[HN Gopher] MacBook Pro with new M5 Pro and M5 Max
___________________________________________________________________
MacBook Pro with new M5 Pro and M5 Max
Author : scrlk
Score : 587 points
Date : 2026-03-03 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| miohtama wrote:
| But is it powerful enough to run Liquid glass?
| MattDamonSpace wrote:
| /s I assume but it's crazy to me that LG runs on the watch
| Y-bar wrote:
| Apple TV 4K can't run the Liquid Glass interface without
| stuttering, turning off transparency restores fluid (heh!)
| animations.
| layer8 wrote:
| Unlikely.
| boriskourt wrote:
| Nice starting storage bump MacBook Pro with M5
| Pro now comes standard with 1TB of storage, while MacBook Pro
| with M5 Max now comes standard with 2TB. And the 14-inch MacBook
| Pro with M5 now comes standard with 1TB of storage.
| zarzavat wrote:
| It's not exactly a bump if they raise prices at the same time,
| though with the RAM situation I'm not mad.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Well 1TB MacBook Pro used to cost $1799, now 1TB is the base
| model and costs $1699, so it's actually a $100 price drop for
| 1TB storage.
| Tepix wrote:
| Not if you compare Macbook Pro with Pro CPUs.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Whoah, both the Pro and Max CPUs feature 18 cores. This hasn't
| happened since M1 Pro/Max. This is a surprise.
|
| Also, the mix of cores have changed drastically.
|
| - 6 "Super cores"
|
| - 12 "Performance cores"
|
| I'm guessing these are just renamed performance and efficiency
| cores from previous generations.
|
| This is a massive change from the M4 Max:
|
| - 12 performance cores
|
| - 4 efficiency cores
|
| This seems like a downgrade (in core config but may not be in
| actual MT) assuming super = performance and performance =
| efficiency cores.
| cced wrote:
| So they renamed performance to mean efficiency and are now
| using super in place of performance?
| petu wrote:
| Super is old "performance" core:
|
| > The industry-leading super core was first introduced as
| performance cores in M5, which also adopts the super core
| name for all M5-based products
|
| But new "performance" is claimed to be new design (= not just
| overclocked efficiency core from M5?):
|
| > M5 Pro and M5 Max also introduce an all-new performance
| core that is optimized to deliver greater power-efficient,
| multithreaded performance for pro workloads.
|
| quotes from https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-
| debuts-m5-pro-a...
| netruk44 wrote:
| I think super cores are a new type/tier of core, not a rename
| of performance.
|
| The base M5 has super/efficiency cores.
|
| The Pro and Max have super/performance cores.
| klausa wrote:
| I don't think the "new" Performance cores are just "renamed"
| "E" / "Efficiency" cores; Apple has retroactively renamed the
| baseline M5 nomenclature to say it has "10-core CPU with 4
| super cores and 6 efficiency cores"; so they're clearly keeping
| the "efficiency cores" nomenclature around.
|
| I think this is a new design, with Apple having three tiers of
| cores now, similar to what Qualcomm has been doing for a while.
|
| I think how it breaks down is:
|
| - "Super" are the old "P" cores, and the top tier cores now
|
| - "Performance" cores are a new tier and seen for the first
| time here, slotting between "old" P and E in performance
|
| - "Efficiency" / "E" are still going to be around; but maybe
| not in desktop/Pro/Max anymore.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Interesting. This is clearly a big CPU change if so. I wonder
| why no E cores. I'm sure E cores would be more efficient at
| OS tasks than the new performance cores.
|
| For example, 6 super, 8 performance, and 4 efficiency.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Another commenter stated the P cores can be scaled down to
| be E cores dynamically, so why not?
| aurareturn wrote:
| P cores would take up more die space.
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder if they'll get to good enough scaling from E to
| Super where they don't really need to distinguish
| anymore?
| jacobp100 wrote:
| I was looking into this. The M5 performance cores can be scaled
| down to match efficiency cores in performance and power usage.
|
| I believe they lower the clock speed, limit how much work is
| done in parallel on each core, and limit how aggressive the
| speculative execution is so less work is wasted.
| aurareturn wrote:
| The M5 performance cores can be scaled down to match
| efficiency cores in performance and power usage.
|
| Source for this?
| aurareturn wrote:
| Whoah, both the Pro and Max CPUs feature 18 cores. This hasn't
| happened since M1 Pro/Max. This is a surprise.
|
| Replying to my own post. In hindsight, this shouldn't be any
| surprise because these chips are now chiplets. Apple is
| connecting a CPU die with a GPU die. This means they're
| designing just one CPU die rather than two. An Ultra would just
| be two of these CPU dies.
| Havoc wrote:
| Intel is totally gonna steal that. They're catching so much
| flak for their "efficiency cores" I'm surprised they haven't
| done a rebrand yet
| Tangokat wrote:
| "Scaling up performance from M5 and offering the same
| breakthrough GPU architecture with a Neural Accelerator in each
| core, M5 Pro and M5 Max deliver up to 4x faster LLM prompt
| processing than M4 Pro and M4 Max, and up to 8x AI image
| generation than M1 Pro and M1 Max."
|
| Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?
|
| I still think Apple has a huge opportunity in privacy first LLMs
| but so far I'm not seeing much execution. Wondering if that will
| change with the overhaul of Siri this spring.
| jahller wrote:
| looks like this will be their angle for the whole agentic AI
| topic
| Sharlin wrote:
| "Apple Intelligence is even more capable while protecting
| users' privacy at every step."
|
| Remains to be seen how capable it actually is. But they're
| certainly trying to sell the privacy aspect.
| re-thc wrote:
| > Remains to be seen how capable it actually is.
|
| It's the best. We all turned it off. 100% privacy.
| whizzter wrote:
| We had a workshop 6 months ago and while I've always been
| sceptical of OpenAI,etc's silly AGI/ASI claims, the investments
| have shown the way to a lot of new technology and has opened up
| a genie that won't be put back into the bottle.
|
| Now extrapolating in line with how Sun servers around year 2000
| cost a fortune and can be emulated by a 5$ VPS today, Apple is
| seeing that they can maybe grab the local LLM workloads if they
| act now with their integrated chip development.
|
| But to grab that, they need developers to rely less on CUDA via
| Python or have other proper hardware support for those
| environments, and that won't happen without the hardware being
| there first and the machines being able to be built with enough
| memory (refreshing to see Apple support 128gb even if it'll
| probably bleed you dry).
| fny wrote:
| I feel like the push by devs towards Metal compatibility has
| been 10x than AMD. I assume that's because the majority of us
| run MacBooks.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Who is "us" in this case? Majority of devs that took the
| stack overflow survey use Windows:
|
| https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#1-computer
| -...
| pdpi wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to say that the people responding
| to surveys on Stack Overflow aren't the same people who
| work on pushing the state of the art in local LLM
| deployment. (which doesn't prove that that crowd is
| Apple-centric, of course)
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Perhaps. Though Windows has been the majority share even
| when stack overflow was at it's peak, and before.
| petercooper wrote:
| It's not the whole answer, but SO came from the .NET
| world and focused on it first so it had a
| disproportionately MS heavy audience for some time.
| GitHub had the same issue the other way around. Ruby was
| one of GitHub's top five languages for its first decade
| for similar reasons.
| AdamN wrote:
| That's the broad developer community. 90%+ of the
| engineers at Big Tech and the technorati startups are on
| MacOS with 5% on Linux and the other 5% on Windows.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Source?
| re-thc wrote:
| > 90%+ of the engineers at Big Tech and the technorati
| startups
|
| The US 1s? Is that why we have Deepseek and then other
| non-US open source LLMs catching up rapidly?
|
| World view please. The developer community is not US
| only.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You'll see a lot of MacBooks in Beijing's zhongguangcun
| where all the tech companies are, but they also have a
| lot of students there as well, so who knows. You need to
| go out to the suburbs where Lenovo has offices to stop
| seeing them. I know Apple is common in Western Europe
| having lived there for two years (but that was 20 years
| ago, I lived in China for 9 years after that).
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if the deepseek people were
| primarily using Mac's. Maybe Alibaba might be using PCs?
| I'm not sure.
| JCharante wrote:
| Majority of devs are in the global south I presume
| whizzter wrote:
| I think that might be partly because on regular PC's you
| can just go and buy an NVidia card insteaf of fuzzing
| around with software issues, and for those on laptops they
| probably hope that something like Zluda will solve it via
| software shims or MS backed ML api's.
|
| Basically, too many choices to "focus on" makes non a
| winner except the incumbent.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which majority?
|
| I certainly only use Macs when being project assigned, then
| there are plenty of developers out there whose job has
| nothing to do with what Apple offers.
|
| Also while Metal is a very cool API, I rather play with
| Vulkan, CUDA and DirectX, as do the large majority of game
| developers.
| whizzter wrote:
| Honestly though, gamedevs really are among the biggest
| Windows stalwarts due to SDK's and older 3d software.
|
| Only groups of developers more tied to Windows that I can
| think of are probably embedded people tied due to weird
| hardware SDK's and Windows Active Directory dependent
| enterprise people.
|
| Outside of that almost everyone hip seems to want a Mac.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 80% of the desktop market has to have their applications
| developed by someone, at least until software replicators
| replace them.
|
| Everyone hip alright, or at least those that would dream
| to earn a salary big enough to afford Apple taxes.
|
| Remember there are world regions where developers barely
| make 1 000 euros per month.
| well_ackshually wrote:
| The only "push" towards Metal compatibility there's been
| has been complaints on github issues. Not only has none of
| the work been done, absolutely nobody in their right mind
| wants to work on Metal compatibility. Replacing proprietary
| with proprietary is absolutely nobody's weekend project. or
| paid project.
| hnb2137 wrote:
| If coding by AI was truly solved then it would be done
| with AI, right?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Torch mlp support on my local macbook outperforms CUDA T4 on
| Colab.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Except CUDA feels really cozy, because like Microsoft, NVidia
| understands the Developers, Developers, Developers mantra.
|
| People always overlook that CUDA is a polyglot ecosystem, the
| IDE and graphical debugging experience where one can even
| single step on GPU code, the libraries ecosystem.
|
| And as of last year, NVidia has started to take Python
| seriously and now with cuTile based JIT, it is possible to
| write CUDA kernels in pure Python, not having Python generate
| C++ code that other tools than ingest.
|
| They are getting ahead of Modular, with Python.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?
|
| Neural Accelerator was present in iPhone 17 and M5 chip
| already. This is not new for M5 Pro/Max.
|
| Apple's stated AI strategy is local where it can and cloud
| where it needs. So "doubling down"? Probably not. But it fits
| in their strategy.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| I think its just marketing, and the marketing is working. Look
| how many people bought Minis and ended up just paying for API
| calls anyway. (Saw it IRL 2x, see it on reddit openclaw daily)
|
| I don't mind it, I open Apple stock. But I'm def not buying
| into their rebranding of integrated GPU under the guise of
| Unified Memory.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I've tried to use a local LLM on an M4 Pro machine and it's
| quite painful. Not surprised that people into LLMs would pay
| for tokens instead of trying to force their poor MacBooks to
| do it.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| What are the other specs and how's your setup look? You
| need a minimum of 24GB of RAM for it to run 16GB or less
| models.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| This is typically true.
|
| And while it is stupid slow, you can run models of hard
| drive or swap space. You wouldn't do it normally, but it
| can be done to check an answer in one model versus
| another.
| Hamuko wrote:
| 48 GB MacBook Pro. All of the models I've tried have been
| slow and also offered terrible results.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Try a software called TG Pro lets you override fan
| settings, Apple likes to let your Mac burn in an inferno
| before the fans kick in. It gives me more consistent
| throughput. I have less RAM than you and I can run some
| smaller models just fine, with reasonable performance.
| GPT20b was one.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Tokens per second is abysmal no matter how much ram you
| have
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Some models run worse than others but I have gotten
| reasonable performance on my M4 Pro with 24 GB of RAM
| atwrk wrote:
| Local LLM inference is all about memory bandwidth, and an
| M4 pro only has about the same as a Strix Halo or DGX
| Spark. That's why the older ultras are popular with the
| local LLM crowd.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| I'm super happy with it for embedding, image recog, and
| semantic video segmentation tasks.
| andoando wrote:
| Local LLMs are useful for stuff like tool calling
| renewiltord wrote:
| What models are you using? I've found that SOTA Claudes
| outperform even gpt-5.2 so hard on this that it's cheaper
| to just use Sonnet because num output tokens to solve
| problem is so much lower that TCO is lower. I'm in SF
| where home power is 54C//kWh.
|
| Sonnet is so fast too. GPT-5.2 needs reasoning tuned up
| to get tool calling reliable and Qwen3 Coder Next wasn't
| close. I haven't tried Qwen3.5-A3B. Hearing rave reviews
| though.
|
| If you're using successfully some model knowing that
| alone is very helpful to me.
| usagisushi wrote:
| Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B and 27B have changed the game for me. I
| expect we'll see something comparable to Sonnet 4.6 running
| locally sometime this year.
| prettyblocks wrote:
| Could be, but it likely won't be able to support the
| massive context window required for performance on par
| with sonnet 4.6
| jsheard wrote:
| > Look how many people bought Minis and ended up just paying
| for API calls anyway. (Saw it IRL 2x, see it on reddit
| openclaw daily)
|
| Aren't the OpenClaw enjoyers buying Mac Minis because it's
| the cheapest thing which runs macOS, the only platform which
| can programmatically interface with iMessage and other Apple
| ecosystem stuff? It has nothing to do with the hardware
| really.
|
| Still, buying a brand new Mac Mini for that purpose seems
| kind of pointless when a used M1 model would achieve the same
| thing.
| ErneX wrote:
| It's exactly that. They are buying the base model just for
| that. You are not going to do much local AI with those 16GB
| of ram anyway, it could be useful for small things but the
| main purpose of the Mini is being able to interact with the
| apple apps and services.
| chaostheory wrote:
| No one is buying a base model Mac for local LLM. Everyone
| is forgetting the PC prices have drastically increased
| due to RAM and SSD. Meanwhile, Macs had no such price
| change... at least for the models that didn't just drop
| today. Mac's are just a good deal at the moment.
| briffle wrote:
| the new models cost $200 more for each 8GB of Ram you
| add.. Ouch...
