A big part of the story is soaring memory and storage prices, but other factors come into play as well. Steve Dent for Engadget If you want to run AI models locally or do high-end Hollywood VFX on Apple products, the Mac Studio is now your only solution. Equipped with a M5 Max or M5 Ultra processor, Apple's compact but powerful desktop delivers gobs of performance both alone and working in a cluster. There's just one issue: the price. In 18 months since the last model, the M5 Max's base price has increased by $500 to $2,500, while the M5 Ultra starts at $5,500, up $1,500 from the M3 Ultra model. Those bumps go well beyond what's typical for Apple device upgrades. So why is that? A big part of the story is soaring memory and storage prices, but hedging and profit margins might come into play as well.

Who is the Mac Studio for? There's no question that Apple's Mac Mini is a great desktop computer, offering a surprising amount of power in a shockingly small size. However, it tops out at an M5 Pro processor and 64GB of RAM, with 307 GB/s of memory bandwidth. That's enough for many demanding situations, but AI and content creation power users may need more. Enter the Mac Studio. The "base" version (starting at $2,500) has an M5 Max processor with an 18-core GPU and 32-core GPU, and up to 128GB of unified memory, depending on the option chosen. That goes up to $5,899 for the 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU version with 128GB of RAM and 2TB storage. For AI or video editing pros, it's already capable of tasks "like running large language models and editing 8K video," as Apple says.

Then, there's the M5 Ultra model, squarely aimed at heavy AI power users. It uses an M5 Ultra processor that is two M5 Max processors joined together and supports up to 512GB of RAM. Its typical use case, Apple says, is to "store huge datasets entirely in local memory, increase the tokens-per-second speed and run huge LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely on device." Moreover, if budget permits, you can triple that performance by clustering four of those together via the high-speed Thunderbolt 5 ports. Demand for this kind of setup for AI reportedly caught Apple by surprise with the last model. Video users will also be spoiled by the Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra chip. Filmmakers will be able to "color-grade uncompressed 8K footage in real time, VFX artists can render complex simulations... [and it can] simultaneously play up to 33 streams of 8K Pro Res 422 at 30 fps." That model starts at $5,500 with a 30-core CPU and 64-core GPU and 96GB of unified memory. If you really want to kit it out, though, you can get it with a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU and 256GB of unified storage (512GB is coming next month). Memory bandwidth for that 256GB model tops out at 1.2TB/s, four times that of the Mac Mini. With 2TB of storage, though, that option will run you $11,299. The Mac Studio M3 Ultra with the same configuration (the flagship 32-core CPU and 80-core GPU, 256GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD) retailed for $7,499 at launch, a cool $3,800 cheaper.

What on Earth happened? Steve Dent for Engadget The primary culprits for this massive price increase are the Mac Studio's large amount of high-end memory and storage, "RAMageddon" pricing, hedging and Apple's usual insistence on high profit margins. Apple said so itself when it first bumped Mac Book prices back in June: "We've never seen component prices increase this much, this quickly. We've worked hard to absorb these costs and delay price increases for as long as possible, but the current environment has made that unsustainable." Let's start with the RAM, or what Apple calls "unified memory," because it's shared between the CPU and GPU. With 1.2TB/s bandwidth when fully loaded with RAM, the Mac Studio M5 Ultra uses LPDDR5X memory. That RAM has a maximum throughput of 172GB/s, so Apple installs it right onto the M5 Ultra processor package to maximize speed, in a very wide bus (1,024 bits for the M5 Ultra model), to ach...