Apple Now Lets You Put 512GB RAM In A Mac Studio If You Have $22,299

by Aaron Leong — Friday, October 30, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT

Expect to fork up (and die a little bit inside) for a maxed-out Mac Studio - Image: Apple

If you have ever caught yourself thinking your Mac Studio needed more memory to edit that Hollywood blockbuster you have lying around, or run simulations of the entire visible universe while simultaneously bankrupting your estate, Apple finally has the version for you.

Preorders are now open for M5 Ultra-equipped Mac Studio featuring a whopping 512GB of RAM. While half a terabyte of memory sounds like bliss for hardcore developers and local AI developers, that single memory upgrade is a cool $15,500 up-charge. Mind you, that is not the price of the computer, which is insanity.

Looking at Apple's online configurator for the Mac Studio, if you were to select the highest-tier 36-core CPU and 80-core GPU M5 Ultra chip with a "paltry" 96GB, you're already looking at a hearty $6,800. Tossing in the max 512GB RAM upgrade brings your subtotal to $22,300 before you have even looked at internal storage.

Still, if you're topping out the RAM, the 1TB base storage would just be downright insulting both to your computer and to Apple, right? Do know, however, that if you decide to get 16TB, that will be another $7,500 from your line of credit, for a grand total of $29,800. Again, insanity.

Mac Studio port selection - Image: Apple

$29,800—that's brand-new mid-trim Honda Civic or Mazda3 money territory. Obviously, it's not an apples to apples comparison, but the fact that you could literally drive home a shiny new car with an advanced driver safety suite and Apple CarPlay and Android Auto as standard (plus a full tank of gas) versus a tiny metallic desktop cube feels otherworldly. We are in wild times.

Part of Apple’s rationale centers on the booming AI industry, where researchers and data scientists desperately need gargantuan memory pools and ultra-fast bandwidth to process multi-billion-parameter neural networks locally. So for a corporate research lab or a Hollywood production studio billing millions in enterprise software, $30,000 is practically chump change to write off the budget.

For the average user who wants something powerful enough for work (and occasionally edit family vacation footage with a few tabs of Chrome open in the background), the M5 Max-equipped Mac Studio with 36GB RAM/512 GB SSD ($2,499) should more than suffice.