$22,299.00 USD. That is where the starting line sits for a Mac Studio M5 Ultra with 512GB of unified memory. For that kind of cash, developers scaling local LLMs aren't just buying desktop convenience anymore; they're staring down the barrel of workstation pricing that directly collides with multi-node enterprise cluster alternatives. Community math is already running the numbers against multi-GPU server setups, and the trade-off between single-node memory bandwidth and custom rack architecture is getting brutal.
