Apple announced a new Mac Studio desktop computer built around two new chips – the M5 Max and the M5 Ultra – which the company said deliver its largest jump yet in on-device artificial intelligence performance.
The new machine can be configured with up to 512GB of unified memory, allowing large language models to run entirely on the device rather than in the cloud. Apple said the top-end M5 Ultra configuration offers up to 4.3 times the peak AI compute performance of the previous M3 Ultra chip. Pre-orders begins today in 30 countries and regions, with deliveries starting on September 22. The 512GB configuration will not arrive until late October.
Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at ₹279,900 in India, or ₹256,900 for education customers. The M5 Ultra version starts at ₹629,900, or ₹584,900 for education. Further configurations are listed on Apple’s website.
Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, said the new chips “usher in a new era of desktop computing, delivering huge performance gains for pro workloads and AI inference with frontier-class models” by combining Neural Accelerators built into each graphics core with large amounts of high-bandwidth unified memory.
The M5 Max has an 18-core CPU, a graphics processor with up to 40 cores, up to 128GB of unified memory and memory bandwidth of up to 614GB per second. The M5 Ultra scales this up to a 36-core CPU, an 80-core graphics processor, up to 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB per second of memory bandwidth, which Apple said is 50 per cent higher than the previous generation. Both chips include Neural Accelerators in every graphics core, a feature Apple said speeds up the matrix calculations used in AI workloads; this is the first time the Ultra chip has included them.
Apple cited internal benchmarks for both chips against earlier Mac Studio models. It said the M5 Max processes large language model prompts in LM Studio up to 10.7 times faster than the original M1 Max and 3.9 times faster than the M4 Max, and renders text-to-image outputs up to 7.4 times faster than the M1 Max. For the M5 Ultra, Apple said machine-learning training in Foundry Nuke’s CopyCat tool is up to 15.4 times faster than on the M1 Ultra, and large language model prompt processing is up to 9.8 times faster than the M1 Ultra and four times faster than the M3 Ultra.
Multiple Mac Studio units can be linked using Thunderbolt 5 and remote direct memory access to pool memory across systems. Apple said a cluster of four Mac Studio units processes AI inference up to three times faster than a single machine. The company also introduced Core AI, a new framework for building and deploying AI models on its chips, alongside its existing MLX framework for training and running models.
The new Mac Studio is the first to include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, delivered through Apple’s own N1 chip, alongside Thunderbolt 5 ports offering up to 120Gb/s of bandwidth. Storage, built on PCIe Gen 6, is up to twice as fast as the previous generation. The machine supports up to eight displays, or four Studio Display XDR monitors at 5K resolution and 120Hz, and can synchronise with camera equipment including the iPhone 17 Pro over USB-C.
The computer will ship with macOS 27, which Apple said includes a more capable version of Siri, called Siri AI, able to draw on a user’s messages, emails and photos to answer questions and complete tasks across apps. The update also brings changes to Safari, Shortcuts and Photos, along with revisions to the Liquid Glass interface introduced in earlier versions of macOS.
Apple said the new Mac Studio is made with 35 per cent recycled content overall, including fully recycled aluminium in its casing and fully recycled rare earth elements in its magnets, and that its supply chain uses 40 per cent renewable energy. The company said this supports its target of becoming carbon neutral across its full footprint by 2030.
