M5 Max Mac Studio ships with major SSD speed gains

Apple's new Mac Studio desktops equipped with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips began shipping on September 22, with early reviews pointing to a dramatic jump in solid-state drive speed as the machine's standout improvement over the previous generation. According to testing by Roman Loyola of Macworld, the M5 Max Mac Studio's SSD delivered roughly 2.6 times faster read speeds and about 2.1 times faster write speeds than the M4 Max Mac Studio in Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test. Apple had advertised up to 2 times faster storage speeds for the new machine. Loyola's test unit was a configured model with an 18-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 128GB of memory and a 4TB SSD, and he noted that real-world performance may vary from benchmark results. The base M5 Max Mac Studio starts at $2,499 and comes with an 18-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 36GB of unified memory and a 512GB SSD. In Geekbench 7, the M5 Max is about 22 percent faster in multicore performance and about 8 percent faster in single-core performance than the M4 Max it replaces, while the previous-generation M3 Ultra still leads by roughly 9 percent in multicore, according to the review. Cinebench 2024 GPU scores rose about 33 percent over the M4 Max.