Amazon listed the 16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro with 36GB of RAM and 2TB of storage at $3,499 when 9to5Toys reported the price Thursday, a $900 cut from Apple's $4,399 sticker for that configuration.
That makes it the lowest price Amazon has tracked for this particular build, beating a previous floor of $3,649 that held both before and after Apple raised prices on the lineup in late June, according to 9to5Toys.
The math gets more interesting once you factor in that increase. This machine launched earlier this year at $3,899 before Apple's price hike pushed the list price up to $4,399. At $3,499, Amazon's current deal sits $400 below even the original, pre-hike price, which 9to5Toys calls the real benchmark for judging whether a MacBook Pro deal is actually good.
None of that changes what this machine is: a specialized, expensive tool. The M5 Max chip with 36GB of unified memory and 2TB of storage is built for people pushing video edits, 3D renders or large machine-learning workloads through a laptop, not for anyone deciding between this and a MacBook Air. 9to5Toys is blunt about it, calling the configuration one that most buyers won't even consider at any price.
The timing adds a wrinkle. Apple has scheduled an event for October 28 under the title "Pro and tell," and reporting cited by 9to5Toys points to new MacBook Pro hardware arriving at or around that event, with speculation about OLED displays and a touchscreen Mac circulating ahead of the announcement. None of those details are confirmed by Apple, and 9to5Toys is careful to frame them as unresolved, noting nobody yet knows what a next-generation machine with those features would cost.
What is certain is that whatever Apple shows next week won't carry a $900 discount on day one. New hardware rarely gets touched by retailers until well after launch, and even then the kind of markdown Amazon is running on the current M5 Max model took months of inventory cycling to produce. For anyone who needs a 16-inch Mac with this much memory and storage right now, and who isn't waiting to see what Apple reveals on October 28, the current price is the best Amazon has shown for this configuration to date.
As with any retailer deal, the $3,499 price is subject to change without notice, and Amazon could adjust it before or after Apple's event depending on how it manages stock of the outgoing M5 Max lineup.
DDFiled by The Deals Desk
Price drops and sales on tech worth buying, with the price, the retailer and the time it was reported. Prices move; every deal says when it was seen.
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