because RAM usage (even with literally every single user installed app quit/stopped) the RAM usage is very high that I can barely safely get 6-7 GB (I am supposed to get ~10 GB, but it goes up and down real fast!). That's a shame. If only I could install an alternative OS that uses very little amount of RAM :-)

liuliu

When people benchmark MLX related quant models, they really need to publish numbers on benchmarks. You cannot take this as it is what you get of the original models. MLX uses pretty simple quantization methods so at lower bits without QAT, it is just not as good quality as llama.cpp ones.

theplumber

At this point I think I will get the DGX gb300 workstation though I will wait a bit more for the cold season. It is double the price but at least is the real thing

12kaj2

The Year Of Local AI will be here no later than 2040, coinciding with the Year Of The Linux Desktop.

akozak

"a total cost of $0" Uhh ... how much is that hardware?

villgax

Lol, try generation of images & videos on these, they ought to improve perf on Deep learning not just llms

crorella

What are good options to run local models nowadays? Something good for coding and personal assistant kind of things