Apple announced a redesigned Mac Studio on Monday, calling it the company's most powerful Mac ever, built around two new chips, M5 Max and the all-new M5 Ultra, that Apple says deliver a dramatic leap in on-device artificial intelligence performance. Here are five key things to know about the new desktop computer.

1. It's built primarily for running AI models directly on the device

Apple positioned the new Mac Studio explicitly as a machine designed to handle massive AI workloads locally, rather than relying on cloud computing. Johny Srouji, Apple's chief hardware officer, framed the upgrade as a significant step forward for the product line. "Mac Studio is the ultimate desktop for on-device AI and the world's most demanding pro workflows, relied on by users for its tremendous performance and extensive pro connectivity, all in a quiet, compact design that sits right on your desk — and today, we're pushing the boundaries even further," Srouji said. "With the powerful M5 Max and the incredible capabilities of M5 Ultra, Mac Studio ushers in a new era of desktop computing, delivering huge performance gains for pro workloads and AI inference with frontier-class models."

According to Apple, the top-end M5 Ultra chip delivers up to 4.3 times the peak AI compute performance of the previous M3 Ultra chip, and nearly 10 times that of the original M1 Ultra. Neural Accelerators built directly into each GPU core handle dramatically faster matrix multiplication, a core computational operation underlying most modern AI systems. Apple said the combination of that processing power........

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