How Much Would It Cost To Max Out The New OLED MacBook Pro? It's Staggering

Apple just unveiled the new OLED MacBook Pro. Although the laptop comes with the same chips as the MacBook Pro models introduced early this year, Apple is offering more storage on this new machine, which comes at a higher price. If you were to max out the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display – meaning you chose the 16-inch model with the nano-texture display, higher end M5 Max chip, 128GB of RAM, and 16TB of storage — then you'd end up paying $14,549 before taxes. If you choose not to upgrade the amount of storage and opt for the included 2TB option, you end up saving $7,000 –  almost half of the price of the maxed out MacBook Pro specification.

While this sounds like a staggering price to pay for a laptop — especially one with a processor released earlier this year — Apple is known for charging a lot more for the RAM and SSD in these devices. For example, the also recently-released Mac Studio has finally rolled out a new option with up to 512GB of RAM, which alone costs $15,500. Combined with up to 16TB of storage, which Apple charges $7,500 for, customers could pay up to $29,799 for the M5 Ultra version — or more than double the price of the new MacBook Pro. Prices could be even higher, as you probably need a few extra accessories like a display, keyboard, mouse, and so on. Still, if you're up to the task of paying that much for a Mac, you should know you'll get what's best from the company at this moment.

If you're asking this question, then it probably means this machine is not for you. Since Apple offers unified memory built in to its own processors, users can only choose the setup of their machine once. For example, if you order the laptop with 24GB of RAM, this is what you'll get for the rest of your computer's life since you can't upgrade it. Regarding storage, a cheaper solution would be getting an external SSD drive, since other companies don't charge as much for storage as Apple does. Apple also doesn't let users upgrade the amount of built-in storage on their devices either.

For someone maxing out a new MacBook Pro, they're getting one of the best machines in the market for video editing, coding, running giant local AI models, creating with 3D models, and other complex workflows. With up to 18 core CPU, featuring 12 performance cores and 6 super cores, it's been optimized for power efficient, multithreaded workloads with up to 30% faster performance than the previous chip. The LLM prompt processing is 4x faster with the M5 Max chip with up to 50% increase in graphics performance. Finally, the M5 Max can support up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth. Another important upgrade from the M4 generation is 2x faster SSD speeds, meaning that accessing data on the computer is faster than ever.

Apple still sells its existing MacBook Pro models with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, if horsepower is what you're looking for. You won't get the new display, lighter chassis, or glowing Apple logo on the lid, however. You can max the older model out for as much as $10,149 but with only 8TB of storage. That works out $400 cheaper than the OLED version of the equivalently configured model, for a laptop that "gets better" according to BGR's review.