GoKawiil
Tech News
Apple has published pricing for the 512GB RAM configuration of the Mac Studio, which is only available with the top-tier M5 Ultra chip featuring a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU. The upgrade costs $15,500 over the base 96GB configuration, bringing the starting price to $22,299 with 1TB of storage, and up to $29,799 with 16TB of storage. Units ordered now are expected to ship in late November to early December.
Apple has officially launched a new Mac Studio model featuring the M5 Ultra chip with a 512GB storage option. The release continues Apple's Mac Studio lineup, which targets professional users needing high-performance desktop computing.
Apple released a new version of its MLX framework that can run the frontier-class Muse Spark Open model, which has nearly a trillion parameters, locally on Mac Studio hardware. Apple reports that a cluster of four Mac Studios with M5 Ultra chips achieves over 36 tokens per second using tensor parallelization, and that single machines with up to 512GB of unified memory can also run the model, scaling to multiple units via an RDMA over Thunderbolt driver.
Meta launched Muse Spark Open, which it describes as the most capable open-weight AI model in the US, featuring 816 billion parameters and a 1 million token context window. The model is multimodal, built for coding and agentic tasks, and designed to run locally on Apple hardware, though it requires at least 1 terabyte of RAM and performs best on a Mac Studio with an M5 Ultra chip. Meta paired it with its Muse Code coding terminal and demonstrated it fixing a Mastodon client and editing footage in DaVinci Resolve.
Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weight model with 816 billion total parameters, 42 billion active parameters, and a 1 million-token context window, designed for coding and multi-step agentic tasks. The model is optimized to run locally across two Mac Studios equipped with 512GB M5 Ultra chips using Apple's MLX framework, which Meta calls the best desktop setup for running a powerful model. Apple has not yet released the 512GB Mac Studio, though it is expected later this month.
A new open-weight AI model, Muse Spark Open, has been released and optimized to run on Mac Studio machines with Apple's M5 Ultra chip, reportedly allowing two linked Macs to function like a single machine with a terabyte of unified memory. The release also includes custom Helion GPU kernels in SGLang that the developers say speed up performance on NVIDIA and AMD hardware, and the model underwent additional safety post-training evaluated against an internal scaling framework before release.
Meta has open-sourced Muse Spark Open, an 800-billion-parameter model it calls the most capable US open-weight model yet. Running it locally requires roughly 1TB of unified memory, achievable by pairing two of Apple's upcoming M5 Ultra Mac Studios with 512GB each, or four 256GB units costing about $38,000. The weights are now downloadable from Hugging Face, and Meta says the model was built in collaboration with Apple to run on its new hardware.
Meta launched Muse Spark Open, a multimodal model with 816 billion total parameters (42 billion active) and a 1 million-token context window, designed for coding and agentic tasks. The model is optimized using Apple's MLX framework to run on Mac Studio with M5 Ultra chips, with Meta demonstrating two linked Mac Studios handling the full model via unified memory. Weights are now available through Hugging Face.
Meta launched Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter multimodal AI model it calls the most capable US open-weight model available, and said it can run on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple's MLX framework. Apple published its own technical post on MLX and the new model, and executives from both companies publicly praised the collaboration, which Axios reported had been months in the making.
Apple has maintained the same 7.7-inch aluminum enclosure for the Mac Studio since its 2022 launch, now in its fourth hardware generation with the M5 Ultra. Internally, capabilities have grown sharply: the original M1 Ultra topped out at 128GB of memory, while the new M5 Ultra supports up to 512GB with data transfer speeds of 1.2TB/s, about 50 percent faster than the M3 Ultra. Apple skipped an M4 Ultra version due to hardware limitations, and in June raised prices across much of its Mac lineup, pushing the entry-level Mac Studio M4 Max from $1,999 to $2,499.
PCMag reviewed Apple's latest Mac Studio, built around the new M5 Ultra chip, noting its ability to run agentic AI frameworks, generate high-end video, and execute large language models entirely on-device. The review also covers the compact 7-inch-square chassis, its port selection including two USB-A ports, four Thunderbolt 5 ports, Ethernet, HDMI, and an SD card slot, plus support for up to four 5K external displays at 120 Hz.
Apple has released a new top-tier Mac Studio configuration built around its M5 Ultra chip, skipping an M4 Ultra generation entirely. The system pairs a fast CPU, capable GPU, and unified memory architecture, making it well suited to running large language models and AI agents locally rather than in the cloud. The launch follows a period in which high-end Mac Studios were hard to find, driven partly by demand from developers using tools like OpenClaw and open-weight models, compounded by an industry-wide memory chip shortage.