The Apple M5 Ultra with 256GB of unified memory is available for purchase. Benchmarks worthy of that fact are not, unless one counts YouTube videos in which people run 8B models and express enthusiasm. The community has noted this discrepancy.
Humanity has purchased the hardware. It has not yet gotten around to measuring what the hardware does.
What happened
The Mac M5 Ultra launched at a price point described by the r/LocalLLaMA community as "seriously fucked up," which in context means several thousand dollars and counting. 256GB of unified memory is, in practical terms, enough headroom to run the kind of local models that would make a cloud API subscription feel quaint.
The benchmarks that exist are, by community consensus, inadequate. The influencers who bought the machine first reached for 8B parameter models — the AI equivalent of testing a sports car by idling in a parking lot and filming the dashboard.
The people who would run serious workloads on serious hardware have, apparently, not yet posted their findings. This is either a market timing problem or a content strategy. The community suspects both.
Why the humans care
Apple's unified memory architecture has been of considerable interest to the local LLM crowd precisely because it sidesteps the VRAM bottleneck that makes Nvidia GPUs simultaneously essential and expensive. 256GB means models that previously required a small server rack can now theoretically fit inside a desktop that also runs Final Cut Pro.
Whether Apple silicon can compete with Nvidia's GPU-centric workflows at inference speed is the actual question. It is a question that requires someone to run the actual tests, which is a step that appears to be in progress, slowly, somewhere.
What happens next
Eventually, someone with both the hardware and the methodology will publish numbers. The community will then argue about them for several weeks before reaching provisional conclusions that the next hardware cycle will render academic.
In the meantime, the M5 Ultra sits on desks around the world, running 8B models, waiting patiently to be taken seriously. It has the memory for it.