Earlier 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…
I did that comparison and they make the vast majority of their money on hardware. Half of their revenue is iPhone, a quarter is services, and the remaining quarter is divided up among the other hardware products. Regardless of revenue, Apple isn't a hardware company or a software company. It's a product company. The hardware doesn't exist merely to run the software, nor does the software exist merely to give function…
Apple M5 chip
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Re: Apple M5 chip
#282The modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way outperforming the software teams.
Apple has always been a hardware company first - think of how they sell consumers computers with the OS for free, while Microsoft primarily just sells the OS (when comparing the consumer business; I don’t want to get into all the other stuff Microsoft does). Now that they own the SoC design pipeline, they’re really able to flex these muscles.
The above link is a video where he mentions that.
It is true that Apple’s major software products like iOS and MacOS are only available on Apple’s own hardware. But the Steve Jobs justification for this (which he said in a different interview I can’t find right now so I will paraphrase) is that he felt Apple made the best hardware and software in the world so he wanted Apple’s customers to experience the best software on the best hardware possible which he felt only Apple could provide. (I wish I could find the exact quote.)
Anyway according to Steve Jobs Apple is a software first company.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a few electron powered apps that didn’t get updated yet? Electron used to override a private function that makes the Mac OS sluggish on Tahoe, and apparently no one uses Electron apps while doing testing at Apple.
I keep my applications pretty much up-to-date but I didn't check the release notes for each Electron application that I have to make sure they're updated. I still think this is a failure of macOS, since one misbehaving application shouldn't bring the whole environment to slow to a crawl. What I can say is that while the situation is much better than at Day 1, the whole Tahoe experience is not as fluid as Sequoia. Als…
Re: Apple M5 chip
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the main thing limiting Apple Intelligence (in my opinion) will continue to be the 8 GB of unified memory they still insist on. As you said - it won’t help previous generations, though since last year (or two??) all macs start with 16GB of memory. Even entry level macbook airs.
Thats true! I was referring to their wider line up, especially the iPad, where users will expect the same performance as on the Mac’s (they payed for an Mx chip) and they sold me an iPad Air this year that comes with a really fast M3 and still only 8 GB of RAM (you only get 16 on the iPad Pro btw if you go with at least 1TB of storage on the M4 Pro one)
The latter has up to 128GB of memory?
Re: Apple M5 chip
#285This 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.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can already do that, just how slow or fast you go depends on how much you're ready to pay for memory. It's a $1200 premium to go from 36GB to 128GB of unified memory, that cost is hard to justify unless you really need it, or if someone else is paying.
None is comparable to GPT-5 or Sonnet 4.5 experience
Re: Apple M5 chip
#287The modern Apple feels like their hardware teams way outperforming the software teams.
Re: Apple M5 chip
#288Did anyone else notice that the base storage has been upgraded to 512G? I knew this was coming after iPhone 17s storage upgrade!
Re: Apple M5 chip
#289And here I am, selling my Macbook M4 Pro to buy a Macbook Air and a dedicated gaming machine. I've tried gaming on the Macbook with Heroic, GPTK, Whiskey, RPCS3 emu and some native. When a game runs, the performance is stunning for a Laptop - but there is always glitches, bugs and annoyances that take out the joy. Needles to mention lack of support from any sort of online multiplayer, due to the lack of anticheat sup…
I agree—the difference between the different compatibility layers and native games is very steep at times. Death Stranding on my M2 Pro looks so good it’s hard to believe, but running GTA Online is so brittle and clunky… Even when games have native macOS builds, it’s rare to find them with Apple Silicon support (and even rarer with Metal support). There is a notable exception though: Arma 3 has experimental Apple Sil…
Death Stranding is a great looking game to be sure, but it's also kinda hard to get excited about a 5 year old game achieving rtx 2060 performance on a $2000+ system. And that was apparently worthy of a keynote feature...
Re: Apple M5 chip
#290M5 Chip currently only avaialble with up to 32 GB of RAM on the 14 inch Macbook pro variant, just FYI. [1] https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inc...
That's laughable in 2025, and together with the wimpy 153 GB/s memory bandwidth (come on, Strix Halo is 256GB/s at a fraction of the price!) they really don't have a leg to stand on calling this AI-anything!