Apple on Tuesday began shipping a new generation of high-powered desktops, as it pitches the machines powered by its M5 chips to enterprises as a way of running AI chores locally without the need to rent data centre capacity or pay API fees.

The Mac Studio desktops launched in August, with pricing of up to nearly $20,000 (£15,000) for the top-end models with the new M5 Ultra chip and high-end memory configuration.

Most models began shipping on Tuesday, while Mac Studios configured with 512GB of unified memory are planned to ship in late October, Apple said.

Power-efficient architecture

Initially developed for compute-intensive tasks such as rendering graphics, the high-end Mac Studio has more recently become popular for AI workloads such as programming.

At the time of launch, Apple demonstrated four Mac Studios networked together to run an AI model with one trillion parameters that was used to find and repair a programming flaw.

Apple said at the time that the machines, which run on power-efficient ARM-based chips, could all run on a single wall outlet.

“There’s no cost per token,” said Apple’s chief hardware officer Johny Srouji at the event.

The new M5 Max chip offers an 18-core CPU with up to a 40-core GPU, while the Ultra chip combines two Max chips into a single large chip using Apple’s UltraFusion architecture, doubling the CPU and GPU resources, and increasing memory capacity and bandwidth.

Apple is reportedly considering tapping into demand for power-efficient AI compute by launching a rack server, with such a product potentially using a future M8 Ultra processor and coming to market in 2029, The Information reported this month.