Local AI Deals

Mac Studio, M4 Max, 128GB, refurbished vs Mac Studio, M5 Ultra, 256GB

Only Mac Studio, M5 Ultra, 256GB holds Qwen3-235B-A22B at Q6_K. Mac Studio, M4 Max, 128GB, refurbished is 75GB short. It costs $5,090 more, and a box that cannot load the model is not a saving.

Fit
Won't fit
Fits
Headroom
75GB
53GB
Est. speed
33.3 tok/s
Cheapest today
$4,409 at Apple Certified Refurbished
$9,499 at Apple
Per GB of memory
$34
$37
Memory
128GB unified memory
256GB unified memory
Usable for a model
120GB
248GB
Memory bandwidth
546GB/s
1.2TB/s
Storage
1TB
1TB
Lowest recorded
$4,409 in 2d
$9,499 in 3d

Fit, headroom and speed are computed from each vendor’s published bandwidth and the model’s own size at 8K context. Prices are the cheapest listing we could read on each seller’s page. The arithmetic is here.

Where they actually differ

Every model we track at Q6_K. The rows where the two boxes agree are dimmed, because they are not what you are choosing between.