Apple Engineers M7 Ultra to Support Up to 1.5TB of Unified Memory

The interesting number in Mark Gurman's latest Power On newsletter is not a benchmark score, it is a memory ceiling. Apple is reportedly engineering the M7 Ultra to support up to 1.5TB of unified memory, roughly double what the M5 Ultra is planned to top out at. As 9to5Mac summarised the report, that would finally put Apple Silicon back at the RAM ceiling of the highest-end 2019 Intel Mac Pro, a specific bar Apple has not crossed since it went in-house on chips.

The near-term context is that Apple is also lining up an M5 Ultra Mac Studio later this year with up to 768GB of unified memory, which Gurman calls a record for Apple silicon on its own. The M7 Ultra Mac Studio is the 2028 machine sitting behind it, with reportedly new inner architecture and a better heat sink to actually keep that memory ceiling usable under load.

Why this matters if you are not a Mac Pro buyer: the amount of RAM that fits on a single package is what decides whether very large language models, long-context inference, and heavy video and scientific workloads can run locally at all. Nvidia's DGX-class desktops have owned that on-desk conversation for a while. A 1.5TB unified memory SKU, with the bandwidth that soldered-on-package memory buys, would be Apple's first credible answer for the people who actually need that much headroom.

The honest caveats are the ones Gurman himself flags. Apple is engineering the M7 Ultra to support 1.5TB, but whether that configuration actually ships depends on the state of the memory industry, and there is an ongoing shortage. Based on Apple's current RAM pricing at roughly $25 per additional gigabyte, taking a base 128GB machine up to 1.5TB would run over $35,000, so even if it ships it is aimed at a narrow slice of buyers. The reporting also does not give bandwidth numbers, core counts, or say whether a Mac Pro will be offered alongside the Studio.

Still, the direction is the part worth watching. Apple is quietly re-entering the workstation memory race, and it is telling buyers now, two years ahead, what to plan around.