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| That's been the case for years. Not new to the M5's
| jsheard wrote:
| > Meanwhile, Macs had no such price change
|
| Yeah because Mac upgrade prices were _already_ sky high,
| long before the component shortage. 32GB of DDR5-6000 for
| a PC rocketed from $100 to $500, while the cost of adding
| 16GB to a Mac was and still is $400.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| I'm kind of curious how Apple's supply contracts actually
| work, because it's currently more attractive to buy a Mac
| with a lot of RAM than it usually is, relative to a PC.
| So if it's "we negotiated a price and you give us as much
| RAM as we sell machines" the company supplying the RAM is
| getting soaked because they're having to supply even more
| RAM to Apple for a below-market price.
|
| But if the contract was for a specific amount of RAM and
| then people start coming to Apple more for high RAM
| machines, they're going to exhaust their contract sooner
| than usual and run out of cheap memory to buy. Then they
| have to decide if they want to lower their margins or
| raise the already-high price up to nosebleed levels.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| 16GB should be enough for TTS/Voice models running
| locally no ? I was thinking about having a home assistant
| setup like that where the voice is local and the brain is
| API based
| ErneX wrote:
| Sure, that's why I said maybe it's useful for a few
| things. But the main reason people were recommending the
| Mini was for its price (base model) and having access to
| the Apple services for clawdbot to leverage. Not
| precisely for local AI.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I run ministral for my home knowledge database on 24G
| iMac and some other non-agentic LLM things.
| llmslave wrote:
| yes, and its funny that all these critical people dont know
| this
| re-thc wrote:
| > Aren't the OpenClaw enjoyers buying Mac Minis because
| it's the cheapest thing which runs macOS
|
| That's likely only part of the reason. Mac Mini is now
| "cheap" because everyone exploded in price. RAM and SSD etc
| have all gone up massively. Not the mention Mac mini is
| easy out of the box experience.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| It's not cheap, though. Two weeks ago I bought a computer
| with a similar form factor (GMKtec G10). Worse CPU and
| GPU but same 16GB memory and a larger SSD for 40% the
| price of a base mac mini ($239 vs $599). It came with
| Windows preinstalled, but I immediately wiped that to
| install linux. Even a used (M-series) mac mini is
| substantially more expensive. It will cost me about an
| extra penny per day in electricity costs over a mac mini,
| but I won't be alive long enough for the mac mini to
| catch up on that metric.
|
| I considered the mac mini at the time, but the mac mini
| only makes sense if you need the local processing power
| or the apple ecosystem integration. It's certainly not
| cheaper if you just need a small box to make API calls
| and do minimal local processing.
| re-thc wrote:
| > It came with Windows preinstalled, but I immediately
| wiped that to install linux.
|
| Do you really need Openclaw now? And not claude code +
| zapier or Claude code + cron?
|
| That's the point. If you have worse CPU and GPU Windows
| will be sluggish (it's bloated).
| nicoburns wrote:
| If you need the CPU power in the Mac Mini then it is a
| pretty good price-to-performance ratio.
| stanmancan wrote:
| It's cheap for what you get.
|
| If you just need "a small box to make API calls and do
| minimal local processing" you an also just buy a RPI for
| a fraction of the price of the GMKtec G10.
|
| All 3 serve a different purpose; just because you can buy
| a slower machine for less doesn't mean the
| price:performance of the M1 Mac Mini changes.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price
| of the GMKtec G10.
|
| Sadly not really. The Pi 5 8gb canakit starter set, which
| feels like a more true price since it's including power
| supply, MicroSD card, and case, is now $210. The pi5 8gb
| by itself is $135.
|
| A 16gb pi5 kit, to match just the RAM capacity to say
| nothing of the difference in storage {size, speed,
| quality} and networking, is then also an eye watering
| $300
| edm0nd wrote:
| >you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price
|
| lol. you need to look at rpi 5 prices again. they are
| insane.
| philistine wrote:
| There are so few used Mac Mini around, those are all gone
| and what is left is to buy new.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Worse than that, they hold their value, so buying a used
| M1 mini is still a few hundred bucks, and saving $200-300
| by purchasing a 5 generation older mini seems like a bad
| deal in comparison.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Someone came to be excited they got a "deal" on the
| newest Intel Mac Mini for hosting OpenClaw. 8GB model for
| $300. I kind of regret bursting their bubble by telling
| them you can walk over to Costco (nearest one at time of
| discussion was walking distance) and pay $550 for one
| with an M4 and 16GB of RAM.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| Up until a week ago, the base m4 mini (16gb ram/256gb
| ssd) was $399 at microcenter, now $499. Pretty shocking
| how good of a value that is IMO.
| someperson wrote:
| Just like with GPUs and Bitcoin they'll be a flood of old
| hardware on the market eventually.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Can't they simply run MacOS on a VM on existing Mac
| hardware?
| shuckles wrote:
| You aren't going to run a network connected 24/7 online
| agent from a laptop because it's battery powered and
| portable.
| sneak wrote:
| Not if you want it to be able to use the hardware
| identifiers to register for use with iMessage.
| jen20 wrote:
| Not true as of macOS 15 onwards [1].
|
| [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualiza
| tion/usi...
| renewiltord wrote:
| Bro. The used M1 mini and studio are all gone. I was
| thinking of buying one for local AI before openclaw came
| out and went back to look and the order book is near empty.
| Swappa is cleared out. eBay is to the point that the m1
| studio is selling for at least a thousand more.
|
| This arb you're talking about doesn't exist. An m1 studio
| with 64 gb was $1300 prior to openclaw. You're not getting
| that today.
|
| I would have preferred that too since I could Asahi it
| later. It's just not cheap any more. The m4 is flat $500 at
| microcenter.
| mleo wrote:
| My M4 MacBook Pro for work just came a few weeks ago with 128
| GB of RAM. Some simple voice customization started using
| 90GB. The unified memory value is there.
| rafram wrote:
| Why not? The integrated GPUs are quite powerful, and having
| access to 32+ GB of GPU memory is amazing. There's a reason
| people buy Macs for local LLM work. Nothing else on the
| market really beats it right now.
| threatofrain wrote:
| The biggest problem with personal ML workflows on Mac right
| now is the software.
| cmdrmac wrote:
| I'm curious to know what software you're referring to.
| csullivannet wrote:
| Yes
| lizknope wrote:
| Jeff Geerling had a video of using 4 Mac Studios each with
| 512GB RAM connected by Thunderbolt. Each machine is around
| $10K so this isn't cheap but the performance is impressive.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_RsUxRjKU
| Greed wrote:
| If 40k is the barrier to entry for impressive, that doesn't
| really sell the usecase of local LLMs very well.
|
| For the same price in API calls, you could fund AI driven
| development across a small team for quite a long while.
|
| Whether that remains the case once those models are no
| longer subsidized, TBD. But as of today the comparison
| isn't even close.
| ttoinou wrote:
| With M3 Max with 64GB of unified ram you can code with a
| local LLM, so the bar is much lower
| Greed wrote:
| But why? Spending several thousand dollars to run sub-par
| models when the break-even point could still be _years_
| away seems bizarre for any real usecase where your goal
| is productivity over novelty. Anyone who has used Codex
| or Opus can attest that the difference between those and
| a locally available model like Qwen or Codestral is night
| and day.
|
| To be clear, I totally get the idea of running local LLMs
| for toy reasons. But in a business context the sell on a
| stack of Mac Pros seems misguided at best.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I started doing it to hedge myself for inevitable
| disappearance of cheap inference.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Sometimes you can't push your working data to third party
| service, by law, by contract, or by preference.
| nurettin wrote:
| I ran the qwen 3.5 35b a3b q4 model locally on a ryzen
| server with 64k context window and 5-8 tokens a second.
|
| It is the first local model I've tried which could reason
| properly. Similar to Gemini 2.5 or sonnet 3.5. I gave it
| some tools to call , asked claude to order it around,
| (download quotes, print charts, set up a gnome extension)
| even claude was sort of impressed that it could get the
| job done.
|
| Point is, it is really close. It isn't opus 4.5 yet, but
| very promising given the size. Local is definitely
| getting there and even without GPUs.
|
| But you're right, I see no reason to spend right now.
| Greed wrote:
| Getting Opus to call something local sounds interesting,
| since that's more or less what it's doing with Sonnet
| anyway if you're using Claude Code. How are you getting
| it to call out to local models? Skills? Or paying the API
| costs and using Pi?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It's what a small business might have paid for an onprem
| web server a couple of decades ago before clouds caught
| on. I figure if a legal or medical practice saw value in
| LLMs it wouldn't be a big deal to shove 50k into a closet
| Greed wrote:
| You would still have to do some pretty outstanding volume
| before that makes sense over choosing the "Enterprise"
| plan from OpenAI or Anthropic if data retention is the
| motivation.
|
| Assuming, of course, that your legal team signs off on
| their assurance not to train on or store your data with
| said Enterprise plans.
| LunaSea wrote:
| At least with the server you know what you are buying.
|
| With Anthropic you're paying for "more tokens than the
| free plan" which has no meaning
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| It's not. I've got a single one of those 512GB machines
| and it's pretty damn impressive for a local model.
| Greed wrote:
| Assuming you ran the gamut up from what you could fit on
| 32 or 64GB previously, how noticeable is the difference
| between models you can run on that vs. the 512GB you have
| now?
|
| I've been working my way up from a 3090 system and I've
| been surprised by how underwhelming even the finetunes
| are for complex coding tasks, once you've worked with
| Opus. Does it get better? As in, noticeably and not just
| "hallucinates a few minutes later than usual"?
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I'm not really into AI and LLMs. I personally don't like
| anything they output. But the people I know who are into it
| and into running their own local setups are buying Studios
| and Minis for their at home local LLM set ups. Really,
| everyone I personally know who is doing their build your own
| with local LLMs are doing this. I don't know anyone anymore
| buying other computers and NVIDIA graphics cards for it.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I think people buying those don't realize requirements to run
| something as big as Opus, they think those gigabytes of
| memory on Mac studio/mini is a lot only to find out that its
| "meh" on context of LLMs. Plus most buy it as a gateway into
| Apple ecosystem for their Claws, iMessage for example.
|
| > But I'm def not buying into their rebranding of integrated
| GPU under the guise of Unified Memory.
|
| But it is Unified Memory? Thanks to Intel iGPU term is
| tainted for a long time.
| lynx97 wrote:
| The topic is MacBook, so my criticism is a little off. However,
| I really dont believe in this "local LLM" promise from Apple.
| My phone already gets noticeably warm if I answer 5 WhatsApp
| messages. And looses 5% of battery during the process. I highly
| doubt Apple will have a useable local LLM that doesn't drain my
| battery in minutes, before 2030.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Something is not right if WhatsApp is seriously draining your
| phone like that. Admittedly I'm not a big WhatsApp user my
| iPhone hasn't had any trouble like that with it.
| jakeydus wrote:
| Yeah is OP using an iPhone X?
| Aurornis wrote:
| The hardware capabilities that make local LLMs fast are useful
| for a lot of different AI workloads. Local LLMs are a hot topic
| right now so that's what the marketing team is using as an
| example to make it relatable.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I've been so disappointed in Apple's lack of execution on this.
| There is so much potential for fantastic local models to run
| and intelligently connect to cloud models.
|
| I just don't get why they're dropping the ball so much on this.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Because it won't sell enough hardware to matter to them.
|
| They aren't dropping the ball, they are being smart and
| prudent.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Downvote all you want. Point blank, they are dropping the
| ball.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?
|
| Honestly, I think that's the move for apple. They do not seem
| to have any interest in creating a frontier lab/model -- why
| would they give the capex and how far behind they are.
|
| But open source models (Kimi, Deepseek, Qwen) are getting
| better and better, and apple makes excellent hardware for local
| LLMs. How appealing would it be to have your own LLM that knows
| all your secrets and doesnt serve you ads/slop, versus OpenAI
| and SCam Altman having all your secrets? I would seriously
| consider it even if the performance was not quite there. And no
| need for subscription + cli tool.
|
| I think apple is in the best position to have native AI, versus
| the competition which end up being edge nodes for the big 4
| frontier labs.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| RE Frontier models/hardware: I'm interested to see what
| happens with their "private cloud compute" marketing concept
| now that they're moving from running Siri AI experiences on
| Apple servers to Google servers instead.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| It is simply marketing nonsense - what they really mean (I
| think) is they support matrix multiplication (matmul) at the
| hardware level which given AI is mostly matrix multiplications
| you'll get much faster inference (and some increase in training
| too) on this new hardware. I'm looking forward to seeing how
| fast a local 96gb+ LLM is on the M5 Max with 128gb of RAM.
| manmal wrote:
| We've already established in this thread that memory
| bandwidth isn't that much greater than M4 Max - 12%? However,
| I wonder if batched inference will benefit greatly from the
| vastly improved compute. My guess is that parallel usage of
| the same model will be a couple times faster. So, single
| "threaded" use not that much better, but say you want to run
| a lot of batch jobs, it'd be way faster?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Is this a reply to a different comment?
| ivankra wrote:
| But memory bandwidth (bottleneck for LLM inference) is only
| marginally improved, 614 GB/s vs 546 GB/s for M4/M5 Max - where
| is this 4x improvement coming from?
|
| I think I'll pass on upgrading.
| singhrac wrote:
| It's prompt processing so prefill - that's compute bound not
| memory.
| 0x457 wrote:
| 4x is on Time To First Token it's on the graph.
| general_reveal wrote:
| It's not necessarily doubling down on local. The reality is
| your LLM should be inferencing every tick ... the same way your
| brain thinks every. Fucking. Nano. Second.
|
| So yes, the LLM should be inferencing on your prompt, but it
| should also be inferencing on 25,000 other things ... in
| parallel.
|
| Those are the compute needs.
|
| We just need compute everywhere as fast as possible.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| There already are a bunch of task-specific models running on
| their devices, it makes sense to maintain and build capacity in
| that area.
|
| I assume they have a moderate bet on on-device SLMs in addition
| to other ML models, but not much planned for LLMs, which at
| that scale, might be good as generalists but very poor at
| guaranteeing success for each specific minute tasks you want
| done.
|
| In short: 8gb to store tens of very small and fast purpose-
| specific models is much better than a single 8gb LLM trying to
| do everything.
| Munachi1869 wrote:
| Probably possible for pure coding models. I see on-device
| models becoming viable and usable in like 2-3 years on device
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Apple's AI strategy really kind of threads the needle cleverly.
|
| "AI" (LLMs) may or may not have a bubble-pop moment, but until
| it does Apple get to ride it on these press releases and
| claims. But if the big-pop occurs, then Apple winds up with
| really fantastic hardware that just _happens_ to be good at AI
| workloads (as well as general computing).
|
| For example, image classification (e.g. face recognition/photo
| tagging), ASR+vocoders, image enhancement, OCR, et al, were
| popular _before_ the current boom, and will likely remain
| popular after. Even if LLM usage dries up /falls out of vogue,
| this hardware still offers a significant user benefit.
| ChrisGreenHeur wrote:
| those things could likely just run fine on the gpu though
| Someone1234 wrote:
| They could run fine on the CPU too. But these are mobile
| devices, therefore battery usage is another significant
| metric. Dedicated hardware is more energy efficient than
| general hardware, and GPU in particular is a power-hog.
| vel0city wrote:
| Exactly. It's the same thing as video or audio encoding
| and decoding. Sure the CPU could do it, potentially use
| the GPU, but having actual hardware encoders and decoders
| for the most common codecs will save a lot of energy.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Not if GPU RAM is a limiter. Which it is for most models.
|
| Unified memory is a serious architectural improvement.
|
| How many GPUs does it take to match the RAM, and make up
| for the additional communication overhead, of a RAM-maxed
| Mac? Whatever the answer, it won't fit in a MacBook Pro's
| physical and energy envelopes. Or that of an all-in-one
| like the Studio.
| lamontcg wrote:
| LLM usage is not very likely to "dry up".
|
| What is more likely to happen though is that it doesn't take
| multiple $10B of datacenter and capital to build out models--
| and the performance against LLM benchmarks starts to max out
| to the point where throwing more capital at it doesn't make
| enough of a difference to matter.
|
| Once the costs shrink below $1B then Apple could start
| building their own models with the $139B in cash and
| marketable securities that they have--while everyone else has
| burned through $100B trying to be first.
|
| Of course the problem with this strategy right now is that
| Siri really, really sucks. They do need to come up with some
| product improvements now so that they don't get completely
| lapped.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Apple absolutely has a massive opportunity here because they
| used a shared memory architecture.
|
| So as most people in or adjacent to the AI space know, NVidia
| gatekeeps their best GPUs with the most memory by making them
| eye-wateringly expensive. It's a form of market segmentation.
| So consumer GPUs top out at 16GB (5090 currently) while the
| best AI GPUs (H200?) is 141GB (I just had to search)? I think
| the previou sgen was 80GB.
|
| But these GPUs are north of $30k.
|
| Now the Mac Studio tops out currently at 512GB os SHARED
| memory. That means you can potentially run a much larger model
| locally without distributing it across machines. Currently that
| retails at $9500 but that's relatively cheap, in comparison.
|
| But, as it stands now, the best Apple chips have significantly
| lower memory bandwidth than NVidia GPUs and that really impacts
| tokens/second.
|
| So I've been waiting to see if Apple will realize this and
| address it in the next generation of Mac Studios (and, to a
| lesser extend, Macbook Pros). The H200 seems to be 4.8TB/s.
