Mac Studio 512GB Option Arrives at $22,299: The Numbers Behind It

$22,299. That is the lowest price Apple will charge for a Mac Studio 512GB configuration, which went on sale through Apple's online store on October 28. Apple had promised the option for late October, and according to MacRumors it showed up right on schedule. Macworld notes it landed about a month after the rest of the M5 Max and M5 Ultra Mac Studio lineup began shipping on September 22.

The new memory tier is aimed at a small but growing group of buyers: people who want to run very large AI models on a machine under their desk instead of renting cloud servers. The figures tell most of the story.

Mac Studio 512GB pricing in seven figures

• $22,299: the cheapest way to get 512GB of unified memory in any Mac today.
• $6,799: the starting price of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 36 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores, the only version that accepts 512GB.
• $15,500: the cost of the memory upgrade alone, taking that machine from 96GB to 512GB.
• $11,500: how much more the 512GB machine costs than the identical setup with 256GB, according to Macworld.
• $29,799: the price with 512GB of memory and the maximum 16TB of storage.
• 1.2TB/s: the M5 Ultra memory bandwidth listed on Apple's Mac Studio specs page.
• 128GB: the memory ceiling for the cheaper M5 Max Mac Studio, which did not get a bigger option.

What 512GB of unified memory actually buys

On Apple silicon, the CPU and GPU draw from the same pool of memory. For AI work that is the whole point. A large language model has to fit its weights into memory to run quickly, and a GPU card in a typical PC tops out at a small fraction of 512GB. A single Mac Studio with this much memory can hold models that would otherwise need several high end graphics cards or a rented server.

That is not a theory. Earlier this month Meta and Apple showed Muse Spark Open running on Mac Studio hardware, and open weight releases such as Mistral Large 4 keep giving developers more reasons to run models locally. For a lab, a startup or a privacy minded company, a one time purchase can look better than an open ended cloud bill.

For nearly everyone else, it is overkill. Video editors, photographers and developers who are not running giant models will see little benefit beyond 96GB or 128GB.

Two 256GB Mac Studios cost less than one 512GB model

Macworld did the math that many buyers will do. Two M5 Ultra Mac Studios with 256GB of memory and 1TB of storage cost $10,799 each, or $21,598 together. That is $701 less than a single 512GB machine.

The pair gives you the same total memory, twice the CPU and GPU cores, and a spare computer if one fails. The single box gives you one pool of memory, which is simpler when a model is too big to split cleanly, and it takes up half the desk space. Which side wins depends on the software you run and whether it can spread one model across two machines.

The memory upgrade costs as much as a new sedan

Macworld compared the $22,299 starting price to the entry level trims of a Hyundai Elantra, Nissan Sentra or Kia K4. The jump from 256GB to 512GB alone, at $11,500, is far steeper than the step from 96GB to 256GB, which works out to $4,000 based on Macworld's figures.

Apple has not explained the pricing or why the 512GB option trailed the rest of the lineup by about a month. It arrives during a tight market for memory chips, with AI data centers soaking up supply and PC shipments falling 21% in the third quarter as memory costs climb.

Storage pushes the top price to $29,799

Memory is only part of the bill. The M5 Ultra Mac Studio starts with 1TB of storage. Macworld lists 2TB as a $500 upgrade, 4TB at $1,500 and 16TB at $7,500. Fully loaded with 512GB of memory and 16TB of storage, the machine costs $29,799 before tax or AppleCare.

Choose carefully at checkout. As TechRadar points out, the memory in these machines cannot be upgraded later, so the configuration you buy is the one you keep.

If you mainly want a fast Mac for everyday creative work, the new M6 MacBook Pro and iMac cost a fraction of this, and our gadgets coverage tracks what else is coming before the holidays. For AI teams sizing up local hardware, the honest test is simple: if your largest model fits in 256GB, the $11,500 you save would cover a second 256GB Mac Studio.