Apple last week announced two new Mac Studio models, with one built around the M5 Max chip and one around the all-new M5 Ultra chip, replacing the M4 Max and M3 Ultra models that had been on sale since March 2025.

The gap between the two is unusually wide this time. Mac Studio with M5 Max starts at $2,499, holding the price Apple set when it raised Mac prices in June, while Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,499, a further $200 increase on the post-June M3 Ultra price and $1,500 above what the M3 Ultra cost at launch.

That makes the premium $3,000 before any configure-to-order options, and memory and storage upgrades are more expensive than usual because of the memory chip shortage. Our guide helps to answer the question of how to decide which of these two Mac Studio models is best for you. The shared features include an identical enclosure measuring 3.7 inches tall and 7.7 inches wide, Neural Accelerators built into every GPU core, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW, plus AV1 decode, a next-generation SSD architecture that Apple says is up to twice as fast as before, Thunderbolt 5 with up to 120Gb/s of bandwidth, clustering of multiple systems using RDMA, 10Gb Ethernet, HDMI, and an SDXC card slot (UHS-II), Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 via the N1 chip, Genlock over USB-C for synchronization with professional camera capture, a 3.5mm headphone jack with support for high-impedance headphones, and macOS 27, Apple Intelligence, and Siri AI.

For the overwhelming majority of buyers, including most professionals, the M5 Max is the more appropriate choice. An 18-core CPU, up to 40 GPU cores with Neural Accelerators, up to 128GB of unified memory, and up to 614GB/s of bandwidth cover workflows such as multi-stream 4K and 6K editing, large Logic sessions with real-time plugins, compiling substantial codebases, and most 3D and motion work.