As you may know already, Apple has increased the prices across its Mac/iPad lineups as well as its smart-home products such as Apple TV and HomePod. Despite this unwelcoming news from earlier today, Apple still has something up its sleeve.
According to today’s report from Bloomberg, Apple is still planning to introduce the upcoming M5 Ultra chip to complete the M5 family of chips. Of course, the next generation of Apple’s most powerful chip is set to make its debut in none other than the Mac Studio, which hasn’t seen an update since March 2025, when it was upgraded with the M4 Max and the M3 Ultra chips.
Originally, we were expecting a hardware refresh for Mac Studio as soon as WWDC, and back in April 2026, Bloomberg claimed that Apple would upgrade the Mac Studio around this coming October; however, with the fact that WWDC came and went, as well as the ongoing memory chip crisis that we are in, it becomes even more unclear when Apple will actually update the Mac Studio.
If we take a look at the current Mac Studio, the M3 Ultra features up to 32 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores. It could be configured with up to 512GB of memory, but Apple quietly removed that memory configuration back in March, and Apple soon removed several memory configurations, with some delivery estimates pushed as late as October, leaving 96GB as the only option (if you go for the M3 Ultra). In fact, the current M3 Ultra Mac Studio with that amount of memory now starts at a whopping $5,299 (up from $3,999).
Bloomberg expects the next M5 Ultra chip to feature around 36 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores at most. Apple has tested support for up to 768GB of unified memory; however, the ongoing supply memory constraints may deter the company from offering that memory configuration for the time being. Still, I wouldn’t be too surprised if that amount of memory were exorbitantly expensive. Who knows, the upcoming highest-configured Mac Studio could be priced at well over $10,000, which would be just as expensive as one of those 18K-gold Apple Watch Edition models (whether or not you’d count for inflation).
The future of the Mac (in terms of upcoming launches) has certainly been up in the air with the recent news, but hopefully, we’ll be done with the ongoing memory crisis by the end of this year.
