Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio Starts at $5,499 as AI API Rates Fall

Apple's $5,499 Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra chip gives AI users a way to run AI models on their own computers. At the same time, OpenAI and Anthropic are lowering their token prices. This means users can compare the cost of buying a computer with the fees they pay to use AI services in the cloud.

Apple announced the new Mac Studio on Aug. 25, and it became available on Sept. 22. The M5 Ultra model starts at $5,499 and can be set up with as much as 512GB of shared memory. This version with 512GB is expected to arrive in late October.

The Mac Studio can run large AI models entirely on the computer itself. Four systems working together can provide up to three times the AI processing speed of one system. The version with 512GB of memory also gives the computer more shared memory to run AI models locally.

In a developer demonstration, Yagil, the founder of LM Studio, ran Kimi K2.6 across four Mac Studio computers. The demonstration described the model as having one trillion parameters. “There's no token cost,” Yagil said.

Cloud API prices also changed on Sept. 22. OpenAI listed GPT-6 Sol at $2 for every 1 million input tokens and $10 for every 1 million output tokens. These prices were 50% lower than the promotional prices for GPT-5.6 Sol. Anthropic set the price of Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 for every 1 million input tokens and $20 for every 1 million output tokens. These prices were 20% lower than those for Opus 5.

These prices show two different ways to pay. API fees depend on how many tokens are used, while running AI locally requires buying the hardware first. The figures do not compare the cost of running the same task on both systems, so they cannot show exactly when buying a Mac Studio would cost less than using an API.