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M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review: The Dream Mac for Local AI Agents

48 points piotrgrabowski 1 hour ago 17 comments

snarfy 38 minutes ago | parent

$12,299

simonw 37 minutes ago | parent

The numbers I was most interested in are tucked away in a chart towards the bottom - the speed comparison of the Mac Studios v.s. a RTX 5090:

  Qwen3.8 27B tokens/sec generation speed

  Prompt size    8K    64K   128K   256K
  RTX 5090 PC    59    51    44     n/a
  M5 Ultra       48    39    32     24
  M3 Ultra       31    23.5  20     15
A whole bunch more comparison numbers in this section: https://www.macstories.net/stories/m5-ultra-mac-studio-revie...

peri-cl 4 minutes ago | parent

Those are some incredible graphs (at the anchor you linked at). That's a gigantic improvement in prompt processing going from M3 to M5.

/meta Here's a (uBO style) CSS filter to stop those annoyance chart animations,

    macstories.net##*:style(animation: none !important; transition: none !important)

redox99 3 minutes ago | parent

A dense 27B doesn't really make sense for the Mac. A MoE makes way more sense when you have modest bandwidth but lots of memory.

sajithdilshan 33 minutes ago | parent

On Apple website it says 512GB memory option is available in October. I guess bumping to that one would cost additional 4-6k US$. So an Ultra with 2TB storage would be north of 15k US$.

That’s like 12 years worth of OpenAI Pro subscriptions

geodel 25 minutes ago | parent

Agreed.

Specially since one can pay half right now to OpenAI and sign a 12 year iron clad contract for uninterrupted service delivery of OpenAI Pro.

vardump 22 minutes ago | parent

I hope that was sarcasm.

simonw 21 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, anyone who thinks local AI is going to save them money is likely to be disappointed, at least if they want to run models that are even remotely capable.

Plenty of other reasons to get excited about it local AI, but I don't think cost is one of them.

112233 15 minutes ago | parent

Hard to guess, it can go either way. If you will need to be in a syndicate to use non-sterilized models, that mac makes sense. But if there is mandatory registration of personal cyberarms, you risk going to mines once they check you purchases. You could try to play normie and pretend you simply wanted to show off, by keeping your actual work on external disk, but that leaves traces on system. Counting on someone in the Gap renting you gray iron works as long as you can swap credits. Still, this gear is tiny. Put it in your e-car, with uplink, and leave it at uncle's farm. Discreet.

ApolloFortyNine 27 minutes ago | parent

The model being tested is 18k as configured.

I didn't expect this to make the 5090 to look like a good deal.

kokonokko1337 26 minutes ago | parent

> "It also happens to be a Mac, with an operating system that looks nice and doesn’t suck"

Yes Apple has some of the best hardware out there, albeit overpriced. But the software is such a hindrance and I can't take anyone that states otherwise seriously. If only it had proper Linux support (and the Asahi people do an amazing job but you can reverse-engineer only so many stuff with limited funding, and then you have to do it again for new models). MacOS is good if you just want to have a standard experience, which to be fair is most people. It's good for just setting up an LLM server I guess since the hardware is a perfect fit. I wouldn't touch it otherwise.

srcreigh 22 minutes ago | parent

This is great as a first look, but the author is not a developer, so we don't yet know whether a dev can be as productive with local models on M5 Mac Studio compared to a 20x subscription plan.

I'm also curious about any new low hanging optimization opportunities in the kernels for this new hardware.

It's already clear to me that M5 Mac Studio is more cost-effective than anything you can run on open router, assuming decent utilization.

The M5 Mac Studio will be the most cost effective way to run uncensored cyber capable open agents.

An exciting tipping point will be if programmers can get an Astra-Ultra like experience all week with this hardware. That would be a real sense where this hardware exceeds the value of even 20x cloud subscriptions.

WarmWash 21 minutes ago | parent

>Let’s address the elephant in the room first: why bother with local AI at all when cloud frontier models are better and often faster?

Ehh, the actual elephant in the room is:

"why bother with local AI at all when you can lease a GPU for $5/hr?"

To which the answer is you shouldn't bother, unless you have a bunch of money to throw at hobby projects.

tempoponet 17 minutes ago | parent

While I know it's not apples to apples, the target comparison right now is 2x DGX Sparks. Similar price, 256gb. The conversation has focused on memory bandwidth vs. compute in agentic loops, so for most people the raw numbers will mean less than the "time per task" in coding benchmarks.

This is a great article and bodes well for the M5, but we should expect more like this comparing to other platforms before we truly understand where it fits.