alt Hacker NewsI think the M5U Ultra 96gb is the sweetspot in that price range. It has more compute and bandwidth so you get to run models better sized to its hardware. I believe the Max would be too slow; personally I'm getting this SKU because I think it'd suck to get the 128gb Max and then discover it's too slow, and end up just using cloud providers anyway.
I agree about getting the Ultra if you're interested in AI (LLM) inference speed. I'm a little perplexed as to why there isn't a RAM option in between 96GB and 256GB, though. For instance, I believe Deepseek v4 flash runs a lot faster on (https://github.com/antirez/ds4) with 128GB than 96. I assume the higher SKUs have low enough sales that Apple doesn't want to be manufacturing too many different RAM configs as that would eat into their margins. (I say this as someone interested in AI hardware in general, even the 96GB is out of my price range).