Mac Studio With M5 Max and M5 Ultra Review Roundup [Video]

Early reviews of Apple's new Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra have arrived ahead of its September 22 release. Reviewers found that the familiar enclosure hides substantial gains in storage, CPU, graphics, and local AI performance, although the most dramatic results came from configurations costing well into five figures.

The split between the two chips is clear. M5 Max looks like the more practical creative workstation, particularly for photography and video, while M5 Ultra's 1.2TB/s memory bandwidth and large unified memory options make it unusually capable of running AI models locally. Price and the inability to upgrade memory or storage after purchase remain the main complaints.

Apple introduced the new Mac Studio in August. M5 Max configurations start at $2,499, while M5 Ultra starts at $5,499 and can be configured with up to 512GB of unified memory beginning in late October. Our 2026 Mac desktop comparison covers the differences between the new Mac mini and Mac Studio models.

Current retailer pricing and availability can be found in our price tracker for Mac Studio with M5 Max and Mac Studio with M5 Ultra.

MacStories

“The M5 Ultra Mac Studio is a dream machine for local AI agents,” MacStories concluded after comparing a 256GB model with an M3 Ultra Mac Studio and a desktop PC equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090.

Using Qwen3.8 Flash Next, the publication measured an average 150 percent improvement in prompt processing and roughly 70 percent faster response generation compared with M3 Ultra. The RTX 5090 remained faster when a model fit entirely within its 32GB of VRAM, but the Mac Studio's much larger unified memory allowed it to run models and context windows that would require the PC to offload data to slower system memory.

The Verge

“I've never tested anything this fast before,” The Verge wrote about a $12,299 configuration with a 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU, 256GB of memory, and 4TB SSD.

The M5 Ultra recorded roughly 30 percent higher single-core and multi-core synthetic CPU results than a similarly configured M3 Ultra Mac Studio. Its Cinebench GPU result improved by 63 percent, while sustained SSD performance reached approximately 14.9GB/s for reads and 18.8GB/s for writes.

Macworld

“The SSD performance is so overwhelmingly good, it's the story here,” Macworld said in its review of an M5 Max configuration with a 40-core GPU, 128GB of memory, and 4TB SSD.

In Geekbench 7, the M5 Max was 22 percent faster than M4 Max in multi-core performance, although M3 Ultra retained a 9 percent lead. The M5 Max also improved Cinebench 2024 GPU performance by 33 percent over M4 Max and finished 10 percent ahead of M3 Ultra in that test.

PetaPixel

“It tears through photo and video editing workflows with no hiccups,” PetaPixel concluded after testing an M5 Max model with an 18-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 128GB of memory, and 4TB SSD.

The desktop produced the publication's best Photoshop and Premiere Pro benchmark results to date. It also came close to the significantly more expensive M3 Ultra Mac Studio in Lightroom Classic and DaVinci Resolve, leading PetaPixel to recommend M5 Max as the better overall choice for most photographers and video editors.

Tom's Hardware

“For local AI, the M5 Ultra is seriously impressive,” Tom's Hardware wrote. In a Qwen 3.8-27B test, the system processed prompts faster than NVIDIA's DGX Spark and delivered approximately twice the token generation rate of M4 Max and nearly four times that of DGX Spark.

Its performance also remained steady across ten consecutive Cinebench 2026 runs. The Mac Studio completed a HandBrake video transcode in 64 seconds, eight seconds ahead of a 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X workstation. Dedicated NVIDIA hardware still held a substantial advantage in high-end gaming, however, with RTX 5090 systems finishing well ahead in 3DMark and 4K ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 tests.

The early results position M5 Max as the sensible choice for most creative professionals. M5 Ultra is considerably more specialized, with its greatest advantages appearing in local AI, very large memory workloads, 3D rendering, and production environments where saved processing time can offset the higher cost.

Check out several hands-on video reviews below.

Hardware Canucks

Dave2D

Matthew Moniz

iJustine

Geek Culture