| IIRC the 5090 is ~1.8TB/s. The best Apple is (IIRC) 819GB/s on
| the M3 Ultra.
|
| Apple could really make a dent in NVidia's monopoly here if
| they address some of these technical limitations.
|
| So I just checked the memory bandwidth of these new chips and
| it seems like the M5 is 153GB/s, M5 Pro is ~300 and M5 Max is
| ~600. I was hoping for higher. This isn't a big jump from the
| M4 generation. I suspect the new Studios will probably barely
| break 1TB/s. I had been hoping for higher.
| SirMaster wrote:
| >So consumer GPUs top out at 16GB (5090 currently)
|
| 5090 has 32GB, and the 4090 and 3090 both have 24GB.
| ericd wrote:
| Hard to get 6000+ bit memory bus HBM bandwidth out of a 512
| or 1024 bit memory bus tied to DDR... I think it's also just
| tough to physically tie in 512 gigs close enough to the GPU
| to run at those speeds. But yeah, I wish there was a very
| competitive local option, too, short of spending $50k+.
| fridder wrote:
| It will be interesting to see the specs on an m5 ultra.
| Probably have to wait until WWDC at the earliest to see it
| though
| meisel wrote:
| What % of users actually care that much about local LLMs? It
| appears to still be an inferior (though maybe decent) service
| compared to ChatGPT etc., and requires very top-end hardware.
| Is privacy _that_ important to people when their Google search
| history has been a gateway to the soul for years? I wonder if
| these machines would cost significantly less (or put the cost
| to other things, e.g. more CPU cores) without this emphasis on
| LLMs.
| barrell wrote:
| Privacy is definitely not a cern for the layman, but it is
| for lots of people, especially pro users. I also haven't made
| a google search in years.
|
| I also haven't seen any improvements in the frontier models
| in years, and I'm anxiously awaiting local models to catch
| up.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| A useful llm that needs 64gb of ram and mid double digit cores
| is not useful for 99% of their customers. The LLMs they have on
| iphone 17's certainly cannot do anything useful other than
| summerization and stuff. It's a hardware constraint that they
| have.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?
|
| Apple is in the hardware business.
|
| They want you to buy their hardware.
|
| People using Cloud _for compute_ is essentially competitive to
| their core business.
| causal wrote:
| "Doubling down on already being the best hardware for local
| inference"
| neya wrote:
| > I still think Apple has a huge opportunity in privacy first
| LLMs
|
| This correlation of Apple and privacy needs to rest. They have
| consistently proven to be otherwise - despite heavily marketing
| themselves as "privacy-first"
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
| chaostheory wrote:
| Not for everything. Apple has initially focused on edge AI
| that runs locally per device. It didn't work out well the
| first try, but I would still bet on them trying again once
| compute catches up. Besides, they still have a better track
| record than the other tech giants.
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| I think it's a little telling that the best you can do is a
| seven year old article.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| No other company makes you tell them every application you
| install on your device. No other company makes you tell
| them every location you read from your GPS sensor.
| neya wrote:
| So, somehow now they are the beacons of privacy and we
| should just ignore their history of spying on their users?
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| I think it's all about relativity. Are they private compared
| to an open source privacy focused OS like grapheneOS and the
| fantastic folks running that project? No. Are they more
| private than a company like meta or google who has much worse
| incentives for privacy than Apple? Probably.
|
| Do I wish Apple was way more transparent and gave users more
| control over gatekeeper and other controversial features that
| erode privacy? Absolutely.
| icar wrote:
| Didn't they announce a partnership with Google Gemini?
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _doubling down on local LLMs_
|
| Do think it'll be common to see pros purchasing expensive PCs
| approaching PS25k or more if they could run SoTA multi-modal
| LLMs faster & locally.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| > Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?
|
| Neural Accelerators (aka NAX) accelerates matmults with tile
| sizes >= 32. From a very high level perspective, LLM inference
| has two phases: (chunked) prefill and decode. The former is
| matmults (GEMM) and the latter is matrix vector mults (GEMV).
| Neural Accelerators make the former (prefill) faster and have
| no impact on the latter.
| blueTiger33 wrote:
| have you seen that github repo where they unlock the true power
| of NE?
| recov wrote:
| Have a link?
| caycep wrote:
| Given all the supply issues w/ Nvidia, I think Apple's AI
| strategy should be - local AI everything (not just LLMs), but
| also make Metal competitive w/ CUDA. Their ace in the hole is
| the unified memory model.
| maherbeg wrote:
| Honestly, they can keep waiting for another year or two for on-
| device models at the size they're looking for to be powerful
| enough.
| rafark wrote:
| > Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?
|
| I love the push to local llms. But it's hilarious how apple a
| few years ago was so reluctant to even mention "AI" in its
| keynotes and fast forward a couple years they've fully embraced
| it. I mean I like that they embraced it rather than be
| "different" (stubborn) and stay behind the tech industry. It's
| the smart choice. I just think it's funny.
| whizzter wrote:
| 128gb of memory, it's a nice change for Apple not to lag in that
| department for once, wonder what such a machine will cost though.
| Sharlin wrote:
| At today's prices, the memory will probably cost more than the
| rest of the hardware combined :P
| Detrytus wrote:
| 128gb was there for a while. I am kind of disappointed they do
| not have 256gb option.
| ajdude wrote:
| I was really hoping to see 512gb but I guess they don't want
| it to cut into the sales of the Studio.
| varispeed wrote:
| Same here. If the had 256GB option I'd pull a trigger. Now I
| might be looking for alternatives.
| vardump wrote:
| No 256 GB model, so no purchase. What a shame.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Checking Apple's store, I can't find a cheaper configuration
| than $5100 for the M5 + 128GiB version.
|
| Here in Europe, including 21% VAT, that's EUR6.124,00
| ($7.094,35 equivalent).
|
| Because of pricing strategies and such, the 128GiB version
| comes with a 2TiB SSD at minimum, and also requires the M5 Max
| (not Pro) at its highest configuration.
|
| Not sure if this is new, but it should be noted that these
| laptops don't come with a charger any more.
| alwillis wrote:
| In the US, power adapters are included: 70W
| USB-C Power Adapter (included with M5 Pro with 16-core GPU)
| 96W USB-C Power Adapter (included with M5 Pro with 20-core
| GPU, configurable with M5 Pro with 16-core GPU)
| USB-C to MagSafe 3 Cable (2 m)
| adastra22 wrote:
| Because your countries mandate no power adapter for some
| stupid ewaste reason.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| They didn't: https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/16/no-the-eu-
| didnt-ban-apple-fro...
|
| Devices should be offered without a charger. There's no law
| that states that that should be the default configuration.
| Nor that the charger should cost extra.
| pvtmert wrote:
| I know EU didn't ban chargers, but the common American
| sentiment somehow molded into that.
|
| It is interesting to see how mass-propaganda is playing
| out right before our eyes...
| snowchaser wrote:
| In US, going to 128 GB from 32 is $1500 extra. However 32 GB is
| only offered with the 32 core version and 128 only with the 40
| core version.
| joshstrange wrote:
| They've offered 128gb of RAM since at least the M3.
| nsbk wrote:
| The hardware looks amazing! Too bad they will ship with Tahoe
| installed. I'm not upgrading until I see in which direction the
| next Mac OS release goes
| carlmr wrote:
| I've upgraded to Tahoe at 26.2, zero complaints from my side.
| Haven't had any runaway memory leaks or similar that were
| reported.
| arianvanp wrote:
| Closing Tabs in Safari till takes more than a second though.
| And if you hold Cmd-W to close all of them it just completely
| locks up and crashes. Still not fixed since the release of
| Safari 26.
|
| Literally unusable
| alwillis wrote:
| I've been running the macOS 26.4 beta and have none of
| these issues.
| nhubbard wrote:
| I will say that 26.4 beta 2 was the first time I've
| regretting using betas since Sonoma beta 2. The Sonoma
| beta ruined the firmware on my machine and Apple had to
| replace the logic board; the latest Tahoe beta broke all
| networking on my machine and I had to erase the
| installation to fix everything. I've since dropped off
| the beta train for the time being.
|
| I already left the beta train on my iPhone because I had
| too many issues getting my grocery apps to allow me to
| place orders without going to my laptop and doing it in a
| web browser.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Never had this problem, been on Tahoe since it released. My
| safari tabs are buttery, silken smooth.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I'm on an M4 Pro MacBook-- basically the fastest computer
| you could buy from Apple before today-- and opening/closing
| the tab sidebar in Safari on Tahoe takes multiple seconds,
| even if I have only 4-6 tabs open, and seems to drop to 5
| FPS. It's comically bad.
|
| It's so bad I switched back to Chrome. I had thought Chrome
| had a major battery life penalty compared to Safari on
| Macs, but I checked more up-to-date info and apparently
| that's outdated.
| AdamN wrote:
| Works fine for me. I wonder if you have some extension or
| script on one of the sites you use slowing down the tab
| closure.
| herpderperator wrote:
| This sounds like swap needing to be swapped in and then
| released. Check your memory usage.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Same here. I know some people are unhappy with some of the UX
| tweaks but honestly I don't notice much of it. The whole
| liquid glass thing is a bit gimmicky. Other than that, I
| don't see much difference. The rounded corners on windows are
| a bit silly. But I don't spend a lot of time fiddling with
| windows. Most of my windows are maximized (not full screen).
| I'm sure there are other issues people dislike that I just
| haven't noticed.
|
| I use my laptop for development. I don't actually use most of
| the built in applications. My browser is Firefox, I use
| codex, vs code, intellij, iterm2, etc. Most of that works
| just fine just as it did on previous versions of the OS. I
| actually on purpose keep my tool chains portable as I like to
| have the option to switch back to Linux when I want to. I've
| done that a few times. I come back for the hardware, not the
| OS.
|
| In my experience, if you don't like Apple's OS changes that
| is unfortunate but they don't seem to generally respond to a
| lot of the criticism. Your choices are to get further and
| further out of date, switch to something else, or just
| swallow your pride. Been there done that. Windows is a "Hell
| No" for me at this point. I'll take the UX, with all the
| pastel colors that came and went and all the other crap that
| got unleashed on macs over the last ten years. Definitely a
| case of the grass not being greener on Windows. Even with the
| tele tubby default desktop in XP back in the day.
|
| I can deal with Linux (and use that on and off on one of my
| laptops). However, that just doesn't run that well on mac
| hardware. And any other hardware seems like a big downgrade
| to me. Both Windows and Linux are arguably a lot worse in
| terms of UX (or lack thereof). Linux you can tweak. And you
| kind of have to. But it just never adds up to consistent and
| delightful. Windows, well, at this point liking that is
| probably a form of Stockholm Syndrome. If that doesn't bother
| you, good for you.
|
| So, Mac OS it is for me as everything else is worse. I've in
| the past deferred updates to new versions of Mac OS as well.
| Generally you can do that for a while but eventually it
| becomes annoying when things like homebrew and other
| development toys start assuming you run something more
| recent. And of course for security reasons you might just not
| drag your feet too long. Just my personal, pragmatic take.
| hu3 wrote:
| Just yesterday, my colleague's mac Time Machine couldn't
| recover backup and they had to reinstall everything.
|
| But I think this predates Tahoe.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Silent corruption has been a feature of Time Machine for the
| last 19 years. But haven't you seen the new glass effects,
| isn't it cool?
| satoqz wrote:
| This. I have been a big (and loud) fan of M-series hardware
| from the beginning, but if Apple is going to keep making their
| software worse, I will find myself lingering on older
| generations that run Asahi Linux or going back to a traditional
| x86_64 laptop instead of buying into new generations.
| pier25 wrote:
| Yeah this is a real issue with these new Macs. I would wait
| until macOS 27 to see the direction Apple takes.
| silverwind wrote:
| Hopefully less `border-radius`.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| The next macOS will be touch screen centric with elements
| getting bigger when you're close to touching them, rumors say.
| That being said, I run Tahoe and it works perfectly fine to me,
| I am not sure what issues people have with it. Sure, some
| corner radii aren't exactly the same but I honestly couldn't
| give less of a shit as long as it runs the programs I need.
| nsbk wrote:
| Safari routinely using 20+ Gb of memory with a handful of
| tabs open. Safari tabs refusing to close. Unresponsive System
| Settings window. Random application freezes and crashes,
| Apple Music not playing music. This is on a 32Gb M1 Max. My
| M1 Air on Sequoia doesn't experience any of these issues,
| even if it has half the unified memory.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I never had any of those issues, but then again I don't use
| Safari or other Apple apps like music.
| nsbk wrote:
| The fact that avoiding Apple-made software provides an
| overall better user experience is very telling
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Not necessarily, because I never used Apple apps, it's
| not like I'm avoiding them now because they're ostensibly
| buggy (as others don't seem to have the same issues in
| this thread).
| ErneX wrote:
| I read a rumor about it being "touch friendly instead of
| touch 1st".
| gas9S9zw3P9c wrote:
| I moved away from mac because of the OS and couldn't be
| happier. The hardware may be great but non-Apple hardware is
| fine too, and Linux is significantly better experience than
| MacOS these days.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Same. Im waiting for the next macOS release. Tahoe is ugly as
| hell
| egwor wrote:
| I thought that new models were typically released in October.
| Have I misremembered or is this an unusual timing vs previous
| years? If so, I wonder why the earlier release?
| afavour wrote:
| Increasing component prices perhaps? Get some sales in before
| you have to jack up the sale price.
| alwillis wrote:
| Prices aren't likely to change. Even when the tariffs were
| on, Apple's prices didn't change; they gave up some margin.
|
| They also probably had RAM contracts in place far enough in
| advance to avoid the worst of the price spikes.
| ErneX wrote:
| You remember well, they didn't update these last fall.
|
| And another rumor said these are going to be updated again this
| fall but I'm not sure about that. With OLED screens and M6
| (supposedly).
| cheschire wrote:
| Maybe they want people to have more money available for the new
| phones later this year, since that market is in decline.
| chippiewill wrote:
| They didn't update them last October is why.
|
| I think at this point Apple will just release new versions of
| laptops whenever new CPU revisions and yields allow. M5 Pro
| wasn't ready for October so delayed until now.
| layer8 wrote:
| M6 is rumored to be released in Q4.
| wincy wrote:
| I typed "RAM" to search for it and boy they hammer home how lucky
| I am to be getting 1TB SSD standard, but no mention of RAM
| anywhere on this page. Anyway, the MacBook Pro starts with 16GB
| of RAM. It's $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB.
|
| Interestingly, 36-128GB models are showing as "currently
| unavailable" on the store page, and you can't even place an order
| for them right now? But for anyone curious, it's quoting $5099
| for the 128GB RAM 14" MacBook Pro model.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >Anyway, it starts with 16GB of RAM. $400 to go from 16GB to
| 32GB
|
| Interesting that this hasn't budged since the memory shortages
| appeared.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Fair chance that Apple has price/purchase agreements already
| in place. Consumers are left to fight over the excess
| capacity after megabuyers get their orders filled.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Interesting that this hasn't budged since the memory
| shortages appeared.
|
| Apple has had enough war chests with the ability of buying
| the entirety of TSMC's new capacity _years_ in advance in the
| past.
|
| If I were to guess, Apple locked in their entire BOM and
| production capacity two years ago. That's something even the
| large players cannot replicate because they run cash-lean and
| have too many different SKUs, and the small players
| (Framework, System76, even Steam) are entirely left to the
| forces of the markets.
| lm28469 wrote:
| They sell you 1gb LPDDR5X for $25 while buying it at $5,
| don't worry for their margins...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I know RAM is scarce and everything, but doubling down on LLM
| local acceleration with all of that dedicated silicon while at
| the same time sticking with Apple's traditional lack of RAM
| availability makes for a very weird product proposition to me.
| aurareturn wrote:
| It starts at 16GB for the base M5 and 24GB for the Pro/Max.
| It's been like this.
| edvinasbartkus wrote:
| on Silicon Mac's it's never called RAM, it "unified memory"
| lxgr wrote:
| I'm honestly just glad they don't brand this as "1016 MB of
| unified memory". Swap and ramdisks are a thing, after all...
