This is the machine Apple built for people running big AI models on their own desk instead of renting time on someone else's servers. It is also comfortably the most expensive desktop Apple sells short of a Mac Pro.
Apple announced the new Mac Studio on 25 August 2026 alongside the new Mac mini. Two chips, M5 Max and M5 Ultra. Australian pricing on Apple's own Australian newsroom is A$4,299 including GST for the M5 Max and A$9,499 including GST for the M5 Ultra, with education pricing at A$3,949 and A$8,809. Pre-orders opened on 25 August, machines start arriving 22 September, and the 512GB memory configuration is not coming until late October.
One small oddity worth flagging: Apple's Australian page is dated 26 August while the pricing section says pre-orders start today, 25 August. That is a timezone artefact, not a second announcement.
M5 Max
An 18-core CPU built from 6 super cores and 12 performance cores, with up to a 40-core GPU carrying Neural Accelerators. Up to 128GB of unified memory and up to 614GB/s of bandwidth. For most people who buy a Mac Studio, this is the one, and A$4,299 is where the range actually starts.
M5 Ultra
This is the new bit. M5 Ultra is the first M-series chip to use four dies rather than two. Apple joins two dual-die M5 Max chips with its UltraFusion interconnect, pushing inter-die bandwidth past 4.4TB/s and increasing connection density by more than six times, so the four dies behave as one processor.
The result is up to a 36-core CPU with 12 super cores and 24 performance cores, up to an 80-core GPU that Apple calls the most powerful Apple silicon GPU it has ever made, and up to 512GB of unified memory running at 1.2TB/s. That memory bandwidth is 50 percent higher than the previous generation.
Apple's comparisons against M3 Ultra: up to 1.25 times single-threaded performance, up to 1.3 times multithreaded, up to 4.5 times peak GPU compute for AI, and up to 40 percent faster graphics.
Why 512GB of memory matters
On a normal PC, the graphics card has its own memory and everything else has system memory. On Apple silicon it is one shared pool, so an AI model can use all of it. 512GB in one pool means you can hold a model with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on the machine, with nothing going to a server and nothing leaving the room. That is the entire pitch for this configuration, and it is why Apple has spent so much of the release talking about local AI rather than video editing.
Ports and clustering
Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 come to the Mac Studio for the first time, through Apple's own N1 chip. Up to six Thunderbolt 5 ports at up to 120Gb/s. There is now support for RDMA, which lets you link multiple machines together, and Apple says a cluster of four Mac Studios delivers up to three times faster AI inference than a single one. Storage is up to twice as fast. Genlock over USB-C is here too, and the machine drives up to eight displays, or four Studio Display XDRs at full 5K and 120Hz.
The Media Engine
M5 Ultra carries four ProRes encode and decode engines, hardware H.264 and HEVC, and hardware-accelerated AV1 decode, plus a 32-core Neural Engine.