Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/apples-512gb-mac-studio-vanishes-a-quiet-acknowledgement-of-the-ram-shortage/

by rbanffy • 5 months ago

395 250 5 months ago

znpy3• 5 months ago

Apple recently introduced rdma support in mac os. They are probably trying to push those people buying the 512gb configuration towards buying more of the 256gb configuration and clustering them together.

PostOnce2• 5 months ago

A consumer computer company is not going to push people towards building a miniature HPC cluster. Closest we'll ever get to that is multiple GPUs for video games.*

*Nvidia is no longer a primarily consumer company, so all the other GPU stuff is no counterpoint

MaxikCZ• 5 months ago

One could argue that if you are buying 512gb RAM machines you are not a typical consumer.

znpy3• 5 months ago

Apple isn’t really a consumer company. It does both consumer and enterprise stuff. Just look at all the fleet management stuff it does for ios and mac os.

And besides that, high end macbook prod and studios are workstation-class computers, not consumer-level computers.

hylaride• 5 months ago

A consumer computer company

Apple isn't a just a consumer computer company. Both iPhones and Macs have very large business markets. In fact, I'd argue that the primary reason Apple hasn't locked down MacOS as much as iOS is that it'd absolutely kill the demand from software developers.

citizenpaul2• 5 months ago

The second I saw llms run on gpus i started trying to predict the last year that nvidia produces a consumer GPU product.

storus6• 5 months ago

Weren't 512GB models selling like hot cakes to the complete surprise of Apple? Wait time was up to 3 months last time I checked. Glad I got mine last October.

appreciatorBus• 5 months ago

“Like hot cakes” is relative.

The 512GB Mac Studio was not a mass-market machine—adding that much RAM also required springing for the most expensive M3 Ultra model, which brought the system’s price to a whopping $9,499.

Number of people willing the number of people willing to spend $10,000 on a computer is pretty tiny. Maybe they are common enough in HN circles, but I doubt any one at Apple is losing sleep over them.

rattray• 5 months ago

Curious, what do you use it for?

irusensei3• 5 months ago

Any custom configuration takes a while for them to prepare. I remember my M3 max took 2 or 3 months to a arrive.

Good thing is they only seem to charge when device ships so if an M5 comes along you should be able to cancel the m3 ultra and get the m5.

pera3• 5 months ago

I was just looking to buy a Raspberry Pi 5: the 8GB one is now 58% more expensive than last year; that's more than what I'm willing to pay.

abnercoimbre• 5 months ago

What will you do? eBay?

pera3• 5 months ago

Maybe if I can find an unused one, still not sure tbh... Or I might go for an alternative SBC from AliExpress and compromise on CPU

gzread2• 5 months ago

Raspberry Pi hasn't been a cheap SBC for a long time. It's now in the same market segment as a NUC, but without the case and with worse price to performance.

pjmlp6• 5 months ago

Unfortunely there are no ARM NUCs with a good distribution support, and that is still a strong value for getting a Raspberry Pi.

esskay3• 5 months ago

Unless you specifically need a pi (unlikely) then they really are awful value now. Hard to really go out of the way to support them now they've stuck two fingers up at the solo/indie/educational community and gone all enterprise.

Second hand mini pc's are a good option. Half the price of a pi 5 + sd + power and you often get them with 16gb ram, a decent ssd, etc.

