MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max • Hacker News Board

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#21

Post by jeroenhd » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

wincy wrote: post #12

I typed “RAM” to search for it and boy they hammer home how lucky I am to be getting 1TB SSD standard, but no mention of RAM anywhere on this page. Anyway, the MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of RAM. It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB. Interestingly, 36-128GB models are showing as “currently unavailable” on the store page, and you can’t even place an order for them right now? But for anyone curious, it’s quoting $5099 fo…

I know RAM is scarce and everything, but doubling down on LLM local acceleration with all of that dedicated silicon while at the same time sticking with Apple's traditional lack of RAM availability makes for a very weird product proposition to me.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#22

Post by aurareturn » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

wincy wrote: post #12

I typed “RAM” to search for it and boy they hammer home how lucky I am to be getting 1TB SSD standard, but no mention of RAM anywhere on this page. Anyway, the MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of RAM. It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB. Interestingly, 36-128GB models are showing as “currently unavailable” on the store page, and you can’t even place an order for them right now? But for anyone curious, it’s quoting $5099 fo…

It starts at 16GB for the base M5 and 24GB for the Pro/Max. It's been like this.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#23

Post by cced » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #4

Whoah, both the Pro and Max CPUs feature 18 cores. This hasn't happened since M1 Pro/Max. This is a surprise. Also, the mix of cores have changed drastically. - 6 "Super cores" - 12 "Performance cores" I'm guessing these are just renamed performance and efficiency cores from previous generations. This is a massive change from the M4 Max: - 12 performance cores - 4 efficiency cores This seems like a downgrade (in core…

So they renamed performance to mean efficiency and are now using super in place of performance?

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#24

Post by chippiewill » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

egwor wrote: post #8

I thought that new models were typically released in October. Have I misremembered or is this an unusual timing vs previous years? If so, I wonder why the earlier release?

They didn't update them last October is why.

I think at this point Apple will just release new versions of laptops whenever new CPU revisions and yields allow. M5 Pro wasn't ready for October so delayed until now.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#25

Post by carlmr » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

nsbk wrote: post #7

The hardware looks amazing! Too bad they will ship with Tahoe installed. I’m not upgrading until I see in which direction the next Mac OS release goes

I've upgraded to Tahoe at 26.2, zero complaints from my side. Haven't had any runaway memory leaks or similar that were reported.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#26

Post by whizzter » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

Tangokat wrote: post #5

"Scaling up performance from M5 and offering the same breakthrough GPU architecture with a Neural Accelerator in each core, M5 Pro and M5 Max deliver up to 4x faster LLM prompt processing than M4 Pro and M4 Max, and up to 8x AI image generation than M1 Pro and M1 Max." Are they doubling down on local LLMs then? I still think Apple has a huge opportunity in privacy first LLMs but so far I'm not seeing much execution.…

We had a workshop 6 months ago and while I've always been sceptical of OpenAI,etc's silly AGI/ASI claims, the investments have shown the way to a lot of new technology and has opened up a genie that won't be put back into the bottle.

Now extrapolating in line with how Sun servers around year 2000 cost a fortune and can be emulated by a 5$ VPS today, Apple is seeing that they can maybe grab the local LLM workloads if they act now with their integrated chip development.

But to grab that, they need developers to rely less on CUDA via Python or have other proper hardware support for those environments, and that won't happen without the hardware being there first and the machines being able to be built with enough memory (refreshing to see Apple support 128gb even if it'll probably bleed you dry).

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#27

Post by edvinasbartkus » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

wincy wrote: post #12

I typed “RAM” to search for it and boy they hammer home how lucky I am to be getting 1TB SSD standard, but no mention of RAM anywhere on this page. Anyway, the MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of RAM. It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB. Interestingly, 36-128GB models are showing as “currently unavailable” on the store page, and you can’t even place an order for them right now? But for anyone curious, it’s quoting $5099 fo…

on Silicon Mac's it's never called RAM, it "unified memory"

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#28

Post by TheCapeGreek » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

wincy wrote: post #12

I typed “RAM” to search for it and boy they hammer home how lucky I am to be getting 1TB SSD standard, but no mention of RAM anywhere on this page. Anyway, the MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of RAM. It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB. Interestingly, 36-128GB models are showing as “currently unavailable” on the store page, and you can’t even place an order for them right now? But for anyone curious, it’s quoting $5099 fo…

Apple's RAM price bumps were already insane, now they'll get worse.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#29

Post by pixelesque » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

Interesting that they're showing VFX/CG software (Autodesk MAYA and Foundry Nuke) so prominently - obviously people using "Pro" machines are the target audience for this, but both of those apps (any many others in the industry) use Qt for the interface, rather than being totally platform-native.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#30

Post by mikert89 » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

testfrequency wrote: post #15

I have a fairly maxed out M2 Ultra (24 cores, 192GB RAM), and still cannot get this machine to choke on anything. I have not once felt the need to upgrade in years, and that’s with doing pretty demanding 3D and LLM work.

Yeah I have an M1 Max, and I really want to upgrade, but there’s no reason to.