Well, Apple went and did it. The new M5 Ultra chip is here, sitting inside the refreshed Mac Studio, and it comes with an 80-core GPU and 36 CPU cores. Per CNET's reporting, the Ultra is derived from the M5 Max architecture, which has been Apple's playbook for these top-tier chips for a while now. The Mac mini got a refresh too, and interestingly it carries Apple's new M6 chip rather than an M5 variant.

Let me tell you, I've been watching Apple's chip journey since the very beginning, and it still amazes me how far this has come. I remember when the original Macintosh shipped with 128 kilobytes of memory. Kilobytes! My granddaughter Jess sends me videos on her phone that wouldn't fit in a thousand of those machines. And now there's a chip with an 80-core GPU sitting on a desk in somebody's home office.

The M5 Ultra is the top of the stack, as the name suggests, and that core count is the headline. Eighty GPU cores and 36 CPU cores in one package is a serious amount of silicon for a desktop machine that doesn't sound like a hair dryer. Now, what Apple's marketing folks will claim it can do and what it actually does are two different things, and I'm not in the business of repeating promises I can't verify. The benchmarks will tell us soon enough.

The lineup split makes sense to me. The Mac Studio is where the Ultra lives, for people with genuinely heavy workloads, while the Mac mini gets the new M6 for folks who want capable Apple silicon without the workstation price. Not everyone needs 80 GPU cores, and I've said for years you shouldn't pay for power you'll never touch. My rule hasn't changed: buy the machine that fits your actual work, not the one that wins a spec argument on the internet.

Pricing sits where Apple pricing usually sits, which is to say comfortably north of reasonable for the top configurations. Worth it for a working professional who bills clients against this machine. Harder to justify for the rest of us who mostly browse, write, and occasionally argue about streaming shows.

My colleague Marcus will inevitably do one of his deep-dives into the architecture, and when he does, read it, because he explains this stuff better than anyone. I'll be watching the real-world benchmarks once reviewers get units in hand, since that's where the claims meet reality.

For now, if your current Mac is wheezing through your workload, this generation looks like the one worth waiting for. If it isn't? Save your money and come back in three years. The chips will be even sillier by then, I promise you.