M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review: The Dream Mac for Local AI Agents

Those RTX 5090 numbers are bad. You can get over 200 tps with ninfer using NVFP4 and MTP.

A dense 27B doesn't really make sense for the Mac. A MoE makes way more sense when you have modest bandwidth but lots of memory.

Those are some incredible graphs, that leap in prompt processing going from M3 to M5.

Also: ~30 token/s on GLM 5.3-flash, locally. (That's roughly Opus 4.8-tier. I think).

/meta Here's a CSS filter that stops those nuisance chart animations,

    macstories.net##*:style(animation: none !important; transition: none !important)

That's a dense model. Of course it will do worse.

Now try running that Qwen 3.8 Next model on the 5090 and tell me what TPS you get (hint: it's near 0 since it doesnt fit the 32GB VRAM on 5090 vs the 256 in OPs M5).

I assume those are non-batched. I think the M series GPU can do 4X to 8X depending on model quant, which means if you can batch queries you'll get almost 4X to 8X performance.

Not forgetting of course that an RTX5090 is what 600W+ ? And the Mac is probably half that at most ?

Thank you for this. I wish Apple focused their silicon design on improving the TTFT metrics but coming from an M3 Pro, it still looks laggard compared to Nvidia's TensorCores in the 5090.

Maybe Apple is an acquisition away from changing that balance.

The selling point of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is that you can run much larger models that the 5090 can't without swapping. NVidia aggressively segments the market on VRAM for this reason. That's why a 5090 has an MSRP of ~$2k (but good luck getting one for less than $4k) while a 6000 Pro, which is basically a 5090 with 96GB of RAM has now soared beyond $15k where 3-6 months ago it was more like $10-11k. A 6000 Pro has the same memory bandwidth but slightly more CUDA units (IIRC ~24k vs ~21k).

This advantage won't be apparent with a 27B model. The 256GB MS can probably run the newer Flash models locally, something you can't do on a 5090.

I don't think we'll get a successor to the 5090 until late 2028, maybe even 2029. I'm basing this on the launch date of the 5000 series and that we haven't got a midcycle refresh yet. Rumor has it the chips are ready but the 3GB RAM modules are 3-4x the price of the 2GB modules used on the current cards.

Apple should see a Mac Studio major update in 2028. That might even force NVidia's hand. But it's really impossible to say what the state of the market will be 2-3 years from now. It may have completely crashed. I suspect not however.

The interesting thing will be when the bandwidth demands start forcing HBM memory onto these home/enthusiast solutions.

> This is great as a first look, but the author is not a developer, so we don't yet know whether a dev can be as productive with local models on M5 Mac Studio compared to a 20x subscription plan.

Local models are definitely not as productive as SOTA, sadly it's not close yet. I do think someday they will be "good enough" to use, but they aren't today. Even the SOTA models barely code well, with Opus 4.5 being the first, good coding model.

That being said, I think it's absolutely imperative that we keep pushing local model performance. We need to continue to advance technology there and ensure that the model labs don't do regulatory capture in the name of "safety" (or anything else).

Astra-Ultra? Even the largest open model to date (Kimi K3) is nowhere close to Astra level, and it will be quite slow even on the highest-spec M5 Ultra, with achievable speeds of about 0.5 tok/s at most due to having to stream weights from SSD (~13 GB/s on the highest storage capacity M5 Max machines so far). This is OK for doing simple Q&A in the background but it's far from a genuine coding experience. You'd have to test batching of multiple thinking streams in order to try and raise overall tok/s via layer-wise reuse of the streamed weights (and this is where the "Ultra" part sort of becomes relevant; Kimi series models have good support for agent swarms) but this would decrease single-session performance even further. It would only be usable for background jobs, though the hardware would then have a chance of paying for itself if it was fully used on a 24/7 basis.

Hard to guess, it can go either way. If you will need to be in a syndicate to use non-sterilized models, that mac makes sense. But if there is mandatory registration of personal cyberarms, you risk going to mines once they check you purchases. You could try to play normie and pretend you simply wanted to show off, by keeping your actual work on external disk, but that leaves traces on system. Counting on someone in the Gap renting you gray iron works as long as you can swap credits. Still, this gear is tiny. Put it in your e-car, with uplink, and leave it at uncle's farm. Discreet.

Just commenting here because you're discussing hardware: I thought the test results from the SSD published in this article [1] were pretty interesting. Maybe that's old news though.

[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/3238319/mac-studio-m5-max-r...

Agreed.

Specially since one can pay half right now to OpenAI and sign a 12 year iron clad contract for uninterrupted service delivery of OpenAI Pro.

Yeah, anyone who thinks local AI is going to save them money is likely to be disappointed, at least if they want to run models that are even remotely capable.

Plenty of other reasons to get excited about local AI, but I don't think cost is one of them.

5090 has 32GB VRAM.

It'd be silly to buy the 18k model to run a tiny model like Qwen 27B. You use models like GLM Flash and Qwen Next which won't fit on a single 5090.

The year of linux on the Desktop was 26 years ago for me.

5 years of (200/month) tokens at that price, meanwhile an rtx 5090 pc is about half that… hmm

but i wonder how much these token costs are sustainable or not, it may be in the long term cheaper to have your own hardware if token costs go up (and hopefully hardware gets cheaper again)

> unless you have a bunch of money to throw at hobby projects.

there are lots of people with very expensive hobbies, see sailboat racing for example.

For 99.99% of people, spending 15 grand on a Mac Studio just to run Qwen 3.8 locally is a non starter.