Apple increases RAM upgrade pricing for M3 Ultra Mac Studio, retires 512 GB option

When the M3 Ultra Mac Studio was announced last year, it shocked a lot of techies. For starters, the M3 Ultra was being sold alongside the M4 Max variant, making the former lag behind quite a bit in single-core performance despite commanding an eye-watering price tag.

However, the M3 Ultra did sport up to a whopping 512 GB of unified system memory shared by the GPU and the CPU, allowing users to run massive LLMs locally without having to resort to enterprise-class GPUs with obscene price tags.

Mac Studio no longer available with 512 GB unified memory

The ongoing DRAM crisis has claimed a lot of victims, and it appears that the fiasco has finally caught up with Apple as well. As of this writing, the Mac Studio with 512 GB of RAM has been discontinued, with the system now maxing out at "only" 256 GB of RAM.

Of course, even with 256 GB of shared memory, the Mac Studio can afford to run LLMs that other consumer-class GPUs simply cannot. The highest-end Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU from the AMD Strix Halo family tops out at 128 GB (ROG Flow Z13 currently $2,170 on Amazon). That said, the M3 Ultra is a lot slower than other consumer-grade high-end desktop GPUs such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 when it comes to raw performance.

Interestingly, prices for memory upgrades had not changed at all over in Apple land - until now. The 256 GB upgrade for the Mac Studio, which used to cost $1,600, now costs $2,000. Upgrades for rest of the Mac lineup do not seem to have witnessed any pricing changes.

It is worth noting that Apple charged massive premiums for storage and memory upgrades well before the supply chain crisis was even on the horizon, making Apple's current pricing strategy far from altruistic, to say the least. Even then, it is likely that the company deemed the 512 GB memory variant of the Mac Studio too rich for the current scenario.

As we have reported previously, the M5 Ultra SoC has been spotted in a beta version of macOS, indicating that a new Mac Studio with outstanding AI performance courtesy of neural accelerates embedded inside each GPU core is likely to be released in the near future. Whether or not that variant will have a 512 GB memory config, remains to be seen.