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| Apple's RAM price bumps were already insane, now they'll get
| worse.
| ezfe wrote:
| They're literally not changing
| hu3 wrote:
| It did change. They bumped $200 on the entire line. So even
| the 16GB version is more expensive.
|
| I'd love to have customers like Apple. Bumps $200: "it
| didn't change!!!"
|
| And no power adapter included.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > And no power adapter included.
|
| To be fair, ever since the advent of high power USB-C PD
| that really, really is not needed any more, way too many
| power bricks are effectively e-waste.
|
| People already have USB-C power bricks and docks
| everywhere and unlike pre-USB-C generations, you can use
| them not just across different generations of hardware,
| but across vendors as well.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| I doubt if that many have USB-C high power bricks unless
| they are upgrading from another USB-C laptop.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > unless they are upgrading from another USB-C laptop.
|
| Which MacBooks have been for almost a decade - the 2016
| MBP with Touch Bar was the first that went fully USB-C
| PD. Anyone who has had a MacBook in that time frame will
| have had at least one high power USB-C PD wall wart.
|
| The Windows world, as usual, has been different, but even
| there, I'm not aware of _any_ mainstream model being sold
| in the last two years without even a single PD capable
| port.
| vile_wretch wrote:
| The EU forbids them from including power adapters.
| They're still included everywhere else.
| gambiting wrote:
| Except that it's literally not true and people are
| repeating it for some stupid reason, I assume you just
| never actually looked it up - laptops are specifically
| excluded from that regulation, and in fact Apple does
| bundle a power adapter with their laptops, just not on
| the cheapest models.
| jlokier wrote:
| > in fact Apple does bundle a power adapter with their
| laptops, just not on the cheapest models.
|
| Here in the UK, they no longer include the power adapter
| even with the top models. I just specced out a fully-
| loaded M5 Max Macbook Pro, 128GB RAM, 8TB storage on the
| Apple Store, and it doesn't include a power adapter by
| default.
|
| The 140W power adapter can be added as an option to the
| MacBook Pro for an additional PS99 + VAT, or purchased
| separately. If you purchase separately you can of course
| choose a lower-power adapter for a lower price.
|
| Now that a power adapter isn't included and you have to
| pay for it separately, it might make more sense to get
| one of the good brands of GaN power adapters instead,
| because they are smaller than the Apple ones for the same
| power, and have more ports.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Here in the UK, they no longer include the power
| adapter even with the top models
|
| That's incredibly stupid(of apple), I'm in the UK and
| literally got my M4 Max MacBook Pro delivered on Friday,
| it came with a power adapter.
| Romario77 wrote:
| EU doesn't forbid including. The new law requires there
| to be an option without the adapter. If the manufacturer
| chooses so they can have an option with and without the
| adapter.
| hu3 wrote:
| I can buy a laptop right now close to home and it comes
| with power adapter.
| SirMaster wrote:
| You mean bumped $100. M4 MacBook Pro and M5 MacBook Pro
| started at $1599 with 512GB SSD.
|
| Now it starts at $1699, a $100 bump but comes with a 1TB
| SSD. Previously it would have cost $1799 for the 1T SSD,
| so it's a $100 bump on base price but you are also
| getting 1TB SSD for $100 less than before.
| brailsafe wrote:
| To me, this is kind of like Telecom providers giving you
| bandwidth headroom that realistically should have been
| there for a long time, but removing the option to get a
| cheaper plan whether you'd otherwise pay for the upgrade
| or not.
|
| Like for my last upgrade, I bit the bullet and upgraded
| to 1TB for the first time ever instead of base storage at
| Apple's absurd prices, so it's good, but if I'd not have
| been willing to spend money on that at all, they lifted
| the floor.
|
| My cell phone plan has been increasing every year by
| small amounts, but my usage pattern hasn't changed, and
| meanwhile they've restricted HD streaming using Deep
| Packet Inspection or whatever, so I theoretically have a
| 100GB full speed cap but can't practically use more than
| 20gb anyway, so they're pricing the bandwidth into the
| contract but I can't save money by getting a lower
| ceiling
| re-thc wrote:
| > It did change. They bumped $200 on the entire line.
|
| I wonder if that would happen regardless of RAM, e.g. for
| tariffs etc.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > I'd love to have customers like Apple. Bumps $200: "it
| didn't change!!!"
|
| Try making a good product that people love?
| ezfe wrote:
| The base storage increased as well, and the upgrade
| prices for RAM are the same, which is where the real
| issue was.
| cloudier1 wrote:
| If they can just absorb the current ram price hike, you
| know they having insane margins.
| jsheard wrote:
| > It's $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB.
|
| No change from the previous models then, 16GB->32GB was already
| $400. They're cutting into their previously enormous margins to
| keep the prices stable, rather than hiking the prices to
| maintain their margins.
| philistine wrote:
| They bought the fab time for that RAM 2-3 years ago. Apple is
| renowned for their foresight and preparation. We'll
| eventually see price increases from Apple's RAM upgrade, but
| we're not there yet.
| daveidol wrote:
| Their margins may not have changed actually.
| https://youtu.be/IGCzo6s768o
| niwtsol wrote:
| This is not exactly correct. If you have an M5 Pro chip
| instead of m5 Chip - I just built a 16inch, M5 Pro chip, it
| is $400 to go from 24 -> 48gb. An additional $200 ($600 over
| base) to go to 64gb. So the memory prices change based on
| chip. M5 Max Chip starts with 48gb of memory.
| abhikul0 wrote:
| M5 Max starts at 36GB memory at $3599. M4 Max started at
| the same memory at $3199. They have doubled the default
| storage from 1TB to 2TB, that's a $400 increase I'm paying
| even if I don't want the extra 1TB.
| aroman wrote:
| They raised the base price by $200.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| Apple's previous policy of price gouging for RAM means no
| need to raise prices yet, they still have a buffer.
| __loam wrote:
| They also have long term contracts with the suppliers in
| all likelihood
| sgt wrote:
| In practice, you can really go a long way on 16GB on a Mac
| with unified memory. I like to say it's comparable to 32GB
| during the old Intel days.
| jsheard wrote:
| RAM is still RAM, the switch from crusty HDDs to fast NVMe
| SSDs may have helped to smooth things over when you spill
| into swap but it's not going to do miracles.
| sgt wrote:
| RAM isn't just RAM though. Unified memory on Apple
| Silicon provides significantly better memory management
| and efficiency compared to trad RAM
| cardanome wrote:
| They advertise local LLMs which will be servery limited
| with 16GD of RAM. Plus the GPU could in theory provide
| decent gaming performance but again might suffer from the
| RAM limit.
|
| Most people can totally live with 16gigs but it is kind of
| a waste for the horsepower. They know what they are doing.
| Apple is a master in upselling.
|
| Though personally I don't mid the aggressive upsellign as
| long as the quality is there. Problem is, the hardware
| quality is great but the software side is severely lacking
| and getting worse.
| cthalupa wrote:
| If anything, it's less, because you're giving up more RAM
| to the GPU.
|
| Which, I mean, I love unified memory, as one of those
| weirdos that does do local LLM stuff and am contemplating
| if it's time to upgrade my m2 max.
|
| But if you needed 32gb then you still need at least 32gb
| now. Unless swap on nvme disks is enough for you - and it
| isn't for me.
| raincole wrote:
| > M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to
| 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB
| of unified memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth
|
| Isn't this it?
| wincy wrote:
| Ah yeah you're right, thanks. I tried to at least make my
| post useful and pull up prices for the different tiers.
| Overall, those prices are surprisingly competitive now
| compared to the rest of the laptop market!
| stetrain wrote:
| On the M5 Pro tier (not the base M5 tier that was released last
| November), the base memory is 24GB.
|
| My M3 Pro from a few years ago for the same price had 18GB.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Insane for the "Pro" to have only 16GB of memory. My 11 year
| old Intel i3 laptop has 16GB of memory.
| detritus wrote:
| Don't these integrated ARM-based SoCs make much better use of
| RAM as opposed to old Intel-based boards? That's my
| understanding, anyway.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The benefits are in speed not capacity.
| wincy wrote:
| My wife's 8GB MacBook Air crashed yesterday with Firefox
| and Find My open and nothing else because of running out of
| RAM, so, sort of, but they're not magic. (Find My was using
| 3GB of memory!)
| nozzlegear wrote:
| So Firefox was using 5gb? There's your problem.
| wincy wrote:
| It's a losing battle me trying to tell my wife to close
| her Firefox tabs, haha, but yes, Firefox does use a lot
| of ram when you have 500 tabs. Maybe I'll get her a 64GB
| MacBook Pro for the premium web browsing experience she
| so desires!
| qudat wrote:
| Tabs as bookmarks, people keep falling into this trap, my
| wife included
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I do it myself and I'm sure a lot of people on HN do too.
| But I've tried to embrace the "zen" of closing all tabs
| lately and it's been nice. If I really want to find
| something later I can search my history or, like you
| said, just bookmark it.
| astrange wrote:
| She shouldn't have to do anything. That's the browser's
| job.
| cloudier1 wrote:
| What page? Azure portal is notorious for leaking memory
| in both chrome and firefox, that's the only tab I've seen
| using 5+ gb ram.
| astrange wrote:
| If you mean it showed the out of memory dialog, that
| wouldn't be caused by an app using 3GB. The dialog shows
| up at ~48GB swap space used on an 8GB Mac, or when you're
| out of disk space and can't write a swap file.
| dawnerd wrote:
| More to do with the faster storage allowing you to swap
| without noticing it as much. There was this whole trend
| when m1 first came out of people saying it didn't matter if
| you got the lowest spec because the ssd was so fast it made
| up for the lack of ram... totally ignoring that swapping
| like that was destroying their drives really fast.
| kylec wrote:
| Apple doesn't tend to use "RAM" in their marketing materials,
| they usually use "memory", which appears 9 times in the press
| release.
| armsaw wrote:
| Preorders open tomorrow according to the store page. You can't
| order the base RAM model today, either.
| reenorap wrote:
| The price hasn't changed between the M4 and M5. I honestly
| don't know how they did it. But I had a standing order for a
| maxed-out M4 (128 GB RAM, 2 TB drive) and the price is the same
| as the M5 so I cancelled my M4 order and will pre-order the M5
| MAX instead.
| tedivm wrote:
| Well, guess I was wrong about that.
| reenorap wrote:
| No, that's not how it works at all. They still source all
| their RAM from Samsung, Hynix, Micron, etc.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| that is ... not at all how that works. RAM is a separate
| chip, that is placed on top of the substrate that holds the
| main dies. It is bought from normal ram manufacturers like
| micron. it is not "embedded in the chip" by any possible
| meanings of those words.
| jansan wrote:
| The performance numbers are impressive, but I do not get the on-
| board AI spin. What is it used for?
| boringg wrote:
| marketing.
| layer8 wrote:
| Image Playground
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Local LLMs. Lots of people buy Macs due to their unified memory
| which obviates the need to buy a much more expensive GPU to get
| the same amount of VRAM.
| alwillis wrote:
| If you're working on something sensitive, you may not want to
| share it with OpenAI or Anthropic.
|
| You can run open source models like Kimi K or Qwen locally.
| Apple recently updated Xcode 26.3 to support local models.
| Tepix wrote:
| Private AI assistants will be a big thing. You don't want to
| send all your private data they have access to to a cloud AI
| API provider. You shouldn't, anyway.
| testfrequency wrote:
| I have a fairly maxed out M2 Ultra (24 cores, 192GB RAM), and
| still cannot get this machine to choke on anything.
|
| I have not once felt the need to upgrade in years, and that's
| with doing pretty demanding 3D and LLM work.
| mikert89 wrote:
| Yeah I have an M1 Max, and I really want to upgrade, but
| there's no reason to.
| Sharlin wrote:
| AI video generation can fairly easily choke anything that's not
| NVIDIA's flagship model. Even the latest local image gen models
| are so large that they can be frustratingly slow with non-
| optimal hardware even if they fit in the VRAM. IIRC when I had
| an M2, it was about 4x slower at running the venerable Stable
| Diffusion (and SDXL) than my meager RTX 3060.
| testfrequency wrote:
| I do not do anything with AI Video, but I imagine running
| this locally would be a hog on a Mac - especially if not
| optimised for Metal.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You might have confused Hacker News with your e-mail inbox
| again. This is an Apple press release, directed to everybody in
| the world who might be interested in a new computer or their
| first computer.
| testfrequency wrote:
| What's with the attitude? My machine is aging like a fine
| wine, I'm acknowledging how resilient their custom silicon is
| despite the world demanding more and more compute.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It was a joke, should have put a smiley face. But every
| thread on a new Apple product here on HN have the same "why
| should I upgrade" comment, forgetting that there are people
| who might have very old devices they want to upgrade, or
| they might want to switch from Windows/Android to Apple.
|
| Even if a new device is a small upgrade from last year's
| model, it can be a giant upgrade for other people.
| testfrequency wrote:
| Got it. I guess it feels unfair to gaslight people who
| are celebrating not needing upgrades, anecdotally sharing
| their experiences - because some people just need a new
| computer for xyz reason in time.
| ffreire wrote:
| Are you one of the folks thinking of upgrading? If so,
| from what generation? What makes you excited? Isn't this
| a more interesting way to have the conversation?
| _jab wrote:
| I've found current-generation Macs so capable that I've
| switched to using a Macbook Air. Would strongly recommend -
| it's still a powerful machine and it's significantly lighter
| and cheaper.
| aurareturn wrote:
| and that's with doing pretty demanding 3D and LLM work.
|
| It definitely chokes with larger models that can fit the 192GB
| of RAM. Prompt processing is a big bottleneck before M5.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _It definitely chokes with larger models that can fit the
| 192GB of RAM_
|
| M5 Max maxes out at 128GB, so that will have to wait for the
| eventual M5 Ultra anyways.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| If there's anything this past three years has taught me, it's
| that modern cpus can performantly do every task except for
| streaming text over the internet.
| hobofan wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's just LLMs tendency to replicate bad
| React patterns.
| pmdr wrote:
| I had to upgrade the CPU in a 10-year old machine (from i5 to
| i7) to have decently -working javascript on websites. Every
| other piece of software worked fine, though.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I have a powerful older Mac that doesn't really "choke" on
| anything, but I could always use more speed.
|
| The high memory Macs have been great for being able to run
| LLMs, but the prompt processing has always been on the slow
| side. The new AI acceleration in these should help with that.
|
| There are also workloads like compiling code where I'll take
| all the extra speed I can get. Every little bit of reduced
| cycle time helps me finish earlier in the day.
|
| And then there's gaming. I don't game much, but the M1 and M2
| era Apple Silicon feels sluggish relative to what I have on the
| nVidia side.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Sounds pretty beefy. What kind of local LLM is that thing
| capable of running? Does it open up real alternatives to cloud
| providers like OpenAI and Claude, or are the local models this
| hardware is capable of running still pretty far behind?
| throwaway911282 wrote:
| my m4max runs fan at high speed! just have few electron apps
| open..
| pixelesque wrote:
| Interesting that they're showing VFX/CG software (Autodesk MAYA
| and Foundry Nuke) so prominently - obviously people using "Pro"
| machines are the target audience for this, but both of those apps
| (any many others in the industry) use Qt for the interface,
| rather than being totally platform-native.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Contrary to HN popular belief, there are neither incentives nor
| benefits to building native ui apps, for neither consumer nor
| professional apps. The exception is apps that only make sense
| on a single platform, such as window management and other deep
| integration. On iOS/macos you have a segment of indie/smaller
| apps that capture a niche market of powerusers for things like
| productivity apps. But the point is it makes no sense for
| anything from Slack, VSCode, Maya, DaVinci Resolve, and so on,
| to build native UIs. Even if they wanted to build and
| maintained 3 versions, advanced features aren't always
| available in these frameworks. In the case of Windows, even MS
| has given up on their own tech, and have opted to launch
| webview based apps. Apple is slightly more principled.
