During Apple surprise Mac announcements last week, the company declared in its press release that the Mac Studio features “a next-generation SSD architecture built on PCIe Gen 6.” However, that mention has since been removed from the Mac Studio press release and site, as spotted by MacGeneration.
The PCIe Gen 6 statement has been removed from the Apple U.K., Apple Germany, and Apple Japan press releases, though strangely, the PCIe Gen 6 reference still exists in the Apple France press release. The releases still list August 25, 2026, as the day of publication and have no record of an update, but we, along with many other outlets, quoted the PCIe Gen 6 in our original stories and haven’t been contacted by Apple about a correction.
The press release now reads, “Storage performance is up to twice as fast, with a next-generation SSD architecture, delivering industry-leading read and write speeds for rapid project loading, file transfers, and loading huge LLMs.” The twice as fast comparision is to the M3 Ultra Mac Studio.
The Internet Archive has a copy of the U.S. Mac Studio press release, recorded on August 25 at 13:03:29, and it contains the PCIe Gen 6 reference. Other copies recorded by the Internet Archive on August 25 still have the reference, but the first record of the press release on August 26 at 02:03:13 shows that the release was revised to remove references to PCIe Gen 6.
PCIe Gen 6 is the next generation of the PCIe interconnect standard, offering performance upgrades over the PCIe Gen 5 standard. Apple did not specify that the M5 Ultra Mac Studio implements PCIe Gen 5, but the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips are equipped with it. So it’s likely that the M5 Ultra has it too, and Apple made an error in its press release.
Apple was contacted for clarification and had yet to respond at the time of this posting.
