Apple's August 25 newsroom post says a Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory is coming in late October. It prints an M5 Max from $2,499 and an M5 Ultra from $5,499. The $22,299 figure is a Wednesday reading of the store configurator. 9to5Mac and MacRumors each put that price on the M5 Ultra with 512GB. 9to5Mac says the option sits only on the chip with a 36-core CPU and an 80-core GPU, as a $15,500 step up from the 96GB configuration of that same chip. With 1TB of storage the total is $22,299. With 16TB it is $29,799. AppleInsider's headline put the same memory step at $15,500. MacRumors adds that an M5 Max still tops out at 128GB. 9to5Mac read an arrival window of late November to early December.

On these figures, $22,299 minus the $15,500 memory step is $6,799 for the 36-core chip with 96GB and 1TB. That is $1,300 above the $5,499 base. The extra memory is 416GB, so the step works out to about $37 per extra gigabyte. Two base M5 Ultra machines list at $10,998 together. The memory step costs more than both of them.

The spec sheet keeps the bandwidth flat when the capacity goes up. The base M5 Ultra is a 30-core CPU and a 64-core GPU, with 96GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s of bandwidth. The 36-core, 80-core chip stays at 1.2TB/s. Apple lists 256GB and 512GB as the higher memory options, and 512GB is the option on that 36-core chip. The M5 Max starts at 36GB and 460GB/s. Its ceiling is 128GB at 614GB/s, on the 40-core GPU. The $15,500 buys room on the same bus.

The next year of DRAM contracts still points up. On July 9, TrendForce said server DRAM contract prices should keep rising each quarter from the second half of 2026 through the second half of 2027, with the pace slowing. In that note the third-quarter increase was put at 13 to 18 percent, held down for some U.S. cloud buyers by long-term agreements, and a server DRAM shortage was already expected for 2027. On September 30, TrendForce said conventional DRAM contract prices were projected to rise 10 to 15 percent in the fourth quarter. The pace is slower. The direction is still up. PC makers were buying because they expect supply to stay tight in 2027, and the note said PC DRAM supply could fall next year as capacity moves to servers. Mobile DRAM's upward trend was still in place in that note, with slower growth in the fourth quarter, because suppliers keep shifting capacity toward server memory and HBM.

Micron's September 30 call, as The Stack reported it, runs the same way. Sanjay Mehrotra said memory and storage supply will be "much tighter" in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than in 2026. He said he does not see when supply catches up with demand. He said HBM bit shipments grow faster than conventional DRAM through calendar 2028, and that the gap between DRAM supply growth and demand growth is keeping supply tight. New cleanroom space arriving in 2028 still takes a long time to build, and output ramps only after the first wafers. These notes describe the memory market. They do not set Apple's configurator. Apple can hold $22,299, cut it, or raise it. A cheaper 512GB Mac Studio in a year would be Apple cutting the sticker. The forecasts in these notes do not show the chips getting cheaper.

The machines under this option already hold the local models most of this capacity talk is about. At the 4-bit count this desk uses, half a gigabyte per billion parameters before context, Qwen3 32B is 16GB and a 70B model is 35GB. A packaged 4-bit file is heavier than that count, so the real file needs more room and the rate ceiling is lower. The 32B count fits the 36GB M5 Max. The 70B count fits the 96GB Ultra. The ceiling is the 1.2TB/s bus divided by the weight file. It is not a measured benchmark. A 35GB file comes out near 34 tokens a second. A 200GB file, which still fits the 256GB option, comes out at 6. A file that needs the 512GB step has to sit above 256GB of weights. At 300GB that ceiling is 4 tokens a second. Filling 512GB with weights would be about 2 tokens a second. If the job fits in 128GB or in 256GB, this configuration is the wrong buy.

Waiting a year is a bet that Apple cuts this sticker. The contract forecasts through the second half of 2027 still point up.