The main culprits for this massive price increase are the Mac Studio’s large amount of high-end memory and storage, “RAMageddon” pricing, hedging, and Apple’s usual insistence on high profit margins. Apple said it itself when it first raised MacBook prices in June: “We’ve never seen component prices rise this much, this quickly. We’ve worked hard to absorb these costs and delay price increases as long as possible, but the current environment has made that unsustainable.”
Let’s start with RAM, or what Apple calls “unified memory,” because it’s shared between the CPU and GPU. With a bandwidth of 1.2 TB/s when fully loaded with RAM, the Mac Studio M5 Ultra uses LPDDR5X memory. This RAM has a maximum throughput of 172 GB/s, so Apple installs it directly on the M5 Ultra processor to maximize speed, in a very wide bus (1,024 bits for the M5 Ultra model), to achieve the highest speeds. It is the fastest and most expensive memory available, other than high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used for servers.
It’s hard to say exactly how much RAM accounts for the price of a Mac Studio. Apple reportedly paid around $6 per gigabyte for LPDDR5X memory earlier this year, but that price could be closer to $10 or $11 now. Let’s say its memory cost for the 256GB Mac Studio M5 Ultra is around $2,500 to $2,800. It currently sells for much more than that, but Apple obviously has significant purchasing power. However, this cost remains significant.
The price of NAND storage is also much higher, with Apple’s cost likely being around $300-$500 for a 2TB value, depending on the current market and the high-end PCIe 5.0 memory it uses. Prices would be about four times what memory was when the previous Mac Studio was released, and double the price of storage.
That’s an increase of about $2,200 to $2,400 at the high end. Rounding that figure to account for increases in other components puts Apple’s costs around $2,400 to $2,600 more, based on these very rough estimates.
You may remember that I said the 256GB Mac Ultra was $3,800 more this year, so where does the rest of that price increase come from? Apple reportedly projected a gross margin of around 40% on its hardware, but the price of the new Mac Ultra is almost 60% higher than the estimated cost increase. There are several possible reasons. The first is that Apple is protecting itself against even higher future RAM prices so it can limit Mac Studio M5 price changes later. Another reason is that Apple is using the memory shortage to boost the margins of its flagship desktop Mac. Or maybe it’s a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.