| trymas wrote:
| I am not an apple framework expert, but some things in apple
| ecosystem are nice.
|
| CoreImage - GPU accelerated image processing out of the box;
|
| ML/GPU frameworks - you can get built-in, on device's GPU
| running ML algorithms or do computations on GPU;
|
| Accelerate - CPU vector computations;
|
| Doing such things probably will force you to have platform
| specific implementations anyway. Though as you said - makes
| sense only in some niches.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Strong disagree. I think Microsoft's decision to wrap web
| apps for the desktop is one of the stupidest they have ever
| made. It provides poor user experience, uses more battery
| power and needs more memory and CPU to be performant and
| creates inconsistencies and wierd errors compared to native
| apps.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The increased adoption of webviews has resulted in a death
| by a thousand cuts effect on Windows 11 performance. The
| speed bump that comes from going from an up to date Windows
| 11 install to a up to date Windows 10 install on the same
| machine is stunning... W10 is much more snappy in every
| regard despite being nearly identical functionally
| speaking.
|
| I won't try to claim that Electron and friends have no
| place is software development but we absolutely should be
| pushing back harder against stuffing it everywhere it
| possibly can be.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > but we absolutely should be pushing back
|
| Every modern desktop uses webviews in some capacity.
| macOS renders many apps with webviews, GNOME uses gjs to
| script half the desktop. The time to push back was 10-20
| years ago, it's too late to revert now.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| They're still fairly uncommon in macOS, mostly being used
| in places related to cloud service settings. SwiftUI and
| Catalyst (iOS bridge) are both much more common than
| webviews, and AppKit remains ubiquitous.
|
| Meanwhile on Windows major features like the Start menu
| are written in React.
|
| Worth noting that WebKit webviews also tend to be more
| lightweight than their Chromium brethren.
| dagmx wrote:
| Qt delegates to native UI in a lot of cases. I think a lot of
| people who rail against native UI fail to delineate between
| native UI and first party frameworks. Using third party
| frameworks, even cross platform ones, does not mean you lose
| out on native UI elements.
| trymas wrote:
| Similar thoughts with first image of Capture One, when apple
| bought Pixelmator/Photomator a year ago.
|
| I think I read somewhere long time ago that Capture One is also
| using Qt for GUI, though cannot find this anymore, so probably
| not true.
| sarmike31 wrote:
| An "unrivaled experience" with MacOS Tahoe...
| dirk94018 wrote:
| On M4 Max 128GB we're seeing ~100 tok/s generation on a 30B
| parameter model in our from scratch inference engine. Very
| curious what the "4x faster LLM prompt processing" translates to
| in practice. Smallish, local 30B-70B inference is genuinely
| usable territory for real dev workflows, not just demos. Will
| require staying plugged in though.
| eknkc wrote:
| I find time to first token more important then tok/s generally
| as these models wait an ungodly amount of time before streaming
| results. It looks like the claims are true based on M5:
| https://www.macstories.net/stories/ipad-pro-m5-neural-benchm...
| so this might work great.
| hu3 wrote:
| What about real workloads? Because as context gets larger,
| these local LLMs aproxiate the useless end of the spectrum with
| regards to t/s.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I strongly agree. People see local "GPT-4 level" responses,
| and get excited, which I totally get. But how quickly is the
| fall-off as the context size grows? Because if it cannot hold
| and reference a single source-code file in its context, the
| efficiency will absolutely crater.
|
| That's actually the biggest growth area in LLMs, it is no
| longer about smart, it is about context windows (usable ones,
| note spec-sheet hypotheticals). Smart enough is _mostly_
| solved, combating larger problems is _slowly_ improving with
| every major release (but there is no ceiling).
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That should be covered by the harness rather than the LLM
| itself, no? Compaction and summarization should be able to
| allow the LLM to still run smoothly even on large contexts.
| hu3 wrote:
| Sometimes it really needs a lot of data to work.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The thing about context/KV cache is that you can swap it out
| efficiently, which you can't with the activations because
| they're rewritten for every token. It will slow down as
| context grows (decode is often compute-limited when context
| is large) but it will run.
| storus wrote:
| 4x faster is about token prefill, i.e. the time to first token.
| It should be on par with DGX Spark there while being slightly
| faster than M4 for token generation. I.e. when you have long
| context, you don't need to wait 15 minutes, only 4 minutes.
| fotcorn wrote:
| The memory bandwith on M4 Max is 546 GB/s, M5 Max is 614GB/s,
| so not a huge jump.
|
| The new tensor cores, sorry, "Neural Accelerator" only really
| help with prompt preprocessing aka prefill, and not with token
| generation. Token generation is memory bound.
|
| Hopefully the Ultra version (if it exists) has a bigger jump in
| memory bandwidth and maximum RAM.
| anentropic wrote:
| Do any frameworks manage to use the neural engine cores for
| that?
|
| Most stuff ends up running Metal -> GPU I thought
| abhikul0 wrote:
| It's referring to the neural cores(for matrix mul) in the
| GPU itself, not the NPU.
|
| https://creativestrategies.com/research/m5-apple-silicon-
| its...
| sumek83 wrote:
| https://github.com/maderix/ANE
| barumrho wrote:
| 100 tok/s sounds pretty good. What do you get with 70B? With
| 128GB, you need quantization to fit 70B model, right?
|
| Wondering if local LLM (for coding) is a realistic option,
| otherwise I wouldn't have to max out the RAM.
| super_mario wrote:
| I run gpt-oss 120b model on ollama (the model is about 65 GB
| on disk) with 128k context size (the model is super optimized
| and only uses 4.8 GB of additional RAM for KV cache at this
| context size) on M4 Max 128 GB RAM Mac Studio and I get 65
| tokens/s.
| abhikul0 wrote:
| Have you tried the dense(27B,9B) Qwen3.5 models? Or any
| diffusion models (Flux Klein, Zimage)? I'm trying to gauge
| how much of a perf boost I'd get upgrading from an m3 pro.
|
| For reference: | model
| | size | params | backend | threads |
| test | t/s | |
| ------------------------------ | ---------: | ---------: |
| ---------- | ------: | --------------: |
| -------------------: | | qwen35 ?B Q5_K - Medium
| | 6.12 GiB | 8.95 B | MTL,BLAS | 6 |
| pp512 | 288.90 +- 0.67 | | qwen35 ?B Q5_K -
| Medium | 6.12 GiB | 8.95 B | MTL,BLAS |
| 6 | tg128 | 16.58 +- 0.05 | |
| model | size | params |
| backend | threads | test |
| t/s | | ------------------------------ | ---------: |
| ---------: | ---------- | ------: | --------------: |
| -------------------: | | gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE
| | 11.27 GiB | 20.91 B | MTL,BLAS | 6 |
| pp512 | 615.94 +- 2.23 | | gpt-oss 20B MXFP4
| MoE | 11.27 GiB | 20.91 B | MTL,BLAS |
| 6 | tg128 | 42.85 +- 0.61 |
| Klein 4B completes a 1024px generation in 72seconds.
| fulafel wrote:
| The marketing subterfugue might be about this exactly,
| technically prompt processing means the prefill phase of
| inference. So prompt goes in 4x as fast but generates tokens
| slower.
|
| This seems even likely as the memory bandwidth hasn't increased
| enough for those kinds of speedups, and I guess prefill is more
| likely to be compute-bound (vs mem bw bound).
| petercooper wrote:
| _So prompt goes in 4x as fast but generates tokens slower._
|
| I'd take that tradeoff. On my M3 Ultra, the inference is
| surprisingly fast, but the prompt processing speed makes it
| painful except as a fallback or experimentation, especially
| with agentic coding tools.
| brtkwr wrote:
| Why doesn't this excite me anymore?
| righthand wrote:
| Because it was always a vapid distraction from life.
| neom wrote:
| For me going way back, it was exciting when I had to save a bit
| (but not too much!) for a new 512 DIMM, and when I opened the
| box and smelled the chip smell, put it in always worried I was
| going to fuck it up, and then computer literally felt faster
| that next boot...that was pretty fun!! Now it's like oh great
| $5k for a slab of stone that can do pretty much anything, neat.
| I still think computers are cool, just not particularly
| exciting.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Me either. I guess it's just fatigue, at least for me. I also
| don't really get that excited by new LLM releases either. Not
| to say the tech isn't impressive, but I guess all the hype has
| me inured.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Because it's the same shit every year for the past 5 years with
| the M line. 2010 to 2015 was a major improvement, 2015 to 2020
| was a major improvement, now they pretty much solved the
| computer/laptop problem for 99% of people. I'm on a 16gb m1
| air, I see absolutely no reason to update.
| trymas wrote:
| Watch this video if you have time:
| https://youtu.be/6AtTk3XoQVs
|
| TL;DW: 2010s intel mac era laptops have seen at very best 35%
| single core CPU performance over in 5 years time! This
| happens almost every year now with M line macs.
|
| Rant:
|
| Retina macs were great and had great form factor over unibody
| macs. Touch-bar macs in the mid 2010s was IMHO a disaster.
| Terrible keyboard, poorer thermal capacity, missing essential
| ports, adapters galore.
|
| But when it comes to performance - early 2010s macbooks with
| dedicated gpus had serious overheating issues.
|
| Retina macbooks were decent, both form factor and
| performance.
|
| Touch-bar macs were totally abysmal, all performance gains
| over previous generations was all through pumping more heat.
| CPUs constantly pegged at 90C+, cannot have laptop on your
| lap, Apple planning and delaying release schedules around
| intel fumbling their tik/tok cycles (as far as i remember
| some macs did not get any improvements for 2 years+ if not
| way more). Upgrades sometimes were total jokes, because of
| thermal throttling there was no point to put more hardware
| than it could work with. From reviews buying higher level cpu
| sometimes didn't give noticeable real life gains because,
| again, thermal throttling kicking in instantly. 2020 intel
| macbook pro has fans spinning almost all the time. Having a
| remote call - your battery is dead in 2h max (essentially 1%
| per 1min).
|
| M1 mac gave insane perceived performance boost - no
| noticeable throttling. Macbook airs are fully passively
| cooled, never heard M Macbook pro with fans screeching.
|
| Also real full work day battery doing real work without power
| adapter at full performance. Cool to touch most of the time.
|
| I made homework for a job in 2020 on a 2013 personal macbook.
| Apart from memory footprint - I could not feel noticeable
| difference on development experience. Editing images was
| frustrating on both. With M macs - its silent, smooth fast.
|
| Number of parallel cores matching best intel cpus on base
| models, GPU blowing any mobile gpu in price range out of the
| water with thermal capacity to peg it 100% no problem.
| Unified memory for those GPUs to do what you could only
| imagined doing on GPUs that cost 3 times more than the
| macbook.
|
| It's a such excellent architecture that yeah - it's "boring"
| you can nitpick about M69 Ultra Pro Max performance, but take
| a base MBP of any M line and it blows almost any laptop out
| of the water, even to this day.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Because the M1 was too good, a qualitative leap over previous
| Macs and really every other laptop and even some desktops back
| in 2020. Now, Apple Silicon is just iterative.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| It excites me, since I am finally going to replace my 2019
| Intel MacBook Pro!
| akd wrote:
| Because a Macbook M1 is fast enough to do anything and most
| people aren't running local LLMs
| FBISurveillance wrote:
| Note: no power adapter included.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Not true everywhere. Only where required by law, so complain to
| your government.
| varispeed wrote:
| Only 128GB. I was hoping they'd do 256GB version. Disappointing.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I wonder if it is good to just get one and run Linux on a VM.
| Would that work better than an x64? Anybody knows?
| pbmonster wrote:
| Why would you want to do that? Do you like the hardware that
| much, and also that much more than just an M2 (soon M3) running
| Asahi?
|
| Linux in a VM would work with the usual caveats. Periphery like
| the built-in webcam most likely won't work. Getting codecs and
| DRM to run will be pain and you'll be back to use macOS for
| that quickly (but that's just standard pain of ARM Linux).
| kwanbix wrote:
| Because I don't like MacOS and my understanding is that Asahi
| has issues with: * USB-C Displays * Thunderbolt / USB4 *
| Touch ID
|
| Touch ID is the least of the problems, but the other two are
| more serious.
| pcurve wrote:
| $200 price bump across the board. The cheapest 16" is now $2699
| and 14" Pro $2199. I think it's a fair price considering M2Pro
| 14" was $1999 (though it was discounted) only had 512GB and 16GB
| RAM.
| SirMaster wrote:
| It's not $200 across the board. M4 MacBook Pro and M5 MacBook
| Pro started at $1599 with 512GB SSD.
|
| Now it starts at $1699, a $100 bump but comes with a 1TB SSD.
| Previously it would have cost $1799 for the 1T SSD, so it's a
| $100 bump on base price but you are also getting 1TB SDD for
| $100 less than before.
| pcurve wrote:
| To clarify, I meant, model with Pro chip, not just Macbook
| Pro name.
|
| For example, up until MacBookPro M2, MacBookPro M2 came with
| M2 Pro chip.
|
| However, starting with M3, Apple lowered the MacBookPro MSRP
| to $1599, but its base configuration was downgraded to M3
| chip from M3 Pro. To get the M3 Pro, you had to pay $1999.
| There's substantial performance between the two.
|
| Same with M4. To get the M4 Pro chip, you had to pay $1999.
|
| Now to get M5 Pro chip, it's $2199. Still a good value, but
| just saying it's a deviation from the trend.
| aurareturn wrote:
| With how much more expensive SSDs and RAM are recently, I'd
| say this is a great deal.
| mathverse wrote:
| Nano-texture is worth the upgrade if you are on a macbookpro
| whatever M<cpu> and dont have it.
|
| For those of us with astigmatism it's really night and day
| experience.
| napo wrote:
| I was considering it but got cold feet when I've been told that
| you could damage it when cleaning it. When I open/close my
| laptop I leave a ton of finger prints. I'm not too good with
| delicate hardware stuff.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Why are you touching the screen when you open/close your
| laptop??? Do you close your car doors with the window?
| petrbela wrote:
| My screen gets fingerprints from the keyboard, maybe that's
| what he meant.
| DGAP wrote:
| $5k machine for developers to just run claude code while they
| browse Reddit.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| With an additional $200/month subscription from Anthropic,
| because they noticed that the Kimi K2.5 they were able to run
| on their M5 comes nowhere close to matching Opus 4.6.
| mpalmer wrote:
| I'm done buying Macs until they prove they can ship an OS
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| I love the following section of their copy:
|
| > Even More Value for Upgraders
|
| > The new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max mark
| a major leap for pro users. There's never been a better time for
| customers to upgrade from a previous generation of MacBook Pro
| with Apple silicon or an Intel-based Mac.
|
| I read as "Whoops we made the M1 Macbook Pro too good, please
| upgrade!"
|
| I think I will get another 2-5 years out my mine.
|
| Apple: If you document the hardware enough for the Asahi team to
| deliver a polished Linux experiene, I'll buy one this year!
| seanalltogether wrote:
| Same, in fact the only reason right now that I would upgrade my
| m1 pro is if they threaten to change the design by getting rid
| of the hdmi or sd card slot, or doing something stupid like
| when they added the touch bar. I was locked into my old intel
| pro for so long because of all the bad hardware choices they
| were making.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| You may get your wish with all the rumors of a touch screen
| on the M6 MBPs.
| throwforfeds wrote:
| Love that they didn't learn anything from the touchbar.
| spiderice wrote:
| Comparing the touchbar to a touch screen is silly
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You are right the touch screen is even more stupid
| speedgoose wrote:
| It's not. I had a thinkpad with a touchscreen and while I
| used the touchscreen seldomly, it was useful in some
| applications. Notably to easily develop touch based
| applications.
|
| I have a M1 MacBook Pro with the touch bar since. It's
| crap. I remember the keynote where they introduced it and
| a DJ mixed music using it. It was ridiculous that it got
| approved.
| abustamam wrote:
| I do remember the cringy music demo. Can't believe
| someone really said "yeah let's rehearse this and
| actually sell this product."
|
| Fortunately I just keep my laptop closed and use an
| attached display and keyboard and mouse, so I don't even
| remember if my M1 has a touch bar.
|
| Also minor nit: it's seldom, not seldomly. Seldom
| certainly doesn't seem like an adverb, but it is.
| throwforfeds wrote:
| I guess I'm just a luddite that spends my life on a CLI
| or text editor. Taking my hands away from my keyboard to
| leave finger prints on my screen just doesn't make sense
| to me.
|
| I think people that do do tasks where a touch screen
| makes sense are probably just doing most of their work on
| an iphone or an ipad anyway.
|
| Now gesture control on VR/AR setups? Sure, that feels
| like a new human/computer interaction system that makes
| sense. Jabbing at my laptop screen with one hand on my
| keyboard, not so much.
| whycome wrote:
| They just didn't do anything with the touchbar. It could
| have actually been more useful. The removal of the esc
| key was pretty dumb though.
| abustamam wrote:
| The only useful thing I remember about the touch bar was
| the DJ trying to play some beats on the touch bar. That
| was just weird imo.
|
| Barring removal of Esc key, I think the touch bar was
| useful because it showed contextual actions. But not
| every app used it so it didn't really get a chance to
| shine.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I wish they'd come back with physical keys, with tiny
| changeable displays on each one. Customisation, but touch
| feel without looking.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I read it the same way. I should've gotten way more RAM back
| when I got my M1 and RAM was still cheap although this was of
| course before the LLM boom so there was no way to really know.
| marpstar wrote:
| I maxed my M1 out when I bought it because I was frustrated
| with the 16GB max in the previous machines. I use my machine
| for all sorts of things and some days you just don't feel
| like exiting apps to make space for new ones.
|
| I still don't have a strong urge to upgrade. I could probably
| get by on 32GB (like my work-issued machine is) but 64GB is
| the right amount of headroom for me.
