The prefill rates are way faster on these cards compared to apple silicon, which affects TTFT and therefore usability for a lot of coding tasks, unless you fire and forget most of the time.

Mac GPUs supposedly being fastest thing on Earth obsoleting everything NVIDIA is just pure marketing. It was just faster once than some midrange laptop NVIDIA, which conveniently wasn't explicitly marked as different chip sharing the branding with the desktop variant(oof).

The real benefits to going Mac is its quiet and discreet, high wife/CEO acceptance design, and their huge GPU-assignable shared RAM.

If you're okay with your desk being the wing top of a flying airplane, and 3M Peltor or David-Clark is your favorite working time headphone brand anyway, then your build will be faster and cheaper than a maxed out Mac Studio.

It is more powerful than Apple.

This is a tier above the best Mac Studio and two tiers above the Spark.

Big GPUs

Two RTX 6000 have more FLOPS and more memory bandwidth than a M5 Ultra (but they also cost more).

Depends on your use case

If running models then Apple is fine, if training or tuning or large number of users then Nvidia is king

There’s roughly 50% more memory bandwidth on an RTX 6000 pro versus the M5 Ultra. I imagine it really comes down to what you’re doing, I know my 5090 runs laps around the M5 Pro I have when it comes to local LLM performance (until it runs out of memory).

If it wasn’t for the fact the 6000 Pro is selling for like 100% ($9,000) over MSRP it would probably look a lot more reasonable.

If your goal is pure GPU compute, you should have got a 5090. It can bench comparable to the RTX 6000 Pro cards and is near guaranteed to outperform M5 Ultra.