Mac Studio M5 Ultra chatter hits $20K

The real story here is not Apple pricing news but the market signal: local AI developers now treat massive unified memory as premium inference infrastructure.

• –Apple officially positions the current Mac Studio with M3 Ultra and up to 512GB of unified memory as capable of running LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters entirely in memory, which is why these configs matter so much to LocalLLaMA users.
• –Apple’s current Mac Studio lineup starts at $1,999 and goes as high as about $12.6K on the online store, so a $20K estimate for a hypothetical M5 Ultra is an extrapolation, not an announced price.
• –The thread shows how local inference demand is reshaping workstation buying logic: RAM capacity is becoming the headline spec, not just CPU or GPU speed.
• –If Apple keeps unified memory as its edge, Mac Studio could remain one of the few mainstream desktops attractive to developers who want frontier-scale local models without building a custom multi-GPU box.