Memory and Storage Decide What Apple’s New MacBook Pro and Mac Studio Cost

Apple used its October 28 “Pro and Tell” event to announce the highly rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro, starting at $2,899 for the 14-inch model, and to make a Mac Studio with 512GB of memory orderable at $22,299. 

The MacBook Pro goes on sale November 6. Those figures are entry points, because the final bill depends on the options chosen in Apple’s configurator. 

Experts describes the laptop’s pricing as “a new extreme,” and the upgrade menus are where that claim gets tested.

A Loaded Touchscreen MacBook Pro Could Cost Up to $14,549

Fully configured, Apple’s configurator puts the 14-inch at $14,249 and the 16-inch at around $14,549, according to TechCrunch. 

Both top models use the M5 Max with an 18-core CPU and 40-core GPU. 

The previous 16-inch ceiling was $10,149, so the new one sits $4,400 higher. 

The processors are not new: they are the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips as the March models, as we flagged before the event. 

What is new is touch, a first for the MacBook Pro line, which arrives years after the Touch Bar, introduced in 2016 and discontinued in 2023. 

The money also buys a Tandem PROLED XDR display with a smaller Dynamic Island in place of the notch, a slimmer body of about three pounds and a six-speaker system, and Apple has discontinued the mini-LED models these replace.

Apple Charges $4,000 to Double a MacBook Pro’s Storage From 8TB to 16TB

TechCrunch lists the upgrade prices: 4TB of storage adds $1,000, 8TB adds $3,000 and 16TB adds $7,000. 

Read as steps, going from 4TB to 8TB costs $2,000 more and going from 8TB to 16TB costs $4,000 more, so each doubling of capacity is priced at twice the previous jump. 

Meanwhile, 128GB of RAM adds $2,000, and nano-texture glass is the sole budget option at $150. Combined, these three top choices total $9,150, proving that storage selection is the biggest factor driving up the final price. 

Apple’s 512GB Mac Studio Memory Option Costs More Than a Loaded M3 Ultra

As PCMag notes, the 512GB option is only available on the 36-core CPU, 80-core GPU M5 Ultra, which carries a $1,300 premium over the 30-core, 64-core version, and the memory upgrade alone is $15,500 over the base chip’s 96GB. 

The result is $22,299 with 1TB of storage and $29,799 with 16TB, so the storage step costs $7,500, close to the MacBook Pro’s $7,000. 

The M5 Max Mac Studio is capped at 128GB, the same ceiling as the MacBook Pro, which leaves the Ultra as the only route to 512GB. 

For perspective, when Apple offered 512GB on the M3 Ultra, a fully loaded 16TB machine cost $14,099, meaning today’s standalone memory upgrade costs $1,401 more than that entire previous flagship computer. 

PCMag put the price in terms of a car, while the global memory-shortage context fits where the increase landed: the memory line

Source: Apple’s touchscreen MacBook Pro pushes laptop pricing to a new extreme