MacStadium has been the default answer to "I need a dedicated Mac in the cloud" for over a decade, and for build pipelines, device testing, and general macOS hosting it's a reasonable one. But MacStadium's plans were designed around CPU cores and CI throughput, not the unified-memory ceilings that determine which local LLMs you can actually load. That's the gap maccloud is built to fill.
MacStadium's current Mac Studio plans
As published on MacStadium's pricing page, their Mac Studio tier tops out at 128GB of unified memory on an M2 Ultra chip:
| Plan | Chip | Cores | Memory | Storage | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S1.M | M1 Max | 10-core | 64GB | 2TB SSD | $249/mo |
| S2.M | M2 Ultra | 24-core | 64GB | 2TB SSD | $369/mo |
| S2.L | M2 Ultra | 24-core | 128GB | 2TB SSD | $449/mo |
maccloud's plans
Both maccloud configurations run the newer M5 Ultra chip — two full silicon generations ahead of MacStadium's M2 Ultra — with memory ceilings built specifically around what local model inference needs, not what a CI runner needs:
| Plan | Chip | Cores | Memory | Storage | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| maccloud 256GB | M5 Ultra | 36-core CPU / 80-core GPU | 256GB | 1TB SSD | $1,200/mo |
| maccloud 512GB | M5 Ultra | 36-core CPU / 80-core GPU | 512GB | 1TB SSD | $1,800/mo |
Why the memory ceiling is the whole story
A CI build doesn't care how much unified memory sits idle in the box — it cares about core count and build minutes. A 70B-class local model cares about almost nothing else. Loaded at a practical quantization, a 70B model alone needs somewhere in the 40–75GB range before you've left any room for context, a second model, or an embedding pipeline running alongside it. MacStadium's largest Mac Studio plan (128GB) can carry that, but with limited headroom. Their more common 64GB plans can't comfortably run a quantized 70B model at all.
maccloud's smaller plan starts where MacStadium's largest plan ends, and the 512GB tier gives you four times MacStadium's ceiling — enough room for a 70B model at near-full precision, or several smaller models running side by side.
If your workload is Xcode builds, device testing, or general macOS CI/CD, MacStadium's lower entry price and mature tooling make it the more sensible pick — maccloud isn't trying to compete there. This comparison is specifically for teams whose limiting factor is how large a model they can keep resident in memory.
Pricing model: pay-at-delivery vs. billed immediately
MacStadium bills monthly starting when your instance provisions, which for standard configurations is fast. maccloud's Mac Studio units are built to order — reserving locks in today's price, but you aren't billed until the machine ships, which for the 256GB configuration currently runs 16–18 weeks and for 512GB runs about 24 weeks. If you need compute running today, factor that lead time in; if you're planning ahead for a project that starts next quarter, reserving now protects your price against any increase between now and delivery.
Bottom line
Choose MacStadium if you need general-purpose Mac hosting, fast provisioning, or your models comfortably fit inside 64–128GB. Choose maccloud if the model is the product — if you're serving a 70B+ parameter model, running multiple models concurrently, or want headroom for whatever ships next on a chip that isn't already two generations old.