What's this about?
Apple announced the M6 and M5 Ultra chips and refreshed the Mac Studio and Mac mini around them. The AI-relevant part is memory: a Mac Studio configuration that will accept 512GB of unified memory, which is enough to hold very large models entirely on a desk.
What exactly is "unified memory"?
On a normal PC, the graphics card has its own separate memory, and a model too big for it either won't run or has to be shuffled back and forth slowly. Apple's chips give the CPU and GPU one shared pool instead. So "512GB unified" effectively means 512GB of usable model memory — a capacity that on conventional hardware would require stacking several very expensive datacentre GPUs.
What's the community saying?
HN 980 points, 913 comments
- The most-replied question is simply who buys this: if you are wealthy enough to afford it, why do you need local AI at all?
- Sticker shock, worked out in detail — a maxed M5 Ultra Studio at 256GB and 16TB is around $18,299, and RAM upgrades price out near $25 per GB.
- A widely-liked inflation-adjusted counterpoint: this is roughly what a Mac SE/30 cost, for a machine that can pass a Turing test without effort.
- Reports that Apple may skip the M6 Pro, Max and Ultra variants entirely to rush an AI-focused M7.
- A nostalgic sub-thread on the competitive dynamic now that Xiaomi is claiming CPU parity, likened to the late 1990s.