Yet another Hacker News

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

56 points piotrgrabowski 1 hour ago 22 comments

snarfy 47 minutes ago | parent

$12,299

simonw 47 minutes ago | parent

The numbers I was most interested in are tucked away in a chart towards the bottom - the speed comparison of the Mac Studios v.s. a RTX 5090:

  Qwen3.8 27B tokens/sec generation speed

  Prompt size    8K    64K   128K   256K
  RTX 5090 PC    59    51    44     n/a
  M5 Ultra       48    39    32     24
  M3 Ultra       31    23.5  20     15

A whole bunch more comparison numbers in this section: https://www.macstories.net/stories/m5-ultra-mac-studio-revie...

peri-cl 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

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

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

redox99 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

peri-cl 6 minutes ago | parent

They do MoE. They benchmarked GLM 5.3-flash (320B / 18B), and Qwen 3.8 Next (125B / 6B). The dense Qwen is only focused (I assume) because it's about the only thing that fits on a 5090, that they can compare heads on.

gpugreg 12 minutes ago | parent

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

RationPhantoms 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

sajithdilshan 43 minutes ago | parent

On Apple website it says 512GB memory option is available in October. I guess bumping to that one would cost additional 4-6k US$. So an Ultra with 2TB storage would be north of 15k US$.

That’s like 12 years worth of OpenAI Pro subscriptions

geodel 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

vardump 32 minutes ago | parent

I hope that was sarcasm.

Kurtz79 6 minutes ago | parent

I think we all expect the heavy subsidized subscriptions to end or significantly increase in price at some point, but it could be years from now and I'd rather spend a similar figure on an hypotetical Mac Studio M8 Ultra, or whatever more advanced competitor that will have likley appeared by that time.

A more apples-to-apples comparison would be with API cost in OpenRouter at the same tok/s rate for the same models that you can run locally, maybe.

simonw 31 minutes ago | parent

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 it local AI, but I don't think cost is one of them.

criddell 6 minutes ago | parent

Maybe you are using a local model to go after some Millennium Prize problem and you don't want OpenAI to take your work and use it to win the prize for themselves? $15k might be a bargain.

And, yes, I know a current local model wasn't going to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, but I'm just using it as an example where privacy might be valuable.

112233 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

ApolloFortyNine 37 minutes ago | parent

The model being tested is 18k as configured.

I didn't expect this to make the 5090 to look like a good deal.

kokonokko1337 36 minutes ago | parent

> "It also happens to be a Mac, with an operating system that looks nice and doesn’t suck"

Yes Apple has some of the best hardware out there, albeit overpriced. But the software is such a hindrance and I can't take anyone that states otherwise seriously. If only it had proper Linux support (and the Asahi people do an amazing job but you can reverse-engineer only so many stuff with limited funding, and then you have to do it again for new models). MacOS is good if you just want to have a standard experience, which to be fair is most people. It's good for just setting up an LLM server I guess since the hardware is a perfect fit. I wouldn't touch it otherwise.

srcreigh 32 minutes ago | parent

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.

I'm also curious about any new low hanging optimization opportunities in the kernels for this new hardware.

It's already clear to me that M5 Mac Studio is more cost-effective than anything you can run on open router, assuming decent utilization.

The M5 Mac Studio will be the most cost effective way to run uncensored cyber capable open agents.

An exciting tipping point will be if programmers can get an Astra-Ultra like experience all week with this hardware. That would be a real sense where this hardware exceeds the value of even 20x cloud subscriptions.

WarmWash 31 minutes ago | parent

>Let’s address the elephant in the room first: why bother with local AI at all when cloud frontier models are better and often faster?

Ehh, the actual elephant in the room is:

"why bother with local AI at all when you can lease a GPU for $5/hr?"

To which the answer is you shouldn't bother, unless you have a bunch of money to throw at hobby projects.

tempoponet 27 minutes ago | parent

While I know it's not apples to apples, the target comparison right now is 2x DGX Sparks. Similar price, 256gb. The conversation has focused on memory bandwidth vs. compute in agentic loops, so for most people the raw numbers will mean less than the "time per task" in coding benchmarks.

This is a great article and bodes well for the M5, but we should expect more like this comparing to other platforms before we truly understand where it fits.

sghiassy 11 minutes ago | parent

Imagine spending a trillion dollars on data centers and then reading this article. Nightmare fuel for OpenAI

whalesalad 6 minutes ago | parent

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