- Apple now sells the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of memory from $22,299, rising to as much as $29,799 with a 16TB SSD in tow
- The $15,500 upgrade costs about 3.9 times more per gigabyte than the same step on the M3 Ultra in 2025, roughly in line with soaring memory prices for PC
- The entry 512GB build costs less than a base Corolla; only the maxed-out model reaches Camry territory, and orders ship late November to early December
Apple has finally delivered the one Mac Studio configuration it left hanging in August.
The company’s online store now lets buyers configure the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory, right on the schedule it promised.
The catch is the price, and it is not a small catch: To unlock the option, you first need the top-tier M5 Ultra with a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU, which starts at $6,799 with 96GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. Selecting 512GB then adds $15,500, for a minimum of $22,299.
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A memory crisis meets top-of-the-line hardware
To even get to the pricing stated above, you first need the top-tier M5 Ultra with a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU, which starts at $6,799 and includes 96GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. Selecting 512GB then adds $15,500, for a minimum of $22,299.
Max out the storage at 16TB and the bill reaches $29,799. Orders placed today are quoted for delivery between late November and early December 2026, so you are in for a bit of a wait even if you are willing to shell out that kind of money.
When Apple unveiled the new Mac Studio, it called the 512GB ceiling “staggering.” That adjective, as it turns out, applies to the price just as much as the capacity.
At $22,299, the cheapest 512GB Mac Studio barely undercuts a base 2026 Toyota Corolla LE, which carries a $23,125 MSRP. Spec the SSD all the way to 16TB, however, and the comparison becomes literal. A 2026 Toyota Camry, Toyota’s midsize family sedan, lists for just under $30,000 before destination fees, and the Mac Studio, when maxed out, clocks in at exactly the same ballpark.
Another way to look at it: the memory upgrade alone costs nearly three times as much as the $5,499 entry-level M5 Ultra Mac Studio. None of this would sting quite as much had Apple not sold the same capacity for a fraction of the price last year.
When the M3 Ultra Mac Studio launched in March 2025, upgrading from 96GB to 512GB cost $4,000, and a 512GB build with 1TB of storage cost $9,499. Today’s equivalent costs a whopping $12,800 more.
In March 2026, after the memory shortage hit hard, Apple quietly pulled the 512GB option from the M3 Ultra and raised the price of the 256GB upgrade from $1,600 to $2,000. By May, the 256GB tier had also gone, leaving the M3 Ultra on sale with only 96 GB. In late June, Apple raised prices across most of its Mac and iPad lineup, with the M3 Ultra Mac Studio jumping $1,300 to $5,299. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” the company said at the time.
Doing the math, that 416GB step from 96GB to 512GB cost about $9.62 per gigabyte on the M3 Ultra. On the M5 Ultra, it works out to about $37.26 per gigabyte, roughly 3.9 times as much, indicating that a near fourfold cost increase is now being passed on to Apple’s most deep-pocketed consumers.
That multiple is less outrageous than it first appears. In April 2026, Tim Cook warned of “significantly higher memory costs” from the June quarter. In June, he told The Wall Street Journal that Apple needed memory pricing and supply “to return to reasonable levels for consumer products.” On the July earnings call, his last as CEO before John Ternus took over, he described the market as “a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing.”
IDC figures cited in a recent iThinkDiff earnings preview put memory costs up roughly 350% year on year. If that holds for the high-capacity memory an Ultra needs, Apple’s per-gigabyte increase is roughly in line with the market rather than far above it.
The shape of the price curve is harder to wave away for Apple. Going from 96GB to 256GB costs $4,000, or $25 per gigabyte. The next 256GB, from 256GB to 512GB, costs $11,500, or about $45 per gigabyte. This, however, is in line with reports indicating that the highest-density memory is especially scarce even for a buyer of Apple’s size, which could justify a premium at the top. Apple does not disclose component costs, so the split between scarcity and margin cannot be checked.
Pricing matters on a per-unit basis because the showcase local AI workload at the moment needs more than 512GB anyway. Mark Zuckerberg said Meta’s 816-billion-parameter Muse Spark Open “runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple,” and Ternus replied on X that Mac Studio “keeps pushing the boundaries of on-device AI!” Even in its 4-bit NVFP4 form, though, the model occupies about 493GB, and once working memory is added, Apple’s machine learning team says “the model cannot fit on a single machine.”
In all fairness, Meta’s setup guide supports either two 512GB Mac Studios or four 256GB Mac Studios, and the latter configuration is cheaper, even if scalability could be an issue for future models that require more memory per Studio.
AI for the highest paying customers?
Apple is happy to name the use case for a high-memory-capacity Mac Studio: In his prepared remarks on the call, Ternus, singled out the Mac mini and Mac Studio as “pushing the boundaries of local, private AI,” and CFO Kevan Parekh pointed to the auction house Christie’s running local models on the Mac Studio.
Asked later about the cost of running Siri AI, Parekh said on-device inference was “very, very efficient, no real costs associated with that.” He was talking about Apple’s own bill. For anyone running a frontier model on their own desk, the memory is the bill.
For most buyers, the advice remains the same: TechRadar’s roundup of M5 Ultra reviews concluded that you have to “need” the Ultra, not merely want it for AI workloads, and our look at the M5 Max model pointed most creative professionals toward the cheaper chip. E
ven other reviewers who like the Ultra have gripes about the memory ladder. The Gadgeteer’s reviewer wanted a 128GB tier that Apple’s Ultra configurator skips entirely, writing: “That’s why the 128GB omission gets under my skin.”
Demand, however, is not Apple’s problem: Mac revenue rose 24 percent to $10.8 billion in the September quarter, which Parekh credited mainly to the MacBook Neo and MacBook Pro, and Ternus said Apple had never sold more Macs in a fiscal year. The whole quarter was sold at the higher prices Apple introduced in late June, though, and Apple does not report unit sales, so at least part of that revenue growth is price rather than volume.
For anyone weighing a 512GB Mac Studio, the message is that memory costs are still climbing, supply remains tight, and Apple is not willing to commit to holding prices where they are. Holding out for this configuration to get cheaper looks like a speculative bet at best, and until the memory market cools, the spec sheet for Apple’s most powerful Mac will keep reading like a car dealer’s price list.
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