Mac Studio and Mac Mini demand is unreal.
About half of the configurations are straight up just not available and the other half require a 10-12 week minimum lead time.
A new M3 Ultra 28-Core CPU 60-Core GPU 96GB RAM 1TB SSD sells for around a $2,300 premium on eBay.
Picks and shovels!
my mac studio is taking up >200GB in system data now, this is outside of the OS itself. that's pretty remarkable, buying any 256GB machine is not a great idea these days at all. i don't think 512GB is enough either.
Got my new Mac Studio setup and transferred everything from my M4 studio to my M5 Ultra studio in literally one click…
Passwords, ALL my settings for my bots, my workflow completely synced. literally did everything for me I had to update nothing.
Apples ecosystem dominates
Qwen3.8-27B Mac m4 max vs DGX spark:
same engine (TensorFold 0.6.5 + DFlash2), same seeds:
DGX Spark
• 4-bit: 82.9 · 52 min (~69 tok/s)
Mac Studio M4 Max
• 4-bit: 83.6 · 71 min (~50 tok/s)
• 8-bit: 84.7 · 95 min (~38 tok/s)
Hardware moved it <1 pt. 8-bit bought +1.1 for 2x the memory.
Spark-Bench v7, 80 tests, 0 errors. bf16 lands tomorrow.
Run your own benchmarks: