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Apple M5 chip

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Re: Apple M5 chip

#171
post #103

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.

Today. But in 3 years time it'll be widespread and your Mac will be the one with the sluggish WiFi connection that jams up the airwaves for all other devices too.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#172

The 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.

I really liked the energy of the guy who announced the iPhone Air this past WWDC or whatever it's called now. John Ternus. Hopefully he makes it there (CEO) one day; I'd like to see it.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#173

Earlier 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.

Same boat, and 100% agree. I couldn’t find a single example of Windows or Windows software where I think the experience is in any way better. Windows only saving grace, as a developer, is WSL.

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

#174

Earlier 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/

Probably don't want to draw more attention to their ongoing lawsuits [1]. Apple, for all its faults, does enjoy consistency and the unruly nature of LLM's is something I'm shocked they thought they could tame in a short amount of time. The fallout of the hilariously bad news/message "summaries" were more than enough to spook Apple from allowing that to go much further.

>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.

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[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-accused-of-ai-cop...

Re: Apple M5 chip

#175

Earlier 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.

> the basics are still rock solid

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

#176

It’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:…

MLX doesn't use the neural engine still right? I still wish they would abandon that unit and just center everything around metal and tensor units on the GPU.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#178
Surprised they aren’t beating the “performance per watt” drum they normally would be on Mx releases. I’m assuming this will be a bit of a snoozer until the M5X/M5 Ultra or an M6 hits the pipeline.

If 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

#179
post #140
post #2

This 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.

Even at 1.8x the base memory bandwidth and 4x the memory capacity Nvidia spent a lot of time talking about how you can pair two DGXs together with the 200G NIC to be able to slowly run quantized versions of the models everyone was actually interested in.

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

#180

The 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…

Yeah I love my M1 iPad Pro. But the "liquid glass" update made it feel slower. Really only the 'unlock' feels slower, once I'm using it it's fine. But it's slightly annoying and does make me want to update this year to the m5.

But it's a glorified Kindle and YouTube box, so I'm hesitating a little bit.

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