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Well, I just upgraded from Intel late last year. There are lots
| of users still on Intel :)
| bsimpson wrote:
| There was a magical window at Google where you could be
| issued an iMac Pro 5k. (To this day, the standard issue
| monitor is still 1440p.)
|
| ~9 years later, there are a lot of people still using it as
| their main machine, waiting until we get kicked off the corp
| network for lack of software support.
| bombcar wrote:
| Was that one of the ones that could do "target display
| mode" and become a monitor for another machine?
| bsimpson wrote:
| Nope - they removed that feature, so now come the end of
| the year, they're all e-waste.
|
| It feels really stupid to have to throw away a perfectly
| capable machine with 64GB of RAM in 2026.
| abustamam wrote:
| Wait, they throw them away, not sell or give to
| employees? I feel like as long as the computer is reset,
| indeed it is stupid to just throw it away instead of
| giving or selling it to someone who wants it.
| zadikian wrote:
| They could resell, but maybe another way to phrase this,
| tying the screen to the obsolete computer greatly reduces
| the useful lifespan of the screen. Then again at that
| time, DisplayPort didn't do enough bandwidth to have that
| kind of display externally.
| dawnerd wrote:
| My 32gb m1 max was probably the best purchase I've made. Still
| plenty of headroom in performance left in this beast. Wonder
| what reason they'll use to end software support in the future.
| Bet it'll be some security hardware they make up for the sake
| of forcing upgrades.
| kobalsky wrote:
| my tinfoil hat theory is that they make small features depend
| on new hardware.
|
| for example, let's say the new os depends on m5's exclusive
| thumbnail generator accelerator, and let's say it improves
| speed by a 20%.
|
| now, your M1 notebook than on previous OSes uses standard gpu
| acceleration for thumbnails will not have this specialized
| hardware acceleration, it will have software fallback that
| will be 90% slower.
|
| you won't notice it a first thought because it's stuff, fast,
| but it eats a bit of the processor.
|
| multiply this by 1000 features and you have a slow machine.
|
| I don't know how else to explain how an ipad pro cannot even
| scroll a menu without stuttering, it's insane how fast these
| things were on release
| compounding_it wrote:
| yes pretty much this. make useless features use up
| resources and make basic scrolling slow.
|
| the Liquid Glass for example probably is not so great when
| it comes to resources. Probably works better with latest
| metal and hardware blocks on the GPU in M5 as opposed to
| using GPU cores and unified memory on 8gb M1 making latest
| macOS work not so great. I have the M1 8gb air and it is
| really slow on Tahoe. It was snappy just a couple of years
| ago on a fresh install.
| samat wrote:
| I downgraded today for the first time in my life. Sequoia
| is crazy fast in my MacBook Air m2 16gb
|
| Not upgrading any of my Macs ever again. I was a fanboy
| looking for every new update like a present, for 13
| years, not anymore. It took one Tahoe burn all that
| trust. Never upgrading major OS versions on hardware from
| Apple again.
| abustamam wrote:
| I think this could go equally for Windows as well, and
| many other software (not just OS). I purpose refrained
| from Tahoe because I didn't like the design but I wanted
| to know what the consensus was on it before upgrading.
| Apparently it's bad!
|
| Win 11 is bad compared to Win 10 as well. I'm fairly new
| to Linux so I can't really form an opinion there.
| danielxt wrote:
| It's not tinfoil, that's just how publicly traded companies
| work - increasing the share value
| manmal wrote:
| Some of my M1 MBP Max keys are losing their coating, and the
| battery is at 74% capacity. At some point soon I'll need a
| service. But other than that, I have no real complaints. Even
| the case edge where my arms constantly rest doesn't look too
| bad.
|
| My next MBP will have 128GB memory, but these prices just
| wanna make me wait longer.
| LTL_FTC wrote:
| Those keys are easily replaced, my friend.
| abustamam wrote:
| If you don't mind a bit of DIY, apple runs self service
| repair.
|
| https://support.apple.com/self-service-repair
| karolist wrote:
| Ditto, I don't see myself upgrading in the near future, the
| 64GB M1 Max I paid 2499 at the end of 2023 still feels like a
| new machine, nothing I do can slow it down. Apple kept OS
| updated for around 6 years in Intel times, I don't see how
| they can drop support for this one tbh. I'm still paying for
| apple care since I depend on it so much
| ramijames wrote:
| I've been on a Macbook M1 Pro since 2022 (bought refurbished on
| Amazon for cheap) and it's still such a powerhouse. It doesn't
| struggle at all with anything that I throw at it. Kind of
| amazing.
|
| Nothing has broken and I consistently get 4-6 hours of heavy
| work time while on battery. An amazing machine for the price I
| paid.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > I read as "Whoops we made the M1 Macbook Pro too good, please
| upgrade!"
|
| As there target for that marketing, I can report it hits home!
|
| But objectively, there is nothing wrong with my current
| experience at all.
|
| I have never had that experience over many generations and
| types of machines. The M1 keeps looking better and better in
| hindsight.
|
| ---
|
| Looking forward, either the M5 is the next M1, a bump of good
| that will last. Or Apple will be really firing on all cylinders
| if it can "obsolete" the M5 anytime soon.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I have an M1 Max with 64 GB and an M4 Max with 128 GB and the
| latter feels noticeably snappier than the former. The latest
| MacOS release fucked up the M1's performance. Wish I could
| downgrade easily. I want off that ride.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I have the M3 Pro (32gb) and an M4 Pro 16" (48gb), and the
| latter is sufficiently snappier to make me happy I waited to
| upgrade from my horrible Intel 13" i5 with 16gb. The M1 Pro I
| used for work a few years ago was great too. I'm not on Tahoe
| on either computer, thank god.
| gniv wrote:
| My late-2021 M1 Pro is working fine but I think one of the fans
| is broken. When loaded it starts beeping every 7 seconds and
| won't stop until I reboot. It might be just dust but I'm
| reluctant to open it up. Maybe I should and if I break it I
| have a better reason to upgrade lol.
| wffurr wrote:
| You can spray compressed air without opening the Macbook.
| Also iFixit has a nice guide if you do open it up: https://ww
| w.ifixit.com/Troubleshooting/Mac_Laptop/MacBook+Fa...
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I have an M1 Max Macbook Pro, and having used many employer's
| newer variants of M-series macbook's since then, I'm still very
| satisfied with my M1 Max but
|
| the air series is _really good_ , and very light
|
| my M1 is now noticeably heavy and I don't think upgrading to
| another Macbook Pro is the move the resell value of the M1 did
| not hold, specifically the bumped up storage models. There
| doesn't seem to be a market for 8TB of space specifically, but
| the base 1 - 2TB holds its value because the baseline of the
| MBP holds its value
|
| M5 Max looks tempting if there is a very compelling tradein,
| but the M1 Max is pretty old so I don't have real hope of that,
| but I'll look. For AI Inference the difference doesn't seem
| good enough yet and necessary enough. I'll still need to use
| the cloud or aspire to have a specialized machine with more RAM
| or circuitry on my network.
| predkambrij wrote:
| Please, please. I'd love to use it with Debian.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >I read as "Whoops we made the M1 Macbook Pro too good, please
| upgrade!"
|
| >I think I will get another 2-5 years out my mine.
|
| I only own a M4 because the M1 had a hardware fault and I
| needed a replacement ASAP. (I sold the M1 after repair.)
|
| Although I'm glad to have a newer machine with longer future
| support, I have yet to notice any meaningful performance
| difference.
| ukd1 wrote:
| Ditto. Though, I fixed my M1. I have an M4 max for work; the
| nano screen is a win. The perf _is_ better, but it 's really
| marginal unless actually doing stuff with the GPU, then it's
| super slow compared to a decent GPU anyway (i.e. h100, gb
| etc)
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| > M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s
| of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified
| memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth.
|
| This is the important statement. 614GB/s is quite decent, however
| a NVIDIA RTX 5090 already offers 1,792 GB/s (roughly 3x) of
| memory bandwidth, for comparison.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > NVIDIA RTX 5090 already offers 1,792 GB/s
|
| You can buy two m5 pro base model for the same price as a
| single 5090...
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's a fun comparison, but can you run those 2 m5 pros in
| parallel to accomplish 2x the work? Otherwise, you just told
| me you can buy 2 toyota corollas for the price of 1 F-150
| while trying to convince me you can haul your boat behind
| both corollas at the same time.
| lm28469 wrote:
| You can also buy a 64gb mini, save $1k and do more work
| than what you could do with a single 5090.
|
| In Europe I can get a 128gb mac studio m4 max for 300 euros
| more than a 5090 (for which you still need to buy a power
| supply, motherboard, cpu , &c.)
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| But the inference on the mac studio m4 max will be slower
| than on the 5090, even though you can load larger models.
| lm28469 wrote:
| All I'm saying is that the comparison doesn't make sense.
| The 5090 is faster on a small subset of tasks if attached
| to a computer which ends up being 3x the price of a m5
| machine that fit the same model or the same price as a
| machine that fits models 5x bigger
| dylan604 wrote:
| So you're saying that buying 2 Corollas for the cost of 1
| Ferrari engine would be better? Even though the Ferrari
| engine is much more powerful, it's useless without the
| rest of the car.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| You're right a $3600 graphics card is worse than a $2600
| laptop; but from my perspectives they're very different
| products. Not least of all because even at $3600 for a RTX 5090
| you still have the whole rest of the computer left to purchase.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Max version with the 614GB/s is a $3599 laptop
| asdhtjkujh wrote:
| I imagine the upcoming M5 Ultra will be competitive in this
| regard. The M3 Ultra already has 819GB/s and it's two
| generations behind.
| bachittle wrote:
| The RTX 5090 only has 32gb of VRAM. So the tradeoff is NVIDIA
| is for blazing speed in a tiny memory pool, but Apple Silicon
| has a larger memory pool at moderate speed.
| 827a wrote:
| Or, there's the DGX Spark, which effectively neutralizes both
| of these trade-offs, and is the same price as the RTX 5090.
| Keyframe wrote:
| It's not 5090 performance though.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Nothing stops you from plugging in a 5090. Nvidia ships
| ARM64 GPU drivers.
| Keyframe wrote:
| So, what were we talking about even then in the thread?
| ofcrpls wrote:
| For reference, DGX Spark is at 273 GB/s
| pwython wrote:
| Well that's. Just. Great. I bought a 64GB M4 Max MBP last month.
| I'm past the 14-day return window. I figured the M5 was near, but
| assumed M5 Max would come a bit later. Not sure where I came up
| with that.
| abiraja wrote:
| M5 has been out since last year, no?
| rapfaria wrote:
| Not sure either since M5 base has been available for months now
| pwython wrote:
| Ah yes, that's right. I was looking at the M5 model last
| month wondering why there was no 64GB option.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is always the gamble with buying a Mac. Either purchase
| right when the new is released, or be on the fence of your new
| becoming old a couple of weeks after purchase.
| gjm11 wrote:
| You can console yourself with the fact that your laptop, unlike
| one of the new ones if you'd bought that instead, can run macOS
| Sequoia (without "Liquid Glass") rather than Tahoe.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| The screenshot of running LM Studio alongside Maya is a massive
| hardware flex.
|
| Wish it was Blender though ;)
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| They're giving us extra storage... but they've put the price up
| by 200, which is as much as they charged for the storage anyway.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Why do you think the price went up by $200?
| heurs wrote:
| Honest question. Is it possible to install an earlier version of
| macOS on these machines? Liquid glass looks so.. unprofessional
| to my eyes. And I hear it's also unstable.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| That's a big part of what's keeping me from upgrading. Every
| time I look at my wife's iPhone I'm dumbfounded by just how
| _bad_ the liquid glass looks.
|
| It's the first time I've ever been so repulsed by a design that
| I actively avoid it just... out of sheer preference.
| philistine wrote:
| I have a base M5 since last year. You cannot, no. It is
| literally impossible. Do with that what you will.
| icambron wrote:
| It does look terrible, but I haven't found it to be unstable,
| personally
| Hasz wrote:
| accessibility settings can turn off some (but not all) of the
| garish animations, transparencies, etc.
| dmix wrote:
| You barely see any liquid glass on Tahoe. I keep my dock hidden
| and it's just the icons mostly which aren't that different than
| before.
| myHNAccount123 wrote:
| Same here. Not really understanding the complaints for macOS.
| I think the addition of icons in the context and menus is
| worse than glass.
| zffr wrote:
| Yes. This page has several ways to get older macOS versions:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662, but the earliest macOS
| version you can use on Apple Silicon is macOS 11.
|
| If you move your home directory to a different disk partition,
| you can even share it between two different macOS versions!
| asimovDev wrote:
| these Macs can't go below Tahoe. People on Mac Rumours were
| complaining about M5 MacBooks unable to install Sequoia, so
| it's safe to assume Pro/Max chips will be the same.
| angulardragon03 wrote:
| This. You can't downgrade below the version the device
| ships with (a forked build of the current version at time
| of mass production)
| user3939382 wrote:
| And your native CLI tools will continue to be from 2011 with 0
| attention paid to the dev experience until it's Swift, and we'll
| continue to lock you out of running programs from other human
| beings we didn't approve without a 6 step ritual in the OS. Oh
| and all apps will continue to constantly phone home i.e. pay for
| the machine so Google Adobe and Microsoft can run updaters and
| telemetry on it all day.
| cmdrmac wrote:
| Good point about the telemetry part. I've been using Little
| Snitch for the past few years and just block all the telemetry
| calls.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Or don't use Google, Adobe or Microsoft software if that
| bothers you? And how is that Apple's fault?
| user3939382 wrote:
| Right, actually instead of having first class tools and
| systems that respect us we should all go live in a hut in the
| forest "if it bothers us". Apple is right there next to them
| abusing our machines and makes 0 effort to protect users from
| this.
| astrange wrote:
| Many of the CLI tools have been updated to recent FreeBSD
| versions.
| justin66 wrote:
| "An Unrivaled Experience with macOS Tahoe"
| tamimio wrote:
| I will wait for the new mac mini instead
| otterley wrote:
| I checked the fine print on the product website: by "up to 4x
| faster LLM prompt processing," they're specifically referring to
| time to first token. So it's not about token generation rate
| (tokens per second).
