M5 Ultra Mac Studio wait times: 16 to 18 weeks for the full chip
On 11 September Apple's own store was quoting 16 to 18 weeks for any Mac Studio with the full M5 Ultra chip, which meant January. The 512GB option, the one Mac that could hold a four bit build of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, could not be ordered at all.
Plays here, from YouTube
Apple announced the M5 Ultra Mac Studio on 25 August and said it would be available from 22 September. On the evening of Friday 11 September, Apple's own store was quoting 16 to 18 weeks for any Mac Studio with the full M5 Ultra chip, in the UK and the US. By my own maths that meant 1 to 15 January 2027 (11 September plus 16 to 18 weeks).
The full chip is the one with a 36-core CPU and an 80-core GPU, and the quote was the same with 96GB and with 256GB of memory. At the end of August, AppleInsider had reported a 10 to 12 week wait for a fully specified Mac Studio.
The smaller M5 Ultra
The version with the smaller M5 Ultra chip (a 30-core CPU and a 64-core GPU) and 256GB of memory was quoting 6 to 7 weeks in the US that day, and 28 October to 4 November in the UK. Apple lists the same memory bandwidth for both chips, 1.2TB a second, which is more than four times a DGX Spark (NVIDIA lists 273GB a second, and 1,200 divided by 273 is 4.4).
The 512GB option
The 512GB option could not be ordered at all. Apple said it was coming in late October and had not given a price.
That is the one Mac that could hold a four bit build of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. One uploader's card for such a build lists 427.6GB on disk and 427GB in memory, which it calls tight on a 512GB Mac. Another uploader reports 14.6 tokens a second on the older M3 Ultra with that much memory. Their card gives that speed at 1,000 tokens and does not define what that means.
Two corrections
I also have two corrections to the video of the week before. The report that OpenAI bought tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios came from The Information, not MacRumors as my description said. TechRepublic credited The Information when it covered the report on 31 August, and the MacRumors piece I had linked does not mention OpenAI. Neither Apple nor OpenAI had commented on the report.
NVIDIA's README for its PAIR router says it sends each request to one machine as a whole and does not split one model across machines. So it will not combine their memory the way I suggested.
Read more
- Apple's announcement of the new Mac Studioapple.com
- The full M5 Ultra Mac Studio on Apple's UK storeapple.com
- The smaller M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB on Apple's US storeapple.com
- AppleInsider on the 10 to 12 week waitappleinsider.com
- Apple's Mac Studio specifications, with the memory bandwidthapple.com
- The uploader's model card with the M3 Ultra speedhuggingface.co
- TechRepublic on the OpenAI report, which it credits to The Informationtechrepublic.com
- NVIDIA's README for its PAIR routergithub.com
The numbers in this story
| Figure | What it is | From | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 to 18 weeks, 1 to 15 January 2027 | Apple's quote for the full M5 Ultra chip, in the UK and the US, and the dates that gives | apple.com | store price |
| 10 to 12 weeks | The wait AppleInsider reported for a fully specified Mac Studio | appleinsider.com | reported |
| 6 to 7 weeks | The smaller M5 Ultra chip with 256GB, in the US | apple.com | Apple's store |
| 1.2TB/s against 273GB/s | Memory bandwidth of the M5 Ultra against a DGX Spark | apple.com | the maker's claim |
| about 427GB | A four bit build of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash in a Mac's memory | huggingface.co | an owner's report |
| 14.6 tok/s | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on the older M3 Ultra with 512GB | huggingface.co | an owner's report |
If a number on this page is wrong, I would rather know. Tell me in the comments under the video and I will correct it here and pin the correction there. What has been corrected so far is on the corrections page.