The Short Version
On October 28, 2026, Apple announced the PROLED MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max, shipping November 6. The same day the Mac Studio became orderable with M5 Ultra and 512 GB of unified memory. For local language models, the choice comes down to capacity. A 128 GB M5 Max runs models up to roughly 120B to 200B parameters at 4-bit. Anything bigger, including this month's trillion-parameter open models, needs a Mac Studio, and the largest need two.
Side by Side
| MacBook Pro, M5 Max (40-core GPU) | Mac Studio, M5 Ultra | |
|---|---|---|
| Max unified memory | 128 GB | 512 GB |
| Memory bandwidth | 614 GB/s | 1.2 TB/s |
| Starting price | $4,499 (14-inch M5 Max), more for 128 GB | $5,499 with 96 GB; $22,299 with 512 GB and 1 TB storage |
| Availability | Ships November 6, 2026 | Base models available; one report puts 512 GB shipping in late January 2027 |
| Portable | Yes | No |
Note that the M5 Max with the 32-core GPU tops out at 36 GB and 460 GB/s. That configuration is a poor buy for local models. You want the 40-core version.
What Fits
| Model size at 4-bit | M5 Max, 128 GB | M5 Ultra, 512 GB |
|---|---|---|
| Up to about 70B dense (about 40 GB) | Yes, with room for long context | Yes |
| About 120B MoE (about 60 to 70 GB) | Yes | Yes |
| About 235B to 400B MoE (130 to 220 GB) | No | Yes |
| Reflection Beam, 501B (about 353 GB at NVFP4, per its vLLM recipe) | No | Yes, short context |
| Muse Spark Open 816B or Mistral Large 4 1T (about 500 GB) | No | Not in practice. Apple's tests used two to four machines |
Sizes are approximate weights-only figures. You need extra room for the context cache, which grows with context length, and for the operating system.
Speed
Token speed is limited by how fast the chip reads the model's active weights, so the Ultra's 1.2 TB/s gives it roughly twice the ceiling of the Max's 614 GB/s on the same model. Measured results are lower than these ceilings. The best published reference point is Apple's own: Muse Spark Open at 4-bit ran at 15.7 to 25.0 tokens per second on two M5 Ultra Mac Studios and 36.7 on four, at an 8K context. See unified memory bandwidth and Mac Studio M5 Ultra benchmarks.
Which to Buy
- MacBook Pro M5 Max, 128 GB: you want to run good mid-size open models anywhere, and you'll use cloud APIs for the biggest ones.
- Mac Studio M5 Ultra, 256 to 512 GB: you need models above about 200B parameters locally, or you're serving a team.
- Neither: if you mostly want frontier quality. Open models at this size still score far below Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Astra and Gemini 4 Carbon, and a year of API use costs less than a 512 GB Mac Studio for most people.
For Nvidia alternatives, see DGX Spark vs Mac Studio.