Apple finally sells its long-promised memory upgrade, and the memory alone now costs more than a fully loaded Mac Studio used to. Every price step, and a cheaper route.
Apple is now taking orders for the Mac Studio M5 Ultra with 512GB of memory, and it is the most expensive Mac Apple sells. The price starts at $22,299 in the US, because the 512GB upgrade costs $15,500 and only comes with the faster 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU chip. Add 16TB of storage and the total hits $29,799.
The machine is built for people running huge AI models locally. Most buyers, even professionals, will be better served by a base or 256GB model, and the two-Mac setup is worth a look if your software can split work across machines.
The Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512GB price starts at $22,299 in the US, and the memory upgrade alone accounts for $15,500 of that. Apple opened orders for the configuration this week, two months after it first listed 512GB of memory as an option it wasn’t actually selling.
Max out the storage too and the bill reaches $29,799, more than the starting price of some new electric cars. Very few people need this machine, but the price says a lot about what AI is doing to memory costs, and there is a cheaper way to get similar power if you’re one of the few who do. Here is every price step, when it ships, and who it’s really for.
You can’t simply add 512GB of memory to the cheapest M5 Ultra model. The upgrade is only offered on the faster version of the chip, so the price builds up in steps:
For comparison, the most you could spend on an M5 Ultra Mac Studio when it launched in August was $18,299. Apple also offers a 36-month lease on the top configuration at $697.21 a month. The M5 Max version of the Mac Studio still stops at 128GB of memory.
Prices differ in the UK and Canada, so check Apple’s store in your country before you budget.
To put $29,799 in perspective, a Chevy Bolt LT electric car starts at $28,995 after offers. You could drive home a new car and still have roughly $800 left, or put one very fast box on your desk. Apple will also let you finance the top model over 12 months, at a monthly cost about the same as a new iPhone Duo.
The first orders are due to arrive on December 3. That’s a long wait for a machine announced in August: the M5 Ultra and M5 Max Mac Studio went on sale in late September, and Apple said at the time that the 512GB option would follow in late October. It kept that promise for orders, but not for deliveries.
First, it helps to know what you’re paying for. The 512GB is unified memory, the fast working memory that the Mac’s CPU and graphics cores share, not storage space for files. For AI work, that is the number that matters most, because a large language model generally has to fit in memory to run quickly. The more memory, the bigger the model you can run on your own desk instead of renting a server.
The short answer is the memory shortage driven by AI data centers. Apple has sold a 512GB Mac Studio before, with the M3 Ultra chip in early 2025, and back then the same memory jump cost $4,000. A fully loaded M3 Ultra model with 512GB and a 16TB drive came to $14,099, which is less than today’s memory upgrade on its own.
Apple quietly dropped that 512GB M3 Ultra configuration in April, as chip costs soared. Its return at nearly four times the old upgrade price shows how much memory prices have moved. If you’re wondering why phones, laptops and graphics cards keep getting pricier, this is the same pressure at its most extreme.
Here is the odd part. Two Mac Studios with the faster M5 Ultra chip and 256GB of memory each cost $21,598 together, which is $701 less than a single 512GB machine. You get the same total memory and two M5 Ultra chips instead of one.
You can link the pair with RDMA over Thunderbolt 5, a fast direct connection between the two machines, and split supported AI workloads across them with tools such as Apple’s MLX framework. The catch is setup. The two Macs won’t act like one computer with 512GB of shared memory, and some software won’t split work that way at all. If your models have to fit in a single pool of memory, the single 512GB Mac is still the simpler choice.
Almost nobody, and Apple knows it. The machine is aimed at people who run very large AI models locally, train or fine-tune machine learning models, or handle other jobs that need enormous amounts of fast memory on one desk. For them, keeping data off the cloud and avoiding monthly server bills can justify the price.
For everyone else, the math is simple:
$22,299 in the US. That’s the faster 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU M5 Ultra with 512GB of memory and the standard 1TB drive.
No. Only the 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU model offers 512GB. Every other memory option is available on the base chip.
Not yet. It’s available to order now, and the first deliveries are expected on December 3.
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