The AI Boom is About to Reset Apple

Two weeks ago, I ordered a new Apple MacBook Pro with the M5 Max and 128GB of memory, remedying one of my biggest regrets about buying the M4 Max. I was dead set on skipping this generation, but FOMO got me just as the vice of Apple’s product line-up changes, with those with local AI. As someone currently burning ~150M tokens/day with AI, local AI is not only important but one we are spending money on and directly seeing ROI from. That ROI is coming from what was not possible six months ago. As others are on that same journey, Apple’s product portfolio has been reflecting it in reduced options and capabilities.

By far the best local AI platform we have in the studio is the Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra. That may sound controversial to many, but here is why. With 512GB of memory, the system we bought a year ago for around $10,000 has been the backbone of our studio AI efforts. When we bought it a year ago, folks thought it was crazy expensive. Now, it would be silly for Apple to produce these, and that is what is happening to Apple’s entire line.

I know many folks say they have great ROI and are hammering away at agents and apps, but they rarely tell you what they are doing. We have multiple agents (mostly OpenClaw and Hermes) with Qwen3.5-397B and Qwen3.6 models running as the backend. The agents run on various compute platforms, but those Qwen3.5-3.6 models running on the Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB have been cranking away for months. When I am in the studio, there is enough CPU and memory left over that I can use the system as a primary workstation when working in an Agentic AI builder/operator mode.

So let us get to real-world ROI.