Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple M5 chip

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple M5 chip

#451

Post by charliebwrites »

cj wrote: post #434
paxys wrote: post #392

M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent Intel processor. Great! Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago. So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience not able to keep…

I’m not sure I see the disconnect. At our company we used to buy everyone MacBook Pros by default. After the M-series chip, the MBPs are just too powerful and no longer necessary for the average white collar worker (they seem like “actual” pro machines, now) to the point where we now order MacBook Airs for new employees. I feel like until recently, you really needed a MBP to get a decent UX (even just using chrome).…

Anecdotal, but I switched to an M3 MBA from an M1 MBP for my iOS and other dev related work

I’ve had zero problems with lag or compile time (prior to macOS 26 anyway)

The only thing it can’t do is run Ableton in a low latency way without strongly changing the defaults

You press a key on the keyboard to play a note and half a second later you hear it

Other than that, zero regrets

Re: Apple M5 chip

#452

Post by storus »

outcoldman wrote: post #183

Marketing: 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? --- 1. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unleashes-m5-th... 2. https://www…

M5 is supposed to support FP4 natively which would explain the speed up on Q4 quantized models (down from BF16).

Re: Apple M5 chip

#453

Post by taf2 »

thebitguru wrote: post #416
paxys wrote: post #392

M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent Intel processor. Great! Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago. So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience not able to keep…

Apple has also seemingly stopped caring about the quality and efficiency of their software. You can see this especially in the latest iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 versions of their operating systems. They need their software leadership to match their hardware leadership, otherwise good hardware with bad software still leads to bad product, which is what we are seeing now.

i think 15.6.1 (24G90) will be my last mac osx... omarchy is blazing fast

Re: Apple M5 chip

#454

Post by quitit »

paxys wrote: post #392

M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent Intel processor. Great! Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago. So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience not able to keep…

You wrote:

>Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago. So, where is the disconnect here?

They wrote:

> Together, they deliver up to 15 percent faster multithreaded performance over M4

The problem is comprehension, not marketing.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#455

Post by foota »

paxys wrote: post #392

M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent Intel processor. Great! Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago. So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience not able to keep…

User experience (for most things, unless you sit there encoding video all day) isn't really related to raw performance so much as latency. Processor power can help there, but design and at the limit memory latency is the key constraint.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#456

Post by Tagbert »

vintagedave wrote: post #398
paxys wrote: post #392

M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent Intel processor. Great! Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago. So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience not able to keep…

What scares me is that my M2 started seeing performance issues in macOS recently. Safari is sometimes slow (I admit I stress it with many tabs, but it wasn't like this a year ago.) Somehow the graphics in general seems slower on Tahoe, eg the effects when minimising a window. I am deeply concerned all the performance benefits of the new chips will get eaten away.

26.0 is very much a dot-zero release. It is missing a lot of optimizations and there are some open bugs like memory leaks. Initial reports on 26.1 show a lot of improvement in those. The 3rd beta of 26.1 just came out yesterday. They will probably launch this new version with improved optimizations by end of October.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#457

Post by drcongo »

thebitguru wrote: post #416
paxys wrote: post #392

M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent Intel processor. Great! Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago. So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience not able to keep…

Apple has also seemingly stopped caring about the quality and efficiency of their software. You can see this especially in the latest iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 versions of their operating systems. They need their software leadership to match their hardware leadership, otherwise good hardware with bad software still leads to bad product, which is what we are seeing now.

I see this sentiment a lot, but I've found the OS26 releases to be considerably better than the last few years' OS releases, especially macOS which actually feels coherent now compared to the last few years of janky half baked UI.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#458

Post by vachina »

mittermayr wrote: post #212

This morning I was looking to maybe replace my Macbook Pro 2018, which had the horrible keyboard and finally seems to be crippled enough to not be fun to use anymore — now this! However, I have been disappointed by Apple too many times (they wouldn't replace my keyboard despite their highly-flamed design-faux-pas, had to replace the battery twice by now, etc.) Two years ago I finally stopped replacing their expensive…

LG Gram SuperSlim. Very light (900grams). I once went hiking with it and forgot the laptop was still in the bag.

But its really only capable of high performance in short bursts because of the extremely small thermal mass.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#459

Post by random3 »

bangaladore wrote: post #445
random3 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The disconnect is that you're reading sideways. First line on their website: > M5 delivers over 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI compared to M4 It's the GPU not the CPU (which you compare with your old Intel) and it's an AI workload, not your regular workload (which again is what you compare)

And they are comparing peak compute. Which means essentially nothing.

There was a time when Apple decided throwing random technical numbers shouldn't be the news (those were following the times of Megahertz counting). These times have been changing post Steve Jobs. This said, it is a chip announcement rather than a product announcement, so maybe that is the news.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#460

Post by zulban »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #371
lazypenguin wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I’ve seen, Apple is to blame here as they usually make it harder to target their platform and don’t really try to cooperate with the rest of the industry. As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently download a VM

for games, how would you test in a VM, when games so explicitly want direct hardware access? i am obviously misunderstanding something, i mean.

I run Linux and test my Windows releases on a VM. It works great.

Sure, I'm not doing performance benchmarking and it's just smoke tests and basic user stories, but that's all that 98% of indie developers do for cross platform support.

Apple has been intensely stupid as a platform to launch on, though I did do it eventually. I didn't like Apple before and now I like it even less.

Post reply on HN