So we’re in the middle of a memory shortage, Apple just hiked prices across the entire Mac line, and yet, somehow, there’s a brand new Mac Studio on the way that could pack a frankly absurd amount of RAM. Let me break it down.
According to Bloomberg, despite all those price increases, Apple is still planning to ship a new Mac Studio as soon as this year. And it’s going to be the send-off for the M5 chip family.
Here’s the chip situation. Apple’s lining up a new M5 Ultra as the final piece of the M5 lineup before the whole thing transitions over to the M6, then the M7, M7 Pro, and M7 Max. That M5 Ultra is going straight into a refreshed Mac Studio, which, if you’ve been paying attention, hasn’t had an update since March 2025. So it’s well overdue.
The thing is, this refresh was actually meant to drop earlier in 2026. Apple reportedly pushed it back because of, you guessed it, memory chip supply problems and rising prices. Back in April, Bloomberg pointed to a launch somewhere around October 2026.
Whether Apple actually hits that October window is anyone’s guess right now. Worth noting the current M3 Ultra Mac Studio already has delivery estimates stretching into October, so things are tight.
Now let’s talk specs, because this is where it gets spicy. The M5 Ultra is expected to come with roughly 36 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores. Which, oddly enough, isn’t a massive leap over the M3 Ultra, that one tops out at a 32-core CPU and an 80-core GPU. The headline though is the memory. Apple has reportedly tested support for up to 768GB of unified memory. Seven hundred and sixty eight gigabytes. That’s a genuinely wild number. The catch? Supply constraints might stop Apple from actually offering that much at launch.
And here’s the part that really tells you how strange this market has got. Apple used to sell the M3 Ultra Mac Studio with up to 512GB of RAM, but that 512GB option got pulled back in March. Apple’s been quietly trimming its higher-tier Macs across the board, and right now the M3 Ultra Mac Studio maxes out at just 96GB. During a shortage, that’s the reality.
So now for the elephant in the room. The price. Even if Apple does ship an M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 768GB of RAM, it is going to be astronomically expensive. For context, when Apple raised Mac prices today, the 96GB Mac Studio jumped from $3,999 to $5,299. That’s a $1,300 increase on its own. Now imagine eight times the RAM, in the middle of a memory crisis. We could very realistically be looking at a Mac Studio that sails past $10,000.
So yeah. A monster of a machine, potentially the most memory Apple has ever put in a desktop, arriving at possibly the worst imaginable time to be buying RAM. Classic 2026.
