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Apple Studio with maxed out M5 Ultra, 256GB RAM and 16TB storage is 18,299$. The 512GB RAM version apparently is coming in October, considering that the difference between 96GB and 256GB is priced at 4000$, the 512GB upgrade must be eye watering.

So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$.

The fully maxed out Apple Studio then will be 24699$. It's 17199$ if you don't upgrade the storage(1TB).

Nevertheless I itch to have one :)



So is downpayment on a house. I would buy the house and just pay for tokens as needed. The house will get more valuable and that wealth would buy a lot of tokens in the future - which will probably get cheaper.

EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.


Or more simply – $25K (+ tax) put in a savings account will earn about enough interest to pay for a $100/month AI subscription indefinitely. And at the end of it you still have the $25K.


Not 'more simply', there are basically zero savings accounts that are going to net you a 5%+ interest rate to give you that $100 a month. And that $25k becomes less valuable over time. $25k is now only worth $19k because inflation.


Money market/treasuries (even ETF like SGOV) gets pretty close to 5% when typical savings rate is a bit under

If treasuries “fail” we have a different class of problem.


>Money market/treasuries (even ETF like SGOV) gets pretty close to 5% when typical savings rate is a bit under

???

30 Day SEC Yield as of Aug 24, 2026: 3.61%

12m Trailing Yield as of Aug 24, 2026: 3.74%

https://www.ishares.com/us/products/314116/ishares-0-3-month...

1.39% might not seem like a lot, but that's off by more than a quarter.


Rates are around 3.5% right now before taxes.


There's still many high interest savings accounts that are at least 4%


And you still need at least 5% to do what OP is suggesting.


Do you think the hardware will still be worth $25k once it is five years old?


Do you think monthly AI 'subscriptions' are going to be $100 a month in 5 years? These people using these would probably be on $200/month subscriptions and with that OPs assertion of 'shoving away and paying with interest' makes no sense.


It’s fair to compare the two options.

Our assumptions may differ - and that’s ok... The monthly costs may go down too.


It’s basically impossible to compete on economic terms with deeply subsidized hardware that is widely available to rent or as a service with zero commitment.

For general inference there’s no ROI that makes this work vs subscriptions.

25k for computer now, plus 9-10% sales tax, plus operating cost, plus time and cost for R&D tinkering with models, harnesses, and infra (assuming highly capable engineering talent that can get paid for your human inference) vs a HEAVILY subsidized subscription at 200 per month with free R&D has a pretty long ROI (15 years?)

At API costs, it’s like 6 months if you’re heavy on inference. For training, specialized models will have their own ROI that makes this worthwhile. Then debate renting capacity and the platform to choose


Yeah I think you call out the right incentives. Lots of people are very interested in renting out the hardware, and it gives us lots of flexibility vs buying.

If the pace of hardware change is what the jensens of the world say, then the rents on existing hardware will decline.


Why are we comparing to the maxed out model only? The M5 Ultra with 96 GB, 1 TB, and 64 GPU cores is $5499. Apple lets you lease that model for $110/month for 36 months.

If you can settle for a M5 Max base model that would be a $49/month lease.

Today, you should be able to run Qwen 3.8 - 27B amazingly well on either which is giving comparable performance to 5.6 Luna on SWE Bench. The local models are now getting better and more efficient and this should give you headroom. Tools like turbo fieldfare are really reducing the memory requirements to run large models and I don’t see it stopping soon.

https://github.com/drumih/turbo-fieldfare


This is the real answer.

Unless you need privacy for your inference this instant, paying for credits can get 80 to 90 percent of people everything they need.

Of course if you do need that privacy, then forking the $25K over to Apple is a no brainer.


I don't need privacy, so it would be financially imprudent for me to spend 20 grand on such a machine. But I have a financial management client who does need such privacy, and if I get more fully engaged with them then I would be able to justify getting a loaded Mac.


Why is this a no brainer?

There are both cheaper and faster options out there.


Isn't there something to be said for owning your own hardware though?


Not if it's 5-10x slower than a remote inference server. Mac prefill latency is exhausting.


Currently m5 max has a prefill rate for Qwen 3.8 27B of 400+ tok/s, then generate at ~60 tok/s. (And it can be improved further, the software is not yet at the level it is for CUDA)

That means for context under ~5k or so ttft (time to first token) it's going to respond faster than Claude. If the answer is less than ~1k I think the request finishes sooner. And it's ~claude 4.5 or 4.6 level intelligence.

I've had it work for more than a day on a pi.dev "loop engineering" project involving writing software.

Plus privacy. Plus offline.


M5 changed that a lot though - it could still be better but 4x improvement made it cross the frustratingly slow barrier for me.


Oh tell me more about prefill latency.


https://blog.exolabs.net/nvidia-dgx-spark/


Thank you very much for this link! Extremely fascinating.


Where I’m from $25k is the down payment on a parking space in a garage, not an entire house (or condo).


>The house will get more valuable

Depends on where you live. Also keep in mind population decline so long term, im not so sure. Prices already dropping in less desirable places (everywhere outside of most blue areas) (Assuming you are talking about the US sorry if not)


where are downpayments so cheap? I'll move there ^^'


Yeah my down payment 10 years ago was $200,000. The house has appreciated 0%. I sold meta shares to buy it. Those would be worth a million now.

… I wish I hadn’t just calculated that.


Having a place to live is an investment in your health and wellbeing. Can't live in a stock option.


At the time, were you aware that you could borrow against your portfolio?


And when they get margin called in March 2020?

Maybe they had the cash on hand, maybe they didn’t. Assuming they are in the family formation stage of life with young kids, an outlier risk appetite would be required to sleep well at night.


Detroit, Cleveland, etc. Basically huge swaths of the rust belt. Plus a smattering of small towns in the south.


Sure, and living there is the housing equivalent to buying a super cheap off brand computer.

You get what you pay for.


Well, this is all assuming a 20% down payment, which anecdotally as a 26 yr. old, nobody I know is able to achieve. All my home-owning friends put 3-7% down. Granted, most are using first-time homebuyer loans which are generally more favorable.

In RTP (NC), a ~$400k house at 5% down is $20k


There are 70 houses for sale in Pittsburgh for $25K or less


Coshocton, Ohio, plenty of houses for <100k


On second thought...


Had I done that as well, then maybe I wouldn't have gotten intrigued by HyperCard, then Director/Authorware, then Flash, then HTML, then...


With the way RAM prices are going up, you could expect to make 20% profit on any purchase.


I tripled my money on my RAM purchase of three years ago. So, yes, for short-term appreciation that's hard to beat. But I don't think it's something that will continue.


why not buy the maxed out mac and then buy a metaverse house that you can live in virtually

problem solved /s


Regarding the $25 price per GB RAM. These chips use LPDDR5X RAM. Looking at the Framework site, they are selling LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 modules for the following prices:

    16GB   $239 - $15/GB 
    32GB   $800 - $25/GB
    64GB $1,600 - $25/GB


M6 Mac mini maxes out at 32GB—if you want 64GB you have to go with the M5 Pro (just priced it out on Apple's store page).


Apple hasn't been selling just ram for a long time, they sell vram. Try getting 512 gb of HBM on current Nvidia cards - it's gonna cost way more than $ 24k. And here you get the same amount of memory for weights right in a quiet unit under your desk

Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable


The RAM in the M5 is LPDDR5X, not HBM. You're right of course that it's unified and used as VRAM in that sense.


HBM itself is very expensive but it’s not really fair to compare to LPDDR or GDDR

They’re very different things.

The more logical argument to me is that Apple uses its upgrade price points as more than just direct BOM and rather as a proxy for things that are amortized across all their sales like support/warranty/etc so higher SKUs subsidize the costs of the lower ones.


I wish you could drop $20k and get a house! Down payment here store like $100k+ (AUD). So "only" 5~ Max Studios.


Ha yeah that was my thought. How is this a down payment? This would only be 20% of a $100k house...


"Nobody" puts down 20%. That hasn't been a requirement for decades (in the US).

And there are plenty of places in the US where you can buy a house for $150-$200k. Maybe not places you want to live for one reason or another, but they're there.


Well a substantial proportion of home buyers in Canada put down only the minimum 5% down payment.


op forgot to add "/hyperbole"


i remember when SGI boxes were $50k and then literally worthless just a couple bears later. i remember my university had a pile of them for free outside the deans office.


I figure most electronics are worthless after a couple of bears.


But every second bear doubles the transistor count.


bear metal


Ten years ago a bought an expensive MBP because I do a lot of stats in R, Python etc that benefited from it. But the next Mac I’ll buy will be a much lower-end model, because it’s just easier these days to do that work in notebooks in the cloud.


The trick are tax deductions.

I wouldn’t recommend buying any bare metal unless money is a second thought or you can fully deduct the price.

Most often in the end you pay half the price then. Depending on the write offs you could even make some bucks out of it.

Or buy and lease. Under certain circumstances the hardware costs you nothing.

But you need money to save money. And a company.


I recently had to buy RAM for some on-prem servers at work. 256GB was around $3800, and it wasn't even particularly fast RAM... it also wasn't ECC, because that would have spiked the price still higher.


I don't think 16TB storage is a right choice. Going 2TB and it's 11,299. Probably, if you buy the storage and install it yourself you can go higher and quite cheaper.


I think the reason they offer these options in the first place is the discontinuation of the MacPro and their remaining need to offer high end solutions.


$7000 of that is for the 16tb of storage. That is certainly not worth it if you are trying to save money.


Does anyone know if you can link multiples of these together for a single large model?




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