The chips are great. Now they just need to improve the quite stagnant laptop hardware to go with it.
Apple M5 chip
181–190 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple M5 chip
#182Vision Pro went from M2 to M5, that's quite a jump in horse-power.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#183Marketing:
M5 announcement [1] says 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI compared to M4. I guess in the lab?
Both iPad and MBP M5 [2][3] say "delivering up to 3.5x the AI performance". But all the examples of AI (in [3]), they are 1.2-2.3X faster than M4. So where this 3.5X is coming from? What tests did Apple do to show that?
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1. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unleashes-m5-th...
2. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
3. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-introduces-the-...
Re: Apple M5 chip
#184The modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way outperforming the software teams.
I pretty much see the Macbook as some fancy toys with mediocre software. Maybe the kernel is solid but other software are very meh, even comparing to Windows. But I'm definitely biased as a Windows/Linux user, and my hobby is system programming so naturally a Linux box is more suitable. Biggest grief with MacOS software: - Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in Windows - Scrollbar and other UI iss…
What makes Mac great is/was the ecosystem of 3rd party tools with great UI and features. Apple used to be good enough at writing basic 1st-party apps that would mostly just disappear into the background and let you do your thing, but they are getting increasingly "louder" which... may become a problem.
I still agree that second hand Thinkpads are ridiculously better in terms of price/quality ratio, and also more environmentally sustainable.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#185The 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…
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My iPhone X worked fine for 7 years, even without a battery replacement. It still works just fine. I wanted a larger screen and better zoom lens, so I upgraded earlier this year but I absolutely didn't have to and didn't feel any pressure from Apple to do so.
n=1.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#186So how many hardware systems does Apple silicon have for doing matrix multiplies now? 1. CPU, via SIMD/NEON instructions (just dot products) 2. CPU, via AMX coprocessor (entire matrix multiplies, M1-M3) 3. CPU, via SME (M4) 4. GPU, via Metal (compute shaders + simdgroup-matrix + mps matrix kernels) 4. Neural Engine via CoreML (advisory) Apple also appears to be adding a “Neural Accelerator” to each core on the M5?
I inferred that they meant the neural engine cores by neural accelerators or it could be a bigger/different AMX (which really should become a standard btw)
Re: Apple M5 chip
#187Did anyone else notice that the base storage has been upgraded to 512G? I knew this was coming after iPhone 17s storage upgrade!
512GB was the base storage of the M4 also.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251010205008/https://www.apple...
Re: Apple M5 chip
#188> A nearly 30 percent increase in unified memory bandwidth to 153GB/s
I'll believe the benchmarks, not marketing claims, but an observation and a question.
1. AMD EPYC 4585PX has ~89GB/s, with pretty good latency, as long you use 2xdimm
2. How does this compare to the memory bandwidth and latency of M1,M2,M3,M4 in reality with all of the caveats? It seems like M1 was a monumental leap forward, then everything else was a retraction.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple has always been a software first company, and they only sell the hardware as a vehicle to their software. They regularly say this themselves and have always called themselves a software company. Compare their hardware revenues with that of the app store and icloud subscriptions, you will see where they make most of their money. EDIT: I seem to be getting downvoted, so I will just leave this here for people to s…
> Compare their hardware revenues with that of the app store and icloud subscriptions, you will see where they make most of their money. Yes, it's $70B a year from iPhones alone and $23B from the totality of the Services org. (including all app store / subscription proceeds). Significantly more than 50% of the company's total profits come from hardware sales.
In addition, making money off the software that others develop and sell on the app store doesn't make Apple more of a software company, it makes them a middle man.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#190I am wondering if Apple's focus is off lately with this drive for AI. So far all they are showing in that presentation is that I can have "the ability to transform 2D photos into spatial scenes in the Photos app, or generating a Persona — operate with greater speed and efficiency." And by making Apple AI (which is something I do not use for many reasons, but mainly because of Climate Change) their focus, I am afraid…
Assuming you've read https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa... or the longer full essay/related works, could you elaborate on why you don't use Apple Intelligence? I totally understand why someone would refuse to use it due to environmental reasons (amongst others) but I'm curious to hear your opinions on it.
> could you elaborate on why you don't use Apple Intelligence?
Why would I trust this when they can't deliver a voice assistant that can parse my sentences beyond "Set a reminder" or "Set a timer"? They have neglected this area of their products for over a decade, they are not owed the benefit of the doubt