The Mac Studio M5 Max excels as both a creative workstation and local AI machine, capable of running a 65GB, 120-billion-parameter language model offline with 128GB unified memory. Its compact design, excellent GPU performance, and quiet operation make it a compelling option for AI workloads, though the 128GB configurations are expensive and local AI tooling requires significant setup.
An M6 Pro listing on Geekbench 7 showing superior performance to the M5 Max is likely fraudulent, according to Geekbench creator John Poole who identified internal inconsistencies. Apple is reportedly skipping the M6 Pro and M6 Max in favor of the M7 Pro and M7 Max, making the benchmark results suspect.