New Mac Studios Are Out! But, Worth It To Drop $10K On It for Local AI?

Apple just announced the new Mac Studios. The one I’m looking at is $9,500. That’s the M5 Ultra with 256GB of RAM.

Wow. Just wow. I could buy a car for that amount of money.

I don’t need that machine. I want it. And the reason is local AI.

I’ve already got a DGX Spark in the rack. It’s not cheap, and it’s already limited. My daily driver is an M2 Max Studio with 32GB. Great for the work. Terrible for local models.

A new Studio would replace the daily driver, run bigger and faster models in-house, and keep client data off cloud AI when that’s a concern. Local AI is starting to look like the new oil for a knowledge business.

Should I?