GoKawiilis a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
The Mac Studio review unit that Apple sent us to test this year is, put simply, kind of outrageous. It has an M5 Ultra chip with a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU, 256GB of RAM, and 4TB of storage and costs $12,299. This thing is not for your typical content creation workloads. It’s for AI developers and some of the most demanding 3D visual effects houses out there.
Frankly, our usual benchmarks aren’t cutting it.
The latest version of Apple’s most powerful computer begins shipping today with new chips and prices that extend even further into the stratosphere. The new Mac Studio uses the same design that’s been with us since 2022, replete with ultra-fast ports both front and back, now kitted out with either an M5 Max or M5 Ultra chip, compared to the M4 Max or M3 Ultra of last year’s model.
My precious! (I’m talking about the SD card slot, of course.)
The M5 Max model starts at a relatively modest $2,499 with an 18-core CPU / 32-core GPU, 36GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. We’ve tested an M5 Max already, in the MacBook Pro, where it starts at $4,099 with the same amount of memory and 2TB of storage (the equivalent Mac Studio costs $3,299). The M5 Ultra is another beast altogether. It starts at $5,499 with 30 CPU cores, 64 GPU cores, 96GB of memory and 1TB of storage.
I’ve only had my hands on the new Mac Studio as well as a pair of the latest Mac Minis for a handful of days. That’s enough time to adequately test the M6 and M5 Pro chips in the Mac Mini, and to run our standard benchmarks on the M5 Ultra — but not enough time to seriously challenge it.
Mac Studio (2026) / Apple M5 Ultra / 256GB / 4TB Mac Studio (2025) / Apple M3 Ultra / 256GB / 4TB Mac Studio (2023) / Apple M2 Ultra / 128GB / 4TB MacBook Pro 16 / Apple M5 Max / 128GB / 4TB MacBook Pro 16 / Apple M4 Max / 128GB / 4TB Mac Mini (2026) / Apple M5 Pro / 48GB / 1TB MacBook Pro 16 / Apple M4 Pro / 48GB / 2TB MacBook Pro 14 / Apple M5 / 16GB / 1TB CPU cores 36 32 24 18 16 18 14 10 Graphics cores 80 80 76 40 40 20 20 10 Geekbench 6 CPU Single 4310 3246 2623 4330 4011 4294 3976 4208 Geekbench 6 CPU Multi 37870 28376 21397 29143 26422 29104 22615 17948 Geekbench 6 GPU (OpenCL) 151392 144437 129482 145613 115870 88531 70018 49059 Geekbench 6 GPU (Metal) 233865 214488 224158 227435 192753 142708 113600 77595 Geekbench 7 CPU Single 3763 2975 - - - 3675 - - Geekbench 7 CPU Multi 52441 40375 - - - 34021 - - Geekbench 7 GPU (OpenCL) 159918 121553 - - - 88763 - - Geekbench 7 GPU (Metal) 246680 208163 - - - 137117 - - Cinebench 2026 Single 751 580 - 734 663 715 - 736 Cinebench 2026 Multi 17960 12240 - 8952 7881 8059 - 4486 Cinebench 2026 GPU 133119 81731 - - - 52660 - - PugetBench for Photoshop 17236 14354 - 15716 13424 17726 12374 12354 PugetBench for Premiere Pro (2.0.0+) 224556 183298 - 154829 145350 105041 - 71122 PugetBench for DaVinci Resolve (2.0.0+) 177056 131801 - 124942 103051 85624 - 50882 Blender classroom test (seconds, lower is better) 11 15 - 15 19 24 - 44 Blender cosmos test (seconds, lower is better) 23 34 - 35 39 51 - - Premiere 4K Export (lower is better) 40 seconds 50 seconds 1 minute 1 minute, 10 seconds 1 minute, 18 seconds 1 minute, 51 seconds 2 minutes, 13 seconds 2 minutes, 47 seconds Sustained SSD reads (MB/s) 14867.60 7160.03 - 13638.91 7340.85 12218.07 6737.84 7049.45 Sustained SSD writes (MB/s) 18782.91 7996.90 - 17814.19 7969.07 15420.95 7499.56 7317.6 Price as tested $12,299 $8,099 $6,799 $6,149 $6,149 $2,899 $3,349 $1,949
Conveniently, we still have the similarly specced M3 Ultra Mac Studio from last year — though it was only $8,099 at the time. Aside from CPU core count and architecture, they’re nearly the same, which makes them easy to compare.
The M5 Ultra Mac Studio is around 30 percent faster than our similarly configured M3 Ultra in both single-core and multicore synthetic CPU tests. It varies more in graphics tests, but some, like the new Geekbench 7 OpenCL test, also saw around a 30 percent uplift. And a heftier GPU rendering test like Cinebench scored 63 percent higher.
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