Apple’s latest Mac Studio, powered by the M5 Max or M5 Ultra, delivers exceptionally high performance aimed at AI developers and demanding 3D and video-production professionals. Its unchanged compact design retains fast front and rear ports, while the new chips make it substantially faster than last year’s M3 Ultra model, although the extreme performance comes at a very high price.

The M5 Max version starts at $2,499, while the M5 Ultra begins at $5,499 and reaches $12,299 with 36 CPU cores, 80 GPU cores, 256GB of RAM and 4TB of storage. In testing, a similarly configured M5 Ultra was about 30% faster than the M3 Ultra in single- and multicore CPU benchmarks, achieved up to a 63% improvement in Cinebench rendering, and exported a 4K video in roughly 40 seconds. The reviewer says the testing period was too short for a full assessment, particularly of Apple’s claims about AI performance.