Apple Studio with maxed out M5 Ultra, 256GB RAM and 16TB storage is 18,299$. The 512GB RAM version apparently is coming in October, considering that the difference between 96GB and 256GB is priced at 4000$, the 512GB upgrade must be eye watering.

So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$.

The fully maxed out Apple Studio then will be 24699$. It's 17199$ if you don't upgrade the storage(1TB).

Nevertheless I itch to have one :)

So is downpayment on a house. I would buy the house and just pay for tokens as needed. The house will get more valuable and that wealth would buy a lot of tokens in the future - which will probably get cheaper.

EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.

Apple hasn't been selling just ram for a long time, they sell vram. Try getting 512 gb of HBM on current Nvidia cards - it's gonna cost way more than $ 24k. And here you get the same amount of memory for weights right in a quiet unit under your desk

Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable

M6 Mac mini maxes out at 32GB—if you want 64GB you have to go with the M5 Pro (just priced it out on Apple's store page).

Regarding the $25 price per GB RAM. These chips use LPDDR5X RAM. Looking at the Framework site, they are selling LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 modules for the following prices:

    16GB   $239 - $15/GB 
    32GB   $800 - $25/GB
    64GB $1,600 - $25/GB

I wish you could drop $20k and get a house! Down payment here store like $100k+ (AUD). So "only" 5~ Max Studios.

The trick are tax deductions.

I wouldn’t recommend buying any bare metal unless money is a second thought or you can fully deduct the price.

Most often in the end you pay half the price then. Depending on the write offs you could even make some bucks out of it.

Or buy and lease. Under certain circumstances the hardware costs you nothing.

But you need money to save money. And a company.

i remember when SGI boxes were $50k and then literally worthless just a couple bears later. i remember my university had a pile of them for free outside the deans office.

Ten years ago a bought an expensive MBP because I do a lot of stats in R, Python etc that benefited from it. But the next Mac I’ll buy will be a much lower-end model, because it’s just easier these days to do that work in notebooks in the cloud.

I don't think 16TB storage is a right choice. Going 2TB and it's 11,299. Probably, if you buy the storage and install it yourself you can go higher and quite cheaper.

I think the reason they offer these options in the first place is the discontinuation of the MacPro and their remaining need to offer high end solutions.