Mac Studio with 512 GB for $22,299: Local AI becomes a luxury

What's going on

Apple has delivered the last missing piece of its Mac Studio lineup. Since October 28, 2026, you can order the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 512 GB of unified memory from Apple's US online store, MacRumors and Yahoo Tech report. Apple had announced this configuration back in August and promised it for the end of October, and it hit the date. Configurations with less memory have been available since September 22. The local AI community, for example on Reddit's r/LocalLLM, had been eagerly waiting for the news: for them, memory is the number that matters most.

The sticker shock comes with the price. The cheapest Mac Studio with 512 GB costs $22,299. According to Yahoo Tech, orders placed today will ship between late November and early December 2026.

Why 512 GB matters so much for AI

On Apple Silicon chips, the processor (CPU), graphics unit (GPU) and other compute units share a single pool of memory: unified memory. Regular PCs work differently. There, the graphics card has its own, usually much smaller memory (VRAM). For large language models, that's a big advantage, because the entire model has to fit in memory the GPU can access. According to TechRepublic, for large AI models and memory-hungry creative projects, the amount of memory often matters more than extra compute.

Running models locally also has privacy benefits: your data never leaves your machine, and you're less dependent on cloud services. Whether it's worth it, though, depends on model size, software support, performance needs and cost, according to TechRepublic.

The pricing in detail

To even select the 512 GB option, you first need the top M5 Ultra configuration with a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU. It starts at $6,799 with 96 GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD. The M5 Ultra lineup starts at $5,499.

Yahoo Tech compares this to car prices. The cheapest 512 GB version comes in just under a Toyota Corolla LE ($23,125), while a fully loaded one lands you at a Toyota Camry for just under $30,000. The memory upgrade alone costs almost three times as much as the entry-level M5 Ultra Mac Studio. The M5 Max Mac Studio, according to MacRumors, still tops out at 128 GB.

The comparison with the predecessor is even starker. On the M3 Ultra, the jump from 96 to 512 GB cost just $4,000 in March 2025, and a 512 GB version with 1 TB was $9,499. A comparable configuration now costs $12,800 more. Per gigabyte:

• M3 Ultra (2025): approx. $9.62 per GB
• M5 Ultra (2026): approx. $37.26 per GB, about 3.9 times as much

The uneven pricing tiers also stand out. Going from 96 to 256 GB costs $4,000 ($25 per GB), while going from 256 to 512 GB costs $11,500 (around $45 per GB). The reviewer at The Gadgeteer also misses a 128 GB tier, which Apple skips on the Ultra.

Background: the memory crunch

Apple didn't raise prices out of nowhere. According to Yahoo Tech, Apple quietly dropped the 512 GB option for the M3 Ultra in March 2026, when the memory shortage hit hard. At the same time, the price of the 256 GB upgrade rose from $1,600 to $2,000. In May, the 256 GB tier disappeared too. In late June, Apple raised prices on almost all Macs and iPads, and the M3 Ultra Mac Studio went up by $1,300. Apple said at the time:

“We have never seen a component price rise this much this fast.”

In July, on his last earnings call as CEO, Tim Cook spoke of a “once-in-a-century flood in memory prices.” John Ternus took over after that. IDC figures cited in an analysis by iThinkDiff put the year-over-year rise in memory costs at about 350 percent. That would put Apple's per-gigabyte price hike roughly in line with the market. How much of it is scarcity and how much is margin can't be verified, because Apple doesn't disclose its component costs.

Demand doesn't seem to be suffering. Mac revenue rose 24 percent to $10.8 billion in the September quarter. According to Yahoo Tech, though, some of that is likely due to higher prices rather than more units sold.

The paradox: even 512 GB isn't enough

Apple is marketing these machines squarely at local AI. Ternus said the Mac mini and Mac Studio would “push the boundaries of local, private AI.” The showcase project is Meta's Muse Spark Open, which Meta released on October 15. According to MacRumors, Meta calls it the “most capable US open-weight model to date.” It has 816 billion parameters, 42 billion of them active per token. That makes it a mixture-of-experts model, where only some of the specialist sub-networks do the work for each word. On top of that comes a context window of about one million tokens.

At full precision, the model needs more than 1.6 TB of memory, according to Apple. With NVFP4 quantization (numbers are stored in just 4 bits, which shrinks the model dramatically), it comes to about 493 GB in Apple's tests. Meta cites around 537 GB for the same checkpoint. The sources don't explain the discrepancy. On top of that, you need working memory to process inputs and outputs. Apple's machine learning team is clear about it: “The model does not fit on a single machine.”

Meta's guide therefore calls for two Mac Studios with 512 GB each or four with 256 GB each. According to Yahoo Tech, the four-machine setup is actually cheaper. The computers are linked via Apple's MLX framework and RDMA over Thunderbolt 5, which gives the Macs direct memory access to each other over the cable. Each Mac loads part of the model, and only smaller intermediate results are exchanged. Requirements are macOS 26.2 or newer, MLX 0.30.1 or newer and direct Thunderbolt 5 cables between every pair of Macs.

The bottom line

The 512 GB Mac Studio is one of the few ways to run models with several hundred billion parameters quietly and relatively efficiently on your desk, without a server rack full of GPUs. That's appealing for companies with sensitive data and for ambitious developers. But the price has more than doubled compared with 2025, and the poster child, Muse Spark Open, still needs two machines, at least around $44,600 combined.

TechRepublic advises checking carefully before you buy whether your workloads really need that much memory. You should also test software support and compare costs with cloud offerings, especially if your workload is only occasional. For everyday use, 512 GB is massive overkill anyway. Waiting for prices to drop is a risky bet, according to Yahoo Tech: memory prices keep climbing, and Apple isn't committing to its pricing.