Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Broadcom WiFi support 320Mhz while N1 is stuck with 160Mhz. There were report of N1 not supporting 4096 QAM as well but I didn't check.
"stuck". An infinitely small percentage of people can take advantage of 320Mhz. It's fine.
Apple M5 chip
171–180 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple M5 chip
#172The modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way outperforming the software teams.
There are talks of the hardware head replacing Cook. Hopefully that will bring whatever they’re doing right to other teams.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sixteen years ago, John Gruber wrote: > Hardware and software both matter, and Apple’s history shows that there’s a good argument to be made for developing integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which matters more, I wouldn’t hesitate to say software. All things considered I’d much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac running Windows. https://daringfireball.net/2009/11/the_os_opportunity At the time I…
That’s so wild to me - my personal laptop is still a Mac but I’m in windows all day for work. Some of the new direction of macOS isn’t awesome but the basics are still rock solid. Touchpad is perfect, sleep works 100% of the time for days on end, still has UNIX underneath.
For a simple example, no app remembers the last directory you were working in. The keys each app uses are completely inconsistent from app to app. And it was only in Windows 11 that Windows started remembering my window configuration when I plugged and unplugged a monitor. Then there’s the Windows 95-style dialog boxes mixed in with the Windows 11-style dialog boxes; what a UI mess. I spoke with one vendor the other day who was actually proud they’d adopted a ribbon interface in their UI “just like Office” and I verbally laughed.
From a hardware perspective, I still don’t understand why Windows and laptop manufacturers can’t get sleep working right. My Intel MacBook Pro with an old battery still sleeps and wakes and lasts for several hours, while my new Windows laptop lasts about an hour and won’t wake from hibernate half the time without a hard reboot.
I think Windows is the “good enough” for most people.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, they have also succumbed to the AI hype machine. Apple, calling it by its actual name "machine learning" was about the only thing I still liked about Apple.
Wait, didn't they try to backronym their way into "Apple Intelligence" last cycle? https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
>Built into your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro* to help you write, express yourself, and get things done effortlessly.** Designed with groundbreaking privacy at every step.
The asterisks are really icing on the cake here.
---
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-accused-of-ai-cop...
Re: Apple M5 chip
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sixteen years ago, John Gruber wrote: > Hardware and software both matter, and Apple’s history shows that there’s a good argument to be made for developing integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which matters more, I wouldn’t hesitate to say software. All things considered I’d much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac running Windows. https://daringfireball.net/2009/11/the_os_opportunity At the time I…
That’s so wild to me - my personal laptop is still a Mac but I’m in windows all day for work. Some of the new direction of macOS isn’t awesome but the basics are still rock solid. Touchpad is perfect, sleep works 100% of the time for days on end, still has UNIX underneath.
A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail). A number of others were affected by the same issue. There have been show-stopper bugs in the core functionality of Photos as well. I don't get the impression that the basics are Apple's focus with respect to software.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#176It’s unfortunate that this announcement is still unspecific about what they improved in the Neural Engine. Since all we know about the Neural Engine comes from Apple papers or reverse engineering efforts ( https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine ), it’s plausible that they addressed some quirks to enable better transformer performance. They have written quite interesting papers on transformers on the Neural Engine:…
Re: Apple M5 chip
#177Re: Apple M5 chip
#178If anything, these refreshes let them get rid of the last old crap on the line for M1 and M2, tie up loose ends with Walmart for the $599 M1 Air they still make for ‘em, and start shipping out the A18 Pro-based Macbooks in November.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#179This is only the base model, no upgrades yet for the Pro/Max version. The memory bandwidth is 153GB/s which is not enough to run viable open source LLM models properly.
153 GB/s is not bad at all for a base model; the Nvidia DGX Spark has only 273 GB/s memory bandwidth despite being billed as a desktop "AI supercomputer". Models like Qwen 3 30B-A3B and GPT-OSS 20B, both quite decent, should be able to run at 30+ tokens/sec at typical (4-bit) quantizations.
Neither product actually qualifies for the task IMO, and that doesn't change just because two companies advertised them as such instead of just one. The absolute highest end Apple Silicon variants tend to be a bit more reasonable, but the price advantage goes out the window too.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#180The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet). All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware. Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same task…
But it's a glorified Kindle and YouTube box, so I'm hesitating a little bit.