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| It would probably be worth finding a more friendly way to
| market this, but it's a reasonable / accurate way to say it.
|
| The prompt processing sped up.
|
| Not the output generation.
|
| M4 was notoriously slow at this compared to DGX etc.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Yes. This is known. They added neural accelerators, aka Tensor
| core equivalent, in the GPU. This will make prompt processing
| competitive vs similar class GPUs.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| You have to pay separately for the charger now. PS99, what a
| bargain.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Or just don't but an Apple charger? You can get a perfectly
| fine small 100W GAN USB-C charger for like $30 on Amazon.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Since that is required by law, I suggest moving.
| gib444 wrote:
| Which part of the law requires it to be PS99 (or PS1 even?).
| Can you cite it?
| Tepix wrote:
| I already have various chargers, don't you?
| jwr wrote:
| I would probably upgrade my MacBook Pro at once, if it wasn't for
| the Tahoe disaster. Now, not so much, I'm inclined to wait until
| next year.
| alexpham14 wrote:
| Yeah, this feels like the annual "nice, but do I actually need
| it?" refresh if you're already on an M4 Pro.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| I'm on an M1 Pro and it's still a "nice, but do I actually need
| it?". They've done too well on the hardware side.
| tristor wrote:
| I am very excited by this, but I am a bit dampened that the
| maximum memory available is 128GB. I was really hoping for 256GB,
| which would allow me to run frontier models locally. I think with
| 128GB it's still feasible to use this with something like
| Qwen3-Coder-Next and MiniMax-M2.5, but things like Kimi-K2.5 will
| require significant quantization to fit and model performance
| will really suffer.
|
| I'm really wanting to build proper local-first AI workflows at
| home, and I think Apple has an opportunity to make that possible
| in a way other companies aren't really focused on, but we need
| significantly larger memory capabilities to do it, which I know
| is tough in the current memory market but should be available for
| a cost.
| vardump wrote:
| Tell me about it. I checked the page thinking whether I should
| go for 256 GB or 512 GB RAM model.
|
| 128 GB maximum.
|
| Sigh.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| $5000 laptop you have to pay to add a power adapter... gratuitous
| penny pinching from Tim Cook's Apple.
|
| It's one of those things, yes if I'm spending that much on a
| laptop I can afford to spend $80 on the adapter too, but does it
| feel good as a customer to do that or are you souring the
| experience of buying from you just to earn a few more dollars.
| kylec wrote:
| I'm assuming you're in the EU or UK, Apple is required by law
| to not include a power adapter:
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/10/15/eu-gets-what-it-a...
|
| In the US they provide one in the box free of charge.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Does the law say they have to charge for it.
| pvtmert wrote:
| Nope, they are required to have an option to opt-out from
| adapter. They choose to charge for one!
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/16/no-the-eu-didnt-ban-apple-
| fro...
| mort96 wrote:
| This is one thing I don't really blame Apple for, and I think
| everyone else will follow suit -- and not _just_ because Apple
| is doing it.
|
| The EU requires that users must be able to buy a device without
| a charger. It's a huge supply chain challenge to add two
| variants of every single SKU, one with a charger and one
| without. So the obvious solution is to sell the charger
| separately, since you need that regardless, and always sell the
| device without a charger. You avoid having two variants of
| everything that way.
|
| Now, you could maybe argue that Apple should default to bundle
| a charger with your laptop, so that you'd have to uncheck a
| "bundle charger" checkbox on their website. But do you really
| care whether your laptop costs $2200 and you can buy a charger
| for $60 or your laptop costs $2260 and you can save $60 by
| removing the charger?
|
| You can make an argument that doing it Apple's way hides a
| price increase. And yeah, that's probably fair. But it's not
| like Apple is afraid of non-hidden price increases either.
| wpm wrote:
| I have a huge tote box full of power bricks, most of them white
| Apple ones. I have a stack of 60-90W Apple USB-C ones too that
| I don't use cause they only have one port and are larger and
| worse than modern GaN units that can do 140W on one port while
| also pushing 30 or 60 on the others.
|
| So, if you want one of mine, you can have one. On me. Because
| I'm fucking drowning in the things and appreciate _not_ having
| to deal with another one.
| roblh wrote:
| Kinda funny that the top image is capture one when Apple
| literally owns Photomator and gives you the option of bundling it
| when you buy.
| jftuga wrote:
| I wonder how this compares to my M4 air with 10 GPU cores and 32
| MB of RAM. My system can only run ~14B sized models at any
| reasonable speed. The accuracy of these sized models can be
| underwhelming. I am looking forward to a time when it would be
| nice to run models locally at a reasonable price, at a reasonable
| speed and with reasonable accuracy. I don't think we are there
| just yet.
| abiraja wrote:
| I just bought a M5 Macbook Pro 2 weeks ago. Thinking of returning
| it and getting a M5 Pro with the same configuration but only $200
| more. How should I compare M5 vs M5 Pro?
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| You'll get slightly more performance and ever so slightly less
| battery life. I'd do it
| abiraja wrote:
| Thanks for the advice! Gonna do it.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I feel like Apple pulled an Instant Pot with the M1 MacBook Pro.
| I still haven't had a single situation where I felt like spending
| more money would improve my experience. The battery is wearing
| out a bit, but it started out life with so much runtime that
| losing a few hours doesn't seem to matter.
| darknavi wrote:
| I wish this sort of thing was encouraged in the modern
| capitalist technology space.
|
| Unfortunately, number always must go up (and the rate at which
| the number goes up, also must go up).
| ireflect wrote:
| Same. It looks like battery replacement from ifixit is not too
| difficult, so I plan to do that when the time comes.
|
| Incidentally, I just switched to Asahi Linux, but that was for
| software quality and openness reasons, rather than anything to
| do with performance.
| fridder wrote:
| How's Asahi treating you? If I upgrade from my m1max, I was
| going to try it out
| willis936 wrote:
| I just bought this model in the past year for $600 and it still
| feels like a great bargain.
| swyx wrote:
| > The battery is wearing out a bit, but it started out life
| with so much runtime that losing a few hours doesn't seem to
| matter.
|
| this is my exact opposite experience. my M3 Max from 2 years
| ago now has <2hrs battery life at best. wondering if any
| experts here can help me figure out what is going on? what
| should i be expecting?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| What is your maximum capacity in Settings > Battery Health?
| What processes are running with significant CPU? What's the
| typical temperature of the laptop according to a stats app?
| (Temperature is a good proxy for general energy use.)
|
| I'm typing this on an M3 Max; its max battery capacity is
| 88%. I've got some things running (laptop average temp is
| 50-55C, fans off), screen is half brightness, and it's
| projected to go from 90% to 0% in five hours. I don't usually
| baby it enough to test this, but 8-10 hours should be
| achievable.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Also check which apps use the energy.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Charge habits with batteries make a huge difference. If your
| use pattern is that once per day, you take the device from
| 100% to 10%, you put a lot more wear on the battery than if
| it kind of hovers in the 30%-80% range for example, or if it
| just hangs out nearish top-of-charge all day when you're at
| your desk.
|
| Hot take: people should get used to, and expect to, replace
| device batteries 1 or 2 times during the device lifetime.
| They're the main limiting factor on portable device
| longevity, and engineers make all kinds of design tradeoffs
| just to make that 1 battery that the device ships with last
| long enough to not annoy users. If we could get people used
| to taking their device in for a battery once every couple of
| years, we could dramatically reduce device waste, and also
| unlock functionality that's hidden behind battery-preserving
| mechanisms.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| BatFi is a macOS application which will prevent your
| battery from charging to over 80% by default. macOS does
| have a version of this built-in but it's "intelligent
| charging" I don't really trust, and I'd rather just have a
| hard 80% limit except when I override that.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I set Claude loose on my computer and said "why is my battery
| life so bad?" and it found an always-running audio subsystem
| kernel extension (Parrot) which didn't need to be there and
| was preventing the CPU from going into low-power states. My
| battery life got noticeably better when I deleted it.
|
| I'm not even sure how it got installed, possibly when I
| installed Zoom for an interview once but I don't know. Point
| is, at least in one case, AI can help track down battery
| hogs.
| hmottestad wrote:
| My M3 Max can burn through battery much faster than my M1 Max
| ever could.
|
| And some apps are really inefficient. New Codex app drains my
| battery. If you are using Codex I recommend minimizing it,
| since it's the UI that uses most power.
| linsomniac wrote:
| A couple weeks ago I was working remote and didn't bring a
| power adapter, and I realized a couple hours in that my
| battery was getting kind of low. I clicked on the battery
| icon and got a list of what was using a lot of power: 1 was
| an hour long video chat using Google Meet, the other was
| Claude desktop (which I hadn't used at all that morning).
|
| What in the world is an idle Claude Desktop doing that uses
| so much power?
| varenc wrote:
| As others have said, keep the battery in the 80%-30% range.
| Use the `batt` CLI tool to hard limit your max charge to 80%.
| Sadly, if you're already down to <2hrs, this might not make
| sense for you. Also prevent it being exposed to very hot or
| cold temps (even when not in use)
|
| I type this from an M3 Max 2023 MBP that still has 98%
| battery health. But admittedly it's only gone through 102
| charge cycles in ~2 years.
|
| (use `pmset -g rawbatt` to get cycle count or
| `system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep -A3 'Health'` to get
| health and cycles)
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Either your battery was defective or something is using all
| your battery. Even my 2018 Intel MacBook still lasts 3+ hours
| on a charge.
|
| Apple will replace the battery for $249 if you choose to.
| https://support.apple.com/mac-
| laptops/repair?services=servic...
| rfwhyte wrote:
| You can very easily replace the battery yourself for less than
| $100 USD too if it ever becomes enough of an issue that you
| feel you actually need to do something about it. My M1 Max is
| at about 88% battery health, but it still gets 4X-6X longer on
| battery (At full performance too boot) compared to my old PoS
| Razer laptop, so I likely won't be replacing my battery any
| time soon.
| rajma wrote:
| M1 pro MacBook pro here as well. Just today I was thinking I
| have no need to upgrade until M7 and by then maybe even MacBook
| Air would do. Especially since I will have my home server (dgx
| spark) available for anything serious anyway. So excited for
| the Mac studio configs though. M5 ultra 1TB would be a huge
| leap for serious home server builders.
| maxverse wrote:
| I use an M1 for personal development an an M4 for work. I'm a
| typical dev. I don't feel any difference.
| post_break wrote:
| My M3 Pro with 18gb of ram still feels like a beast. The only
| thing I can make it suffer with so far is generating meshes from
| 3D scanning, and even then I'm just patient. Apple is suffering
| from success with these older laptops, it's a tough sell to
| upgrade, even from the M1 Max folks.
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| I mean, they had to make them good because of the new cpu
| architecture, but since the emulation worked so well and
| overall adoption was really fast it now is a problem for them
| as a company. A really good problem to have though
| MBCook wrote:
| Can someone comment on the new dual die thing they're promoting
| for how they make the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips?
|
| How is that different from the silicon interposer they were using
| before?
|
| The big change is the two dies don't have to fabbed next to each
| other in a single wafer, which is fantastic for costs and yields.
| But would this affect the interconnect speed somehow?
|
| How would the two be wired together?
|
| Could this mean the Ultra comes back in M6 since it would be
| easier to fab?
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| Curious about that as well.
|
| They seem to market it as a technological advancement, which it
| is, but rather than being excited im actually worried about
| hidden latencies that could come with that approach. Have you
| found any interesting info on that yet?
| wmf wrote:
| _the new dual die thing they're promoting for how they make the
| M5 Pro and M5 Max chips?_
|
| It's chiplets just like GB10, Strix Halo, etc. One die has the
| CPU and the other die has the GPU.
|
| _How is that different from the silicon [bridge] they were
| using before?_
|
| It's probably similar.
|
| _the two dies don't have to fabbed next to each other_
|
| They never were; this is a widespread misunderstanding.
|
| _But would this affect the interconnect speed somehow?_
|
| Apple never documented the internal interconnect for the M4
| Pro/Max and now they don't document it for the M5 Pro/Max so we
| don't know. It's probably better to read reviews and avoid
| theorycrafting and backseat driving.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| So below 128gb is the sweet spot for local LLMs...
| dev0p wrote:
| I am only interested in one thing: what's the best local AI model
| it can run?
| jbellis wrote:
| I chased down what the "4x faster at AI tasks" was measuring:
|
| > Testing conducted by Apple in January 2026 using preproduction
| 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M5, 10-core
| CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 4TB SSD, and
| production 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M4,
| 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB SSD.
| Time to first token measured with an 8K-token prompt using a
| 14-billion parameter model with 4-bit quantization, and LM Studio
| 0.4.1 (Build 1). Performance tests are conducted using specific
| computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of
| MacBook Air.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Seems very reasonable to me
| tux3 wrote:
| A bit strange to use time to first token instead of
| throughput.
|
| Latency to the first token is not like a web page where first
| paint already has useful things to show. The first token is
| "The ", and you'll be very happy it's there in 50ms instead
| of 200ms... but then what you really want to know is how
| quickly you'll get the rest of the sentence (throughput)
| GeekyBear wrote:
| In previous generations, throughout was excellent for an
| integrated GPU, but the time to first token was lacking.
| danudey wrote:
| So throughput was already good but TTFT was the metric
| that needed more improvement?
| convenwis wrote:
| Good is relative but first token was clearly the biggest
| limitation.
| zamadatix wrote:
| To add to the sibling "good is relative" it also depends
| what you're running, not just your relative tolerances of
| what good is. E.g. in a MoE the decode speedup means the
| speed of prompt processing delay is more noticeable for
| the same size model in RAM.
| fragmede wrote:
| No you don't. Not as a sticky mushy human with emotions
| watching tokens drip in. There's a lot of feeling and
| emotion not backed by hard facts and data going around, and
| most people would rather see _something_ happening even if
| it takes longer overall. Hence spinner.gif, that doesn 't
| actually remotely do a damned thing, but it gives users
| reassurance that they're waiting for something good. So
| human psychology makes time to first token an important
| metric to look at, although it's not the only one.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| Some kinds of spinners serve as a coal-mine canary
| indicating if the app has gotten wedged. Not hugely
| useful, but also not entirely useless.
| case540 wrote:
| I assume it's time to first output token so it's basically
| throughput. How fast can it output 8001 tokens
| jbellis wrote:
| As far as benchmarketing goes they clearly went with
| prefill because it's much easier for apple to improve
| prefill numbers (flops-dominated) than decode (bandwidth-
| dominated, at least for local inference); M5 unified memory
| bandwidth is only about 10% better than the M4.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Not strange, for the kind of applications models at that
| size are often used for the prefill is the main factor in
| responsiveness. Large prompt, small completion.
| nabakin wrote:
| I would consider it reasonable if this was 4x TTFT and
| Throughput, but it seems like it's only for TTFT.
| lastdong wrote:
| 14-billion parameter model with 4-bit quantization seems rather
| small
| simlevesque wrote:
| It's not much for a frontier AI but it can be a very useful
| specialized LLM.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| On my 24GB RAM M4 Pro MBP some models run very quickly
| through LM Studio to Zed, I was able to ask it to write some
| code. Course my fan starts spinning off like the worlds
| ending, but its still impressive what I can do 100% locally.
