Apple puts 512GB behind a $5,499 Mac Studio

Apple’s new M5 Ultra Mac Studio offers up to 512GB of unified memory and starts at $5,499, with the 512GB configuration arriving in late October, according to Apple’s Mac Studio announcement. The machine can cluster over Thunderbolt 5 for distributed inference, but Apple’s performance claims are internal tests and the box is not a drop-in replacement for rented accelerators; teams running local agents as a permission design problem should compare the purchase price against utilization before treating desktop memory as cloud escape velocity.