local LLM

The first review of a shipping Mac Studio with M5 Ultra scored it 8.9 out of 10 and told most buyers to purchase the cheaper model. This analysis separates Apple’s “up to” multipliers — 4.3x peak AI compute against M3 Ultra, but only 1.3x multithreaded CPU — from the measured results: 52,185 on Geekbench 7 multi-core, a 33% gain over M3 Ultra, and only about 10% over the M5 Max on synthetic AI tests. It works through the full configuration ladder from $2,499 to $11,299, the 37.5% entry-price increase, the untested four-machine clustering claim, the whole-system cost per gigabyte of unified memory against an NVIDIA DGX Spark, and the two conditions under which the Ultra is the rational purchase.