| I can't imagine on a more serious setup like the Mac Studio.
| efxhoy wrote:
| How is the output quality of the smaller models?
| butILoveLife wrote:
| For anyone who has been watching Apple since the iPod
| commercials, Apple really really has grey area in the honesty
| of their marketing.
|
| And not even diehard Apple fanboys deny this.
|
| I genuinely feel bad for people who fall for their marketing
| thinking they will run LLMs. Oh well, I got scammed on
| runescape as a child when someone said they could trim my
| armor... Everyone needs to learn.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Yesterday I ran qwen3.5:27b with an M1 Max and 64 GB of
| ram. I have even run Llama 70B when llama.cpp came out.
| These run sufficiently well but somewhat slow but compared
| to what the improvements with the M5 Max it will make it a
| much faster experience.
| giwook wrote:
| I don't know that there would be a huge overlap between the
| people who would fall for this type of marketing and the
| people who want to run LLMs locally.
|
| There definitely are some who fit into this category, but
| if they're buying the latest and greatest on a whim then
| they've likely got money to burn and you probably don't
| need to feel bad for them.
|
| Reminds me of the saying: "A fool and his money are soon
| parted".
| bilbo0s wrote:
| It is.
|
| That's how they make loot on their 128GB MacBook Pros. By
| kneecapping the cheap stuff. Don't think for a second that
| the specs weren't chosen so that professional developers
| would have to shell out the 8 grand for the legit machine.
| They're only gonna let us do the bare minimum on a MacBook
| Air.
| derefr wrote:
| I think these aren't meant to be representative of arbitrary
| userland-workload LLM inferences, but rather the kinds of
| tasks macOS might spin up a background LLM inference for.
| Like the Apple Intelligence stuff, or Photos auto-tagging,
| etc. You wouldn't want _the OS_ to ever be spinning up a
| model that uses 98% of RAM, so Apple probably considers
| themselves to have at most 50% of RAM as working headroom for
| any such workloads.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Quite interesting that it's now a selling point just like fps
| in Crysis was a long time ago.
| re-thc wrote:
| Next is the fps of an AI playing Crysis.
| dana321 wrote:
| Or tasks per minute of the AI doing your job for you
| jayde2767 wrote:
| That measurement will be AI assembling MacBook pros vs
| human assemblers: number of units per hour, day, or
| whatever unit is most applicable.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| >Time to first token measured with an 8K-token prompt using a
| 14-billion parameter model with 4-bit quantization
|
| Oh dear 14B and 4-bit quant? There are going to be a lot of
| embarrassed programmers who need to explain to their
| engineering managers why their Macbook can't reasonably run
| LLMs like they said it could. (This already happened at my
| fortune 20 company lol)
| knicholes wrote:
| I wonder if Apple has foresight into locally running LLMs
| becoming sufficiently useful.
| fulafel wrote:
| So it's not measuring output tokens/s, just how long it takes
| to start generating tokens. Seems we'll have to wait for
| independent benchmarks to get useful numbers.
| dotancohen wrote:
| For many workflows involving real time human interaction,
| such as voice assistant, this is the most important metric.
| Very few tasks are as sensitive to quality, once a certain
| response quality threshold has been achieved, as is the
| software planning and writing tasks that most HN readers are
| likely familiar.
| gslepak wrote:
| That is talking about battery life, not AI tasks. Footnote 53,
| where it says, "Up to 18 hours battery life":
|
| https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/
| Havoc wrote:
| Does that include loading the model again? Apple seems to be
| the only company doing such shenanigans in their measurements
| addaon wrote:
| Is the M5 Max the first laptop with significantly more memory
| bandwidth than the M1 Max? Looks like about a 20% jump... might
| finally be time to re-benchmark CFD workloads.
| reenorap wrote:
| "The new MacBook Pro gets up to 24 hours of battery life, giving
| Intel-based upgraders up to 13 additional hours"
|
| I have a Intel-based 2019 Macbook Pro still and I have NEVER in
| its lifetime gotten even half of what they are claiming here.
| These days if I run it from battery I might get 90 mins.
|
| That said I had a maxed out Macbook Pro M4 Max on order but just
| cancelled it right now and will get this new M5 Max one for
| basically the same price. Once I saw that they didn't up the
| price of memory (I don't know how it doesn't affect them) I
| canceled my order.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| I had intel MacBook Pro. It is a NIGHT and DAY difference. I
| wish I didn't get the 16gb of memory though. It is ok, but
| running 5-10 cursor ai agents at the same time does start to
| choke the memory. Battery is absolutely amazing! And the best
| part - it stays cold!! No more irritated from heat fingers when
| using touchpad.
| winstonp wrote:
| They are at least nice for comparing it with the max of the
| Intel. That should really say gives them up to 22 additional
| hours given the wear on their batteries lol
| fl0ki wrote:
| For those who don't already know, you can get a lot of PC gaming
| performance out of these machines using Sikarugir. You can
| install all of Steam via winetricks and go from there, or launch
| DRM-free games directly.
|
| https://github.com/Sikarugir-App/Sikarugir
| exabrial wrote:
| > MacBook Pro and the Environment
|
| LOL. is it repairable? probably not.
| taf2 wrote:
| Considering these max out at 128GB of unified ram my guess is the
| hope of an M5 Ultra with 1TB of unified ram is unlikely to come
| true... Super disappointing.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Can Apple marketing please reduce the insane quantity of
| adjectives in its releases, it has been nauseating to read for
| decades and sickens me when visiting their sites. Early exit from
| me and ex-OSX dev for over a decade, wont be back until their
| core culture changes.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The most interesting change for the M5 Pro and Max is Apple
| moving to a bonded chiplet strategy from a single monolithic die.
|
| > The tech giant says the chips are engineered around its new
| Fusion Architecture, an advanced design that merges two dies into
| a single, high-performance system on a chip (SoC), which includes
| a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory
| controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/03/apple-unveils-m5-pro-and-m...
|
| They also replaced the efficiency cores on the CPU chiplet with a
| new higher performance design.
|
| > The CPU now features six "super cores," which is Apple's term
| for its highest-performance cores, alongside 12 all-new
| performance cores. Collectively, the CPU boosts performance by up
| to 30% for pro workloads.
| upmind wrote:
| It doesn't feel like much has changed from the previous gen? Just
| a new chip + memory?
| awestroke wrote:
| What did you expect?
| jtfrench wrote:
| Was hoping to see Apple break the 128GB barrier in a laptop that
| they previously set, though 128GB is still pretty sweet for local
| LLM inference on consumer hardware. My 128GB M3 Max is still
| shredding tokens pretty well (with that annoying slow initial
| prompt processing), so no major complaints there. I guess the
| question is, given access to the same amount of RAM, does the M5
| really do an order-of-magnitude better than 128GB on a M3 or M4?
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I barely push my M2 Pro MBPs. Most of my wants aren't hardware-
| related, they're software-related. How it runs some games from
| 10-20 years ago very well, but only through hacky compatibility
| layers that shouldn't be necessary. How some parts of the OS have
| gotten "out of sync" with each other.
|
| Actually, I can think of one hardware want: have they gotten it
| to where you can do external GPUs and the like more easily?
|
| Would still buy one over any other laptop on the market today for
| what I use them for.
| przemelek wrote:
| Still why especially for Pro there is still version with 24 GB of
| RAM? It is scary....
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| I have absolutely no need and yet I want ittttt
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I thought a Studio would be my local LLM machine 2026, but this
| is $2000+ for the 126gb option - not for me. I assume $6000 for
| that Studio machine but it looks now more like $8000.
| Flux159 wrote:
| So is this a minimal upgrade before the M6 Macbook Pros w/ OLED &
| a redesign later this year?
|
| It doesn't even look like they added cellular as an option with
| their own C1X chip (getting around the licensing / cost issues
| since it's their own chip now).
| srid wrote:
| Yea, I think it is worth waiting for M6 just for OLED alone.
| EduardoBautista wrote:
| OLED sounds great, but I am worried about burn in. MacBook
| screens are a bit more static and on longer than iPads and
| iPhones.
| wmf wrote:
| I wouldn't assume those are coming this year.
| winstonp wrote:
| Everybody says they are, with the main point being they can
| get the M6 Pros onto TSMC's 2nm node and save 3nm capacity
| for iPhones.
| sakopov wrote:
| What's a good value for a used MacBook pro these days? Any of the
| older models worth buying today?
| rgovostes wrote:
| It's hard to find any fault with the M1 models released 5 years
| ago. According to second-hand listings on Swappa, US$1200 would
| get you a capable M1 Max; the equivalent M5 Max is US$3600.
| fHr wrote:
| Only good apple product, most overvallued company ever.
| nottorp wrote:
| There only run that low contrast Mac OS version tho.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| >unified memory
|
| This is just marketing speak. Stop repeating marketing. It isnt a
| walled garden, its a walled prison.
|
| Unified memory is just regular memory. There is nothing special
| about integrated GPUs.
| ErneX wrote:
| Isn't that is how it's called though? PS4/PS5, Xbox consoles
| all referred to it like that on the spec sheets.
| twism wrote:
| Is the notch gone?
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Literally the only thing that will get me to upgrade. My M1
| MacBook Pro is a beast and I've felt no need to replace it.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Still only 8TB max storage. Ugh!
| brailsafe wrote:
| wth are you doing w/ wordpress that requires more than 8tb of
| storage!?
| elnatro wrote:
| The question is when Apple Laptops are going to be able to run
| LLMs with a performance comparable to what the AI companies are
| offering?
| holtkam2 wrote:
| Never - data centers will always offer more power if you only
| care about raw inference speed. HOWEVER I think that we'll
| reach the 'good enough' bar super soon. In 2-3 years I expect
| apple macs to be able to run a model as 'good' as Claude 4.6
| sonnet at 90% of the inference speed we're used to from a cloud
| API.
|
| Yes, I'm sure by then there will be better models on offer via
| cloud providers, but idk if I'll even care. I'm not doing
| science / research or complex mathematical proofs, I just want
| a model good enough to vibe code personal projects for fun. So
| I think at that point I'll stop being a OpenAI / Anthropic
| customer.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to
| 614GB/s of memory bandwidth
|
| for reference, the M1 Max has 400GB/s of memory bandwidth, half a
| decade ago
| brailsafe wrote:
| I don't see it mentioned much, but the most exciting thing to me
| is that they're shipping their own WiFi chip in it, which leads
| me to be hopeful that they'll eventually get around to shipping a
| cell modem so I don't have to tether to my phone constantly.
| Still no new colours unfortunately. I think those are the two
| things that would/will be exciting in the future. Give me a green
| 5g+ capable MBP and I'll be happy. I'm so deeply bored of the
| drab grey and darker grey versions; we can have tattoos at work
| now, give me a different colour laptop for christ's sake
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I don't know if they'll ever do that. Colors add another
| dimension, so you either need to have more stock on hand or do
| more custom models. Right now, the profit margins on all
| upgrades is huge.
|
| Phones have less configurability, they sell more, and colors
| seem more important.
| idbejv wrote:
| Tell me a joke That's a hierarchical
| idbejv wrote:
| That's big hockey
| oybng wrote:
| Imagine these with a functioning keyboard, ports, replaceable
| battery and a good operating system.
| stefanfisk wrote:
| In what way are the keyboards and ports non-functional?
| matsemann wrote:
| Yeah, I'm always envy of the Mac's power together with long
| battery times. But so tired of their software and dongles.
|
| My current work laptop (Lenovo) is quite a beast as well when
| plugged in, but I can literally see the battery percentage tick
| down while unplugged, but colleagues with their Macs can go all
| day.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| I have an m4 pro MBP, 1tb storage and 24gb RAM. Not seeing any
| reason to consider an upgrade whatsoever.
| DrProtic wrote:
| Is that supposed to be a surprise?
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Does it still come with a measly 1 year warranty?
| robbru wrote:
| Shout out to LM Studio being featured in one of the product
| shots!
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| I bought an M4 and don't think I can justify upgrading so soon.
| Certainly has some great improvements.
| emilbratt wrote:
| Still rocking M1 air, still a great machine and Im still happy.
| :-)
| bombcar wrote:
| M1 Pro Max has held up surprisingly well, and I'm finding
| justifying the M5 Max over the M5 Pro quite hard to do.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| This is what I upgraded from. Adored it - but wanted the
| 128gb.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| I bought an M1 Max with 64G RAM a long time ago, and am
| perfectly happy with it. I thought about getting a refurbed M4
| Max when the M5 Max comes out, and decided my next computer
| will be a Dell Rugged, just because I want a Rugged laptop for
| auto diag stuff, and I thought I could kill two birds with one
| stone and get something with an NVIDIA card for learning CUDA.
| I've been using the Rugged basically nonstop while the M1 Max
| gathers dust. I think I may be done with Apple laptops now, a
| rugged laptop running linux is so nice. I love the keyboard, I
| love the upgradability, the OS is snappy, and I can use so much
| nice software. I added a 4TB SSD and now have 7 auto diag
| virtual machines with volvo, VAG, BMW software, and keep the
| host linux to myself. I have not had so much fun with a
| computer in a very long time. Both battery bays are full and my
| mac mini takes care of blue bubbles and is a home server for
| inventory management and backups. If for some reason I miss the
| Apple Experience, I can always RDP into the mini. Keeping a
| mini under the desk at home and a rugged laptop outside the
| home is my new sweet spot.
| ra wrote:
| will it run GLM-4.7 locally at any speed?
| tgrowazay wrote:
| > M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s
| of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified
| memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth
|
| Which roughly translates to 30B Q8 size LLM at 10t/s for the M5
| Pro and 60B Q8 size LLM at 10t/s for the M5 Max
|
| For reference, RTX 3090 24GB has a memory bandwidth of approx.
| 936.2 GB/s, DGX Spark 128GB features a unified memory bandwidth
| of up to 273 GB/s
| MoonWalk wrote:
| Ugh, more "AI" hype. How useful are the cited hardware features
| for NON-"AI" processing?
| sudoapps wrote:
| Hot take - Local LLM computing will move to stationary, always on
| devices (Mac mini & studio). Developers and users will move to
| lighter, portable devices to interface with their long running
| agent workers (MacBook Airs & iPads).
| jdprgm wrote:
| One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is M5 Pro now
| supporting 64GB ram . I believe prior gens you had to go Max to
| get 64. m5 Pro 64GB is $3000 meanwhile to upgrade ram on the max
| you need the 40 gpu core variant with 64GB is $4300. $1300 dollar
| mark up for twice the gpu compute and 50% higher mem bandwidth
| isn't great value imo.
| dangus wrote:
| Anyone who cares about value isn't getting a non-base model
| Mac. They are buying the silver shiny thing or their company is
| paying.
|
| For example, grab yourself an Omen Transcend 14, spec it to
| 64GB RAM and the RTX 5070. You're under $2000 and getting
| better graphics performance for anything that isn't AI, and
| you've got an upgradable 1TB SSD and removable WiFi card.
|
| You're also getting an OLED screen which most people would
| prefer.
|
| This model in particular I've chosen because it's just as quiet
| as the M4 MacBook Pro models within 3dB during high intensity
| usage and gets very similar battery life, actually better
| battery life than the M4 Pro/Max models for light tasks.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| 1.35x speed up in single core versus M3 Max. Insane. Everyone
| else has failed to bump single core performance in years. Where
| are these single core gains coming from?
| rvz wrote:
| If you are thinking about running the next Deepseek model, then
| you are going to be a bit disappointed with the M5
|
| Might need to wait for the M5 Ultra or M6 Max with 128GB of RAM
| until the memory bandwidth is greater than a GTX 5090.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| TL;DR Is this major change, or just incrimental?
|
| Just about to be time for me to get a new laptop. Typically I buy
| a generation behind, but want to make sure I won't miss anything
| huge.
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