Apple's 512GB Mac Studio Costs $29,799, Memory Upgrade Alone $15,500

The 512GB Mac Studio is real — and so is the bill

Apple has finally delivered the one Mac Studio configuration it left hanging in August: 512GB of unified memory on the M5 Ultra.

The option appeared on Apple's online store this week, right on the schedule the company promised. To get it, you first need the top-tier M5 Ultra with a 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU, which starts at $6,799 with 96GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. Selecting 512GB then adds $15,500, for a minimum of $22,299.

Max out the storage at 16TB and the bill reaches $29,799. Orders placed today are quoted for delivery between late November and early December 2026, so even buyers willing to spend that kind of money are in for a wait.

When Apple unveiled the new Mac Studio, it called the 512GB ceiling "staggering." That adjective applies to the price just as much as the capacity.

Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512GB: price, release date and specs

How the Mac Studio 512GB RAM price compares to last year

The same capacity cost a fraction of this in 2025, and the per-gigabyte math shows exactly how much has changed.

When the M3 Ultra Mac Studio launched in March 2025, upgrading from 96GB to 512GB cost $4,000, and a 512GB build with 1TB of storage cost $9,499. Today's equivalent costs $12,800 more.

The 416GB step from 96GB to 512GB worked out to about $9.62 per gigabyte on the M3 Ultra. On the M5 Ultra, it is about $37.26 per gigabyte — roughly 3.9 times as much.

The price curve is also steeper at the top. Going from 96GB to 256GB costs $4,000, or $25 per gigabyte. The next 256GB, from 256GB to 512GB, costs $11,500, or about $45 per gigabyte. Reports suggest the highest-density memory is especially scarce even for a buyer of Apple's size, which could justify a premium at the top. Apple does not disclose component costs, so the split between scarcity and margin cannot be checked.

Why Apple's memory prices exploded

A global memory shortage has pushed component costs to levels Apple's own CEO called a "hundred-year flood."

The warning signs were there all year. In March 2026, after the memory shortage hit hard, Apple quietly pulled the 512GB option from the M3 Ultra and raised the price of the 256GB upgrade from $1,600 to $2,000. By May, the 256GB tier had also gone, leaving the M3 Ultra on sale with only 96GB. In late June, Apple raised prices across most of its Mac and iPad lineup, with the M3 Ultra Mac Studio jumping $1,300 to $5,299.

"We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly," the company said at the time.

Tim Cook has been blunt about the cause. In April 2026 he warned of "significantly higher memory costs" from the June quarter, and on the July earnings call — his last as CEO before John Ternus took over — he described the market as "a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing." IDC figures cited in a recent iThinkDiff earnings preview put memory costs up roughly 350% year on year. If that holds for the high-capacity memory an Ultra needs, Apple's per-gigabyte increase is roughly in line with the market rather than far above it.

The broader trend is not confined to Apple. SK Hynix has warned that high RAM prices could last until 2030, and Apple's CEO has already called the cost situation "unprecedented" as fears grow over Mac prices in general.

Who actually needs 512GB in a Mac Studio?

Apple is pitching the high-memory Mac Studio at local AI workloads, but even 512GB may not be enough for the models people want to run.

Meta's 816-billion-parameter Muse Spark Open, which Mark Zuckerberg said "runs great on new Mac Studios," occupies about 493GB even in its 4-bit NVFP4 form. Once working memory is added, Apple's own machine learning team says "the model cannot fit on a single machine."

Meta's setup guide supports either two 512GB Mac Studios or four 256GB Mac Studios — and the latter configuration is cheaper, even if scalability could be an issue for future models that need more memory per machine.

Apple is happy to name the use case. Ternus singled out the Mac mini and Mac Studio as "pushing the boundaries of local, private AI," and CFO Kevan Parekh pointed to the auction house Christie's running local models on the Mac Studio. Asked about the cost of running Siri AI, Parekh said on-device inference was "very, very efficient, no real costs associated with that." He was talking about Apple's own bill. For anyone running a frontier model on their own desk, the memory is the bill.

Availability and pricing

The 512GB Mac Studio is available to order now on Apple's online store in the US, with delivery quoted for late November to early December 2026. Apple has not announced pricing or availability for the UK or EU at the time of writing; the dollar prices above do not include local taxes or import duties.

For buyers in Europe, expect the usual currency conversion plus VAT, which could push the maxed-out configuration well above the $29,799 US figure.

The 512GB Mac Studio is a statement product for a strange moment in computing: memory has become the most expensive part of the machine. Apple will sell you half a terabyte of unified memory, but at $15,500 for the upgrade alone, it is a tool for a narrow group of AI developers and researchers — not a general-purpose desktop.