If you need GPIO then many of the rockchip boards are still fairly affordable and easily had.

mort963• 5 months ago

The Pi isn't great value, but honestly, I'm finding it hard to find a better trade-off between price, performance and software support right now than the compute modules for embedded projects where you can afford to spin a custom PCB. Especially for low-ish volume or prototype stuff.

dwedge5• 5 months ago

Don't forget the case and fan. I think the RPi 3 was the last one you could comfortably run without a fan and not worry about it frying the SD card

dwedge5• 5 months ago

The raspberry pis have been bad value for money for at least 4 or 5 years now unless you're really sensitive to the power draw. Once you add in a case and fan (required if you don't want it to overheat and screw the SD card), the charger, SD card it generally comes in at roughly the same price as more capable intel 1L PC like the Lenovo M920Q (though of course, they aren't new)

pera3• 5 months ago

Yeah power consumption (and performance per watt) is the main reason I keep buying Raspberry Pi, I haven't find anything similar on that regard, specially for pi zeros

neya• 5 months ago

There were a couple alternatives for a few years. Wonder if they are a better value for money now. Beaglebone Black, Orange Pi, Jetson Orin Nano, etc.

irusensei3• 5 months ago

Geez you just agro the x86 guys.

Have fun reading 40 answers about how discarded Lenovos from 2017 are cheaper and stay idle at 5W. It springs to 3x the power usage of a pi if they do anything with it but who cares about performance per Watt?

ErneX2• 5 months ago

Pricing for the 256GB configuration has also increased, from $1,600 to $2,000

cobertos• 5 months ago

Is that a typo in the article? It's $5999 on Apple's website for that configuration

tekacs• 5 months ago

I think this means cost above. As in the extra cost you pay.

ErneX2• 5 months ago

It’s what toggling the 256GB upgrade costs from the previous ram amount, not the computer total.

mkl2• 5 months ago

I'm trying to work out if I should buy a 48GB M4 Pro Mac Mini now, or wait for M5 Pro ones later this year. For AI/ML purposes, mostly. As far as I can tell, the new M5 MacBooks didn't go up much or any for the same amount of RAM?

deelowe• 5 months ago

I don't expect the ram situation to get any better soon if that's what you're asking.

discordance• 5 months ago

Depends what kind of AI/ML purposes you are intending to work on

mikkupikku2• 5 months ago

At this point is the performance advantage of Apple CPUs even worth it if you can't upgrade the ram itself? I'm thinking you might be better off building a PC and putting the absolute bare minimum RAM in it, with plans to swap that out with good stuff in a year or two once the RAM market stops being insane.

htsh• 5 months ago

are we sure the RAM market will stop being insane in a year or two or could this be the new norm?

mkl2• 5 months ago

It's the RAM bandwidth that's the advantage, 300GB/s for M5 Pro. RAM in slots is way slower, ~50GB/s.

pjmlp6• 5 months ago

RAM, disk, CPU, GPU, for me it isn't for quite some time, then again I have been mostly a Windows/UNX person, only using Apple gear when assigned via project delivery.

bombcar10• 5 months ago

I wouldn't buy a local machine for AI/ML purposes unless you have an actual defined use case and programs to run (perhaps even being able to test them at an Apple Store).

Otherwise you may end up like others using a high-spec Mac mini to just access online models.

quietsegfault• 5 months ago

I do not appreciate you calling me out personally!

itg• 5 months ago

The AMD Strix Halo pc's are another option. I was also debating between a mac mini but decided to go the AMD route.

freedomben2• 5 months ago

I'm eyeing that seriously too. Are you running linux on it by chance? Would love to hear from someone running linux on a non-Apple AI capable machine

bombcar10• 5 months ago

They may be trying to sell through the existing CPU before a launch (soft or not) of the M5-based versions (though I've heard the rumor is there will be no M5 Ultra and we might be looking at an M6 Ultra later in the year).

reactordev• 5 months ago

This is most likely the case. They ended their production run and have inventory (or so they thought). Now with the rush for LLM power, they sold out of them and they no longer have that inventory. This was a surprise to their bottom line AND their supply chain logistics plan!

I’m sure they wanted to order more but were priced out for the increase in ram costs. Apple probably decided it wasn’t worth it until they revamped the architecture (and put a larger order in this time around).

I’m not a buyer but I suspect that’s what’s playing out right now behind closed door meetings.

Terretta• 5 months ago

Regret on a $10k desktop rendered obsolete for purpose (the 512GB of RAM only has so many applications) months later is not a great look. It's good long-term brand value thinking to close the regrets window earlier.

Definitely “Caution” stage: https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/mac-studio/

jmull• 5 months ago

Interestingly, the "ultra" Mac Studio released a year ago was based on the older M3, not M4. Apparently, the work to "ultra-fy" a CPU is significant (which makes sense) so there can be a lag.

Not that they have to follow pattern, but the a Mac Studio ultra released later this year might be based on M4. Or one based on M5 might be released a year or more from now.

groundzeros20155• 5 months ago

My understanding is “ultra-ify” means put two together. I think it’s about having inventory

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/03/apple-unveils-m1-ultr...

foobiekr• 5 months ago

It's really probably more about wafer and chip allocation.

fartfeatures• 5 months ago

The M4 Max lacks the UltraFusion interconnect, making an M4 Ultra impossible. We might however see an M5 Ultra due to the new Fusion Architecture in the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips (just announced for the latest MacBook Pro), which uses a high-bandwidth die-to-die interconnect to bond two dies into a single unified SoC—similar in concept to UltraFusion but evolved for better scaling, efficiency, and features like per-GPU-core Neural Accelerators.

Reports and leaks strongly indicate Apple is preparing an M5 Ultra (likely fusing or scaling from the M5 Max using this advanced interconnect tech) for a Mac Studio refresh later in 2026, based on Bloomberg/Mark Gurman and other sources. This would bring back the top-tier "Ultra" option after skipping it entirely for M4.

caseyf7• 5 months ago

There will absolutely be an M5 Ultra. Gurman has confirmed it.

halJordan2• 5 months ago

That means little and less

cyanydeez3• 5 months ago

Just got a strix halo ROG Z13 this month with soldered UMA memory, 128GB LPDDR5X-8000. It cost ~$3k.

Amazon is selling 128GB memory kits @ 5600MHZ for $3k.

I think there might be a market failure guys.

tonyedgecombe4• 5 months ago

It’s only a failure if manufacturers don’t respond by increasing capacity.

cyanydeez3• 5 months ago

This is like believing there's unlimited, instant-on capacity. The same type of "we can just tariff whatever we want, and magically, the market will figure it out".

That makes sense for a few products, but not something that takes billions of dollars, multiple factories, etc to produce.

Aurornis2• 5 months ago

Amazon is selling 128GB memory kits @ 5600MHZ for $3k.

128GB memory kits are not $3K. Closer to half of that. Amazon is not a good source of RAM pricing.

freedomben2• 5 months ago

Where would you recommend sourcing RAM?

chiph• 5 months ago

I think it's unlikely that Apple is paying the spot price for memory. They almost certainly negotiate delivery/price contracts in advance. Maybe the contract for the chips used in the 512GB model will expire soon?

ajross3• 5 months ago

Even if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.

tonyedgecombe4• 5 months ago

Not if their margin on the completed product is higher than the potential profit on the memory.

My guess is they are doing this because they make more money selling two 256GB devices than they do on one 512GB device.

Faaak• 5 months ago

That doesn't take into account the profit generated by selling the mac in itself

muyuu2• 5 months ago

it's Apple and they don't like to adjust prices to the market

other companies would have just hiked the price of the 512GB model to reflect the lack of supply and to allow people who really need that model to pay for it dearly

but that comes with some PR damage that Apple would rather not deal with

Thorrez• 5 months ago

Apple buys and uses so much RAM across all its product lines that it’s in a better negotiating position than the likes of Framework or Raspberry Pi, but CEO Tim Cook acknowledged in the company’s last earnings call that memory pricing could begin to eat into Apple’s profit margins later this year.

cyanydeez3• 5 months ago

I would think the price gouging on memory tiers is why its in a better negotiating position. Having 200% markup means minor market conditions wont prevent them from payment.

AnthonyMouse2• 5 months ago

There's also the fact that they were charging $200 to add 8GB of RAM before the prices went up, when that much RAM was something like $70 at retail.

The problem then is that when the supply gets more expensive and you were already charging the maximally-extractive price to customers, they can't eat much more of a price increase, so instead most of it has to come out of margins.

phamilton• 5 months ago

15 years ago I was an intern at Micron and learned they passed on a contract with Apple because Apple insisted on discounts and there wasn't a compelling reason to reduce profit at Micron.

So yeah, Apple probably does pay less. But the market has enough demand that suppliers do say no.

zozbot2344• 5 months ago

This is actually relevant, because DRAM costs just as much now per Gb as it did 15 years ago (that's controlling for inflation; it's as much as it cost 20 years ago on a pure price basis).

mapt• 5 months ago

It costs the same, we just mark it as an opportunity cost of unloading the memory on the spot market.

If I buy contracts for 1 gold bar at $500, and the gold price runs to $1200, I can either continue to market my gold-containing product for the same profit margin, or I can unload all that gold for $1200/bar and make a profit of $700/bar. If my profit margin is high and it doesn't take many gold bars to make a thousand units, maybe discontinuation doesn't make any sense. But if my product is "solid gold statuary of Dear Leader", and the bars are most of my cost basis, I know what I'd do.

groundzeros20155• 5 months ago

You’re thinking only finance. Their goal in buying the contract is to secure the good. The ability to maintain price will allow them to sell more units which is the number they want to show.

kube-system5• 5 months ago

Yes but the clock has been ticking, new products are being released, and at some point they will be renegotiating the next contract

don_neufeld2• 5 months ago

Yup, and it looks like it will be a tough negotiation:

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/26/apple-agrees-100-price-...

boznz• 5 months ago

Apple needs to seriously consider some sort of vertical integration on memory, it has proved it can do it with CPU's

glenstein• 5 months ago

Amazing that it's gotten to that point but I think that's right. It's more intuitive that you would need vertical integration with your processing chips because of the degree of expert specialization necessary to produce them, especially in close coordination with a major product release.

By comparison, ram seems much more a commodity, but the game has changed and it seems like there may be an important strategic interest in sourcing and supplying your own.

Culonavirus• 5 months ago

It's not a shortage, it's a cartel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY

Alifatisk3• 5 months ago

The video is 1 and half hour long. It's a whole documentary. Very detailed and well thought out, but too long for me at the moment. I'll see if its possible to get a summary somehow.

ahurmazda• 5 months ago

aside: YT has a AI/summary option (unless creator opts out). Look for the sparkle button. Personally, it gets me 80% there most days.

Imustaskforhelp5• 5 months ago

I haven't watched up the video but I went way too into the weeds of the ram crisis.

I am not sure what the video suggests. This is my own understanding of the things after I got way too invested in why does OpenAI need all of this ram all of a sudden. (On a random tuesday)

My understanding is TLDR: The stargate project had OpenAI,Oracle,Softbank etc.

Softbank got the money from Japanese bank loan[0] at low interests rates and actually scrambled to find the 20 Billion $ (they commited combined with oracle to around 500 billion $)

(Btw The datacenter thing is being done in a similar fashion by Oracle)

Almost all of that money when given to OpenAI was used/(will be used?) to commit 20% of the Ram supply of the whole world at a more expensive package because these companies just package ram in different order to get "AI ram" and then Micron shuts down the consumer brand (Crucial)

This has now caused Ram prices to spike 5 times the cost in a couple of months back. Also, the inflation is happening in hard drive and just Nand in general.

The largest impacts I can see that is that even companies like google were scrambling to find Ram. I find this to be one of the larger reasons why they might need so much ram all of a sudden. I mean Google and Anthropic were needing Ram but not 20% of it and not committed in such a way and I am not sure if datacenters are even being built for ram to be stored[1]

OpenAI datacenters in Argentina for example is operated by such a shady company that came like 1-2 years ago IIRC. So a 500 Billion $ Project is just picking any random companies ... Yea no, I have the belief that they don't trust it themselves especially when a company is scrambling for money.

All of this does feel very cartel/monopoly-ish to me to push the competitors out of the market or the people running open source models out of the market and another benefit of it for OpenAI all was that we normal everyday people get impacted too and I am sure that when they made such a large decision, they must have internally thought about it but we all know the morality of OpenAI now after the DoD deal.

But I don't think that google and other companies are that impacted by it all it seems as well. Only the average consumer and Hosting providers (Thus seeing OVH,Hetzner raise prices for example). The average AWS/GCP/Azure makes enough money that they might not even raise money for sometime and they'll be fine having another additional benefit that more people worried about increasing prices would go to Microsoft Azure/GCP/AWS even more so.

Edit: Gamers are being pushed out of consoles and everything too and some are saying seeing the cloud connection and AWS coming out and saying that we want Gamers on cloud (paraphrasing) as meaning that its all done to move everything to cloud.

I do believe that this might be only half the story as OpenAI does benefit from everything moving to the cloud (somewhat) but its done even more to prevent competition in the whole genre as well.

I believe that they thought about it and treated it as a plus point but before all and everything, it helped them thought that it can help them maintain their flimsy lead in AI models as more and more catch up by having a more monopolistic lead by stifling competition by rising prices 5 times. Gamers and normal people were just the largest casuality in this crossfire.

I was thinking in the past month when I found all this that damn, OpenAI's morality sucks and they did all of it on purpose

And then they had the department of defence* deal and the whole controversy surrounding it so yeah, that too.

OpenAI doesn't want your benefit. It wants its profit and when these are conflict, OpenAI doesn't care a cent about you, not anymore than the cent that you give it.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/softbank-...

[1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/148208/oracle-openai-texas...

harias• 5 months ago

You can use Gemini or NotebookLM to summarize it

sva_• 5 months ago

I haven't watched the whole thing either, but basically

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

+ showing the people responsible have only been promoted in those companies

+ pointing out 3 (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) companies at the heart of it now have 95% of market share

+ hypothesis they've doing it again (or rather, have continued doing it "business as usual")

cubefox2• 5 months ago

No, it's a shortage due to high demand from AI data centers.

amelius2• 5 months ago

Why are you so sure?

groundzeros20155• 5 months ago

I hope so. If the government isn’t protecting them all we need to do is wait for new participants in the market.

snczl• 5 months ago

The story here is about what lesson was learned by the DRAM cartel after they got busted and hit with large fines. One might hope the lesson learned would be, "we should not fix prices", but what got them in trouble was colluding secretly. What if we just did it via earnings reports, press releases, and other public statements?

While there is some market variance like the 2022 to 2023 glut, DRAM prices haven't fallen in real terms in over 15 years. This was all done by controlling supply, and it was all done in public. It starts with one of the big three putting out a statement like, "Samsung is considering reducing DRAM wafer output due to softness in the mobile PC segment." The actual reason varies and often makes little sense.

This is followed by similar public statements from the other large vendors expressing a willingness to reduce supply. Once everyone commits in this way, the companies follow up with announcements of actual supply reductions. You can watch this happen any time prices start to dip.

My bet is if the DOJ investigates, they will not find the same sort of embarrassing smoking gun emails between representatives of Micron, Hynix, and Samsung. The collusion was all done in public. The companies will claim it is just good business management, a strategy known as "conscious parallelism." They used this exact defense to get a 2022 antitrust lawsuit dismissed.

That said, their goal seemed to be just keeping prices fixed. They wanted to avoid boom and bust cycles, keep profits high, and keep prices stagnant. A massive price hike invites investigations and creates problems. If DRAM prices just never fall, they can enjoy healthy profits with little risk.

But what happens when your intentionally constrained supply hits a sudden large spike in demand? Prices skyrocket, everyone gets mad, and demands investigations. My guess is instead of being thrilled with the price spike, the executives at the large DRAM manufacturers are very worried someone put something incriminating in a document somewhere that can be subpoenaed ("how we're going to fix prices in public and get away with it").

zozbot2344• 5 months ago

Publicly announcing reductions in DRAM wafer output is not per se nefarious. You need to do it from time to time anyway, if only as part of retooling towards newer technologies that will be required when making DRAM dies for newer standards.

lenerdenator• 5 months ago

Now how am I supposed to develop Electron apps and use Chrome?

In all seriousness, though, as one of the uninitiated, what would be the value of hosting LLMs on a machine like this that has a lot of memory that you pay for up front versus some sort of VPC-based approach?

groundzeros20155• 5 months ago

Have you seen how much GPUs cost to rent? Note that this memory is shared between CPU and GPU.

robotresearcher• 5 months ago

One factor is that you may not be in a position to push your working data to a third party service, for security or legal reasons.

rbshamsu• 5 months ago

Complete privacy, security, control and customization.

saurik• 5 months ago

So, the question I wonder: is that it for this tier? Will we even see a 512GB variant of the next model?

ganoushoreilly2• 5 months ago

I suspect they'll still want to offer it given the push they've been making over the last year with RDMA. My guess is the 512gb or larger studio will largely be a byproduct of the systems they're designing for their own AI efforts in the datacenter. I don't think this is the end of it for the longer term.

benbojangles2• 5 months ago

You can keep your 512gb mac studio i'm running qwen3.5:0.8b on an Orangepi zero 2w and learning just as much as they are.

zitterbewegung4• 5 months ago

The Mac Studio highest config was a great value for AI workloads though at least for inference and no one is reporting this….

knollimar• 5 months ago

Don't you need two 512GB ones for unquanted latest chinese models?

redman25• 5 months ago

For consumers, there's little reason to run unquanted, especially for large models which take less of a hit from quantization. I'm running a 200b model at Q3 with very little degradation. A 1000b model would see even less change.

zitterbewegung4• 5 months ago

Getting 512 GB of ram at the price point is cheaper than everything else. That’s why Apple stopped production to divert for the M5 ultra.

hu32• 5 months ago

Yes and the result of this $10k endeavour is a much slower a dumber model than any SoTA $20/mo API. On top of the maintenance burden to keep software/models updated.

marcuskaz• 5 months ago

Inventory is tight too, if you look at delivery/shipping times for Mac Studio and Mac Mini, I'm seeing April/May

kmfrk• 5 months ago

A lot of people also got into buying Macs for OpenClaw, so demand is probably up as well.

copperx• 5 months ago

What's the deal with the Mac Mini and Openclaw? a vps is a better alternative.

is it because iMessage?

andai2• 5 months ago

Yeah on the discord you see a lot of people asking about how much RAM they need to run local models. There seems to be a lot of demand for it.

root_axis• 5 months ago

I am not convinced there are that many people actually buying macs for OpenClaw.

nickthegreek• 5 months ago

i just walked into a microcenter yesterday where not only did they have a huge stock of mac mini, they are all advertised 15% off and runs openclaw.

bombcar10• 5 months ago

https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?fq=ca... it's even mentioned on each one online

Sathwickp• 5 months ago

Was bound to happen, it never found the market fit

hx8• 5 months ago

I'm sure the margin was great for the ones it sold.

api2• 5 months ago

I’ve been in tech for a long time and have seen RAM shortages and price spikes before. This one’s fairly bad but they resolve in 1-3 years.

pixl97• 5 months ago

Ya, how's that working out for GPU's?

api2• 5 months ago

It’ll take longer for two reasons.

One is that it’s a more complicated part with tougher fab requirements.

Two is that it’s not a commodity. AMD can’t make nVidia GPUs. They have to design their own. Everyone has patents and trade secrets and copyrights. Patents expire and knowledge diffuses but that adds another time lag.

AMD and Intel are fully aware of the demand and are working on it.

RAM is a commodity. Totally interchangeable standard part. Also simpler to fab, thus quicker and easier to scale up.

Oh, and I’d like to add: everyone is afraid it’s a bubble that will pop. Nobody wants a bunch of stranded capex. That has also happened before many times. So that puts brakes on it too.

groundzeros20155• 5 months ago

The cure for high prices is high prices.

layer8• 5 months ago

Two years remaining at least this time, according to current fab planning.

reenorap2• 5 months ago

I've been in tech for ~40 years now and I've never seen anything like this. The downstream repercussions on consumer products that have no access to cheap memory is devastating and is an extinction level event for most low-cost providers of cell phones, tvs, etc.

TMWNN• 5 months ago

I've been in tech for ~40 years now and I've never seen anything like this.

Then how do you not remember the DRAM shortage of the late 1980s?

GeekyBear2• 5 months ago

The rumor from Gurman is that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio ships in the first half of this year.

This may just be a sign that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is shipping sooner rather than later, as it's common for Apple to push out ship dates for soon to be replaced products.

We do have leaked benchmarks showing that the M5 Max outperforms the M3 Ultra currently shipping in the Mac Studio, so buying an M3 Ultra Studio right now would be a terrible idea.

aleph_minus_one• 5 months ago

Slightly off-topic side remark:

Every mathematician and computer scientist should feel deeply confused that the M... Ultra is more powerful than the M... Max.

Why? Because if something is the maximum, there doesn't exist anything larger/better. :-)

user_7832• 5 months ago

This thing has been going on for a while unfortunately. If I told you "Here's an "air", a vanilla, and a "pro"", what would you expect? The vanilla is base, air is lighter, and pro is nicer, right?

Well, for iPads, the base has (had? Haven't closely followed them for a while) an older CPU for some reason. And the Air is actually a "Pro-lite", rather than a weight optimized version.

Don't get started on where the mini sits, or what happens if you want "nicer" features like 60hz+ displays in a small form factor... a feature that budget android tablets have had for years.

GeekyBear2• 5 months ago

They should use something simple, like AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395?

calf• 5 months ago

Not really, Max is to violet as Ultra is to ultraviolet, as in something exceeding an established category (visible light)

guerrilla2• 5 months ago

I wonder if the war with Iran could actually fix the RAM shortage. If this continues it really could put a damper on datacenter rollout.

kube-system5• 5 months ago

How much of the capital investment that’s fueling the current expansion is already allocated?

guerrilla2• 5 months ago

No idea. Let's assume not all of it.

mv4• 5 months ago

I tried finding a 128 - 256GB Mac Studio online and most options would not be shipped for at least "8-10 weeks".

j452• 5 months ago

More likely that the M5 Max Studio is coming out. the M5 Max Macbook Pros just came out.

Also the 512 GB ssd version has a slower SSD than anything 1 TB and up. The new SSDs on the M5 I believe are much faster and what's coming likely will receive that.

There's no doubt there's a ram shortage, and price increases, and the biggest companies in the world lock in their pricing well in advance, and the remaining leftovers are where the consumers experience shortages.

tencentshill• 5 months ago

This is 512GB RAM, not SSD. Kind of insane that has to be differentiated now.

j452• 5 months ago

Total read error on my part, thanks.

I guess it gives more credence to stitch a few more of them togther in the meantime.

827a4• 5 months ago

IMO its more nuanced. They're likely in production ramp-up of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio, for release in the next ~3 months; they have pre-purchased bins of memory from the supply-constrained major memory supplies; and they need as much as they can get because they want to push an M5 Ultra config to 768gb to continue the "you can run local models" story that the M5 Max Macbook Pro started telling last week.

Going beyond 512gb and into 768gb memory is something of a threshold that will allow Apple to claim local capability for significantly more models. Qwen3-235B, Minimax M2.5, and GLM 4.7 could kind of run with no quantization on 512gb, but they'll comfortably run at 768gb. DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM 5 may also work at some level of quantization.

taf2• 5 months ago

I hope you are right

criddell• 5 months ago

Is Apple telling the "you can run local models" story, or is it third parties?

wahnfrieden• 5 months ago

Yes Apple promotes local model capabilities in their marketing

827a4• 5 months ago

Yes:

A powerful Neural Accelerator is built into each GPU core of the M5 family of chips, which dramatically speeds up AI tasks like image generation from diffusion models, large language model (LLM) prompt processing, and on-device transformer model training. [1]

[1] https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

bytesandbits2• 5 months ago

Apple

lolive• 5 months ago

What’s the price of that beast? #meCryingTearsOfBlood

827a4• 5 months ago

Apple will be the first company to pioneer a new "work for tokens" program; simply commit yourself to six months of servitude with The Company to pay off your new Mac Studio purchase.

unfocused• 5 months ago

Less than $10,000, depending on what CPU and storage you select.

bombcar10• 5 months ago

Let's assume a Mac Studio M5 would start at $1999, and that a M5 Max upgrade 128 GB would be about the 1000 it is now. Then an M5 Ultra 768 would be something like $1999 + 1000 + $4000 - cheaper than the current top of the line (which will never happen) so I'd presume about the same $10,000.

Or they could finally make the Mac Pro respectable and have it two M5 Ultra Mac Studios stuck together (or give it NUMA RAM: on chip + expandable).

rewgs2• 5 months ago

My theory is that they're going to release a new Mac Pro that's about half the size of the current one. Enough space for some PCIe slots, but otherwise smaller given the enormous amount of wasted space in that thing since moving from Intel to Apple Silicon. Guessing the rack-mount model, should they continue selling it, will be 3 or 4u instead of 5u.

I know everyone thinks they're going to just kill it, but I don't see it. Apple's move under Tim Cook has been to exhaust supplies (see: filling the Intel Mac Pro chassis with air and not updating the CPU), letting people predict its death (see: 2013 -> 2019 Mac Pro silence), and then redesigning it into something people want while utilizing it as an opportunity to segment specs across their SKUs.

The Studio will remain the high-powered creator machine, whereas the Mac Pro will be retooled into an AI beast.

thefounder3• 5 months ago

Why people buy the Studio with the high ram config is actually the unified memory. This is unique to Apple. I'm not sure what Mac Pro would do with PCIe cards . It would be useless for AI because what you want is unified memory that can be used by the GPU/AI not just ram.

pjmlp6• 5 months ago

It is already a walking zombie, Apple clearly no longer cares about the workstation market, regardless of how many "I still believe" t-shirts get sold to wear at WWDC.

thefounder3• 5 months ago

why just 768gb and not a ~1TB ?

halJordan2• 5 months ago

You have to ask why Apple is going to nickel and dime you?

lbreakjai• 5 months ago

Not related, but why is the word "quiet" or "quietly" suddenly everywhere?

tom_• 5 months ago

Also mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513 - see the article section: "Quietly" and Other Magic Adverbs. Presumably the LLM writing style rubbing off, assuming the LLM hasn't been used to create the content in the first place.

functionmouse• 5 months ago

seems like people are using words like "the", "and", and the letter "e" a lot also. It must mean that everyone is a robot.

TiredOfLife• 5 months ago

That word has been used to turn any action into big evil conspiracy for a long time.

brcmthrowaway• 5 months ago

Why can't RAM be done inhouse? It's probably simpler than a CPU.. right?

juahan• 5 months ago

This is what I’ve been wondering as well.

wmf• 5 months ago

Maybe etching the deep trench capacitors is really tricky.

Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

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