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MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

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251–260 of 1001 posts

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#251
My M3 Pro with 18gb of ram still feels like a beast. The only thing I can make it suffer with so far is generating meshes from 3D scanning, and even then I'm just patient. Apple is suffering from success with these older laptops, it's a tough sell to upgrade, even from the M1 Max folks.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#252
post #19
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.…

"Apple Intelligence is even more capable while protecting users’ privacy at every step." Remains to be seen how capable it actually is. But they're certainly trying to sell the privacy aspect.

> Remains to be seen how capable it actually is.

It's the best. We all turned it off. 100% privacy.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NVIDIA RTX 5090 already offers 1,792 GB/s You can buy two m5 pro base model for the same price as a single 5090...

That's a fun comparison, but can you run those 2 m5 pros in parallel to accomplish 2x the work? Otherwise, you just told me you can buy 2 toyota corollas for the price of 1 F-150 while trying to convince me you can haul your boat behind both corollas at the same time.

You can also buy a 64gb mini, save $1k and do more work than what you could do with a single 5090.

In Europe I can get a 128gb mac studio m4 max for 300 euros more than a 5090 (for which you still need to buy a power supply, motherboard, cpu , &c.)

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#254
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…

Preorders open tomorrow according to the store page. You can’t order the base RAM model today, either.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#255
post #133

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.

Contrary to HN popular belief, there are neither incentives nor benefits to building native ui apps, for neither consumer nor professional apps. The exception is apps that only make sense on a single platform, such as window management and other deep integration. On iOS/macos you have a segment of indie/smaller apps that capture a niche market of powerusers for things like productivity apps. But the point is it makes…

Strong disagree. I think Microsoft’s decision to wrap web apps for the desktop is one of the stupidest they have ever made. It provides poor user experience, uses more battery power and needs more memory and CPU to be performant and creates inconsistencies and wierd errors compared to native apps.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#256

And your native CLI tools will continue to be from 2011 with 0 attention paid to the dev experience until it’s Swift, and we’ll continue to lock you out of running programs from other human beings we didn’t approve without a 6 step ritual in the OS. Oh and all apps will continue to constantly phone home i.e. pay for the machine so Google Adobe and Microsoft can run updaters and telemetry on it all day.

Good point about the telemetry part. I've been using Little Snitch for the past few years and just block all the telemetry calls.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#257
Can someone comment on the new dual die thing they’re promoting for how they make the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips?

How is that different from the silicon interposer they were using before?

The big change is the two dies don’t have to fabbed next to each other in a single wafer, which is fantastic for costs and yields. But would this affect the interconnect speed somehow?

How would the two be wired together?

Could this mean the Ultra comes back in M6 since it would be easier to fab?

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#258
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is "us" in this case? Majority of devs that took the stack overflow survey use Windows: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#1-computer-...

That's the broad developer community. 90%+ of the engineers at Big Tech and the technorati startups are on MacOS with 5% on Linux and the other 5% on Windows.

> 90%+ of the engineers at Big Tech and the technorati startups

The US 1s? Is that why we have Deepseek and then other non-US open source LLMs catching up rapidly?

World view please. The developer community is not US only.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its just marketing, and the marketing is working. Look how many people bought Minis and ended up just paying for API calls anyway. (Saw it IRL 2x, see it on reddit openclaw daily) I don't mind it, I open Apple stock. But I'm def not buying into their rebranding of integrated GPU under the guise of Unified Memory.

Jeff Geerling had a video of using 4 Mac Studios each with 512GB RAM connected by Thunderbolt. Each machine is around $10K so this isn't cheap but the performance is impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_RsUxRjKU

If 40k is the barrier to entry for impressive, that doesn't really sell the usecase of local LLMs very well.

For the same price in API calls, you could fund AI driven development across a small team for quite a long while.

Whether that remains the case once those models are no longer subsidized, TBD. But as of today the comparison isn't even close.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#260
post #122

Nano-texture is worth the upgrade if you are on a macbookpro whatever M and dont have it. For those of us with astigmatism it's really night and day experