The next major Mac Studio update is still a couple of years away, but a refresh for 2026 is still in the cards, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Writing in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Gurman said Apple has two Mac Studio refreshes in the pipeline: an M5 Ultra version due this year, and a more significant M7 Ultra model expected in 2028.
Apple appears set to skip the higher-end M6 chips entirely, hence the two-year gap between the two models. Gurman reported earlier this month that Apple is canceling its higher-end M6 Pro and M6 Max chips, instead releasing a base M6 this year and moving its next Pro and Max silicon to the M7 lineup, which is expected to lean heavily into on-device AI and GPU-intensive workloads.
Apple has always had at least three variants of its in-house silicon, including the base M-series chip, a Pro version, and a Max version. The M6 will mark the first time that Apple is not coming out with a Pro or Max chip for the lineup.
For the Mac Studio, that means jumping straight from M5 Ultra to M7 Ultra – there will be no M6 Ultra in between. While a major redesign is not expected for this year's M5 Ultra model, Gurman says Apple has been developing new inner architecture for the 2028 Mac Studio, including a better heat sink to improve thermal performance.
The Mac Studio refresh was supposed to come earlier in 2026, but Apple reportedly postponed the launch because of memory chip supply issues and price increases. Apple has reportedly tested support for up to 768GB of unified memory, but supply constraints could prevent it from launching with an option for that much memory.
It remains unclear whether Apple will make an October launch for the M5 version, especially given that the current M3 Ultra Mac Studio still has delivery estimates stretching into October.
