Apple began shipping a new version of its Mac Studio on Monday, offering customers a choice between M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips. The company kept the desktop's familiar enclosure, which dates to 2022, and retained the fast front and rear ports of earlier models. Pricing now reaches higher than before. The top configuration Apple sent to reviewers includes an M5 Ultra chip with a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, 256GB of RAM and 4TB of storage, and it is priced at $12,299. Apple positions the machine for AI developers and demanding 3D visual effects studios rather than typical content creation work.

The M5 Max version starts at $2,499 and pairs an 18-core CPU and 32-core GPU with 36GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The same chip has already been tested in the MacBook Pro, where it starts at $4,099 with the same memory and 2TB of storage; an equivalent Mac Studio costs $3,299. The M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 with 30 CPU cores, 64 GPU cores, 96GB of memory and 1TB of storage.

The Verge tested the M5 Ultra Mac Studio against a similarly configured M3 Ultra Mac Studio from last year, which sold for $8,099. The two machines differ mainly in CPU core count and architecture, making comparisons straightforward. In single-core and multicore synthetic CPU tests, the M5 Ultra came out roughly 30 percent faster. Graphics results varied more, though the new Geekbench 7 OpenCL test also showed about a 30 percent gain, while the Cinebench GPU rendering test scored 63 percent higher.

Storage speeds on the review unit were unusually high, and a Blender classroom render completed quickly. A Premiere test exporting a 4K video to an approximately 1.7GB MP4 file finished in about 40 seconds.

Apple describes the M5 Ultra as a monumental step for AI, and the reviewer plans to spend more time evaluating that claim. The review unit was supplied by Apple, and the testing period so far has lasted only a handful of days, enough to benchmark the M5 Ultra and to test the M6 and M5 Pro chips in a pair of new Mac Minis but not enough for a full assessment. The reviewer has asked readers for local AI testing suggestions.

The launch lands during a crowded stretch for computer announcements. Google is unveiling a new line of Googlebook laptops at the same time the review published, and a Microsoft event is scheduled for next week that sounds likely to launch Nvidia's RTX Spark initiative.

More hardware news from TechManNews.