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- Hacker News
- "a total cost of $0" Uhh ... how much is that hardware?by akozak
- Once you hit the memory you need, generation speed is mainly set by bandwidth, and every Ultra from M1 thru M3 has ~800 GB/s. IMO best ROI for most people is 'cheapest used Ultra with enough RAM'
I setup an eBay alert and picked up a used M2 Ultra that has delivered good ROI (at least, far better than 15k for comparable-for-my-use-case performance)
by hamiltont - 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.
by tempoponet - The model being tested is 18k as configured.
I didn't expect this to make the 5090 to look like a good deal.
- The Cost of a 27- inch fully loaded iMac from Apple $3,700 in 2011 is worth $5,510.05 today (fully loaded) used for 10 years.
The Mac Pro Tower plus the Cinema Display monitor at the time was even more, similar to the Studio M5 ULtra today than the iMac which I believe was an upper middle computer?
$5,700 in 2011 is worth $8,488.46 today
$7,700 in 2011 is worth $11,466.87 today
The cost of Mac Studio M5 Ultra today $9,466.87-$11,466.87
Note: If memory cost was the same as it was two years ago subtract about $2000-$3000 dollars.
Today’s prices are not that far off from top end computers.
by Danox - On Apple website it says 512GB memory option is available in October. I guess bumping to that one would cost additional 4-6k US$. So an Ultra with 2TB storage would be north of 15k US$.
That’s like 12 years worth of OpenAI Pro subscriptions
- 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.
by srcreigh - 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:
A whole bunch more comparison numbers in this section: https://www.macstories.net/stories/m5-ultra-mac-studio-revie...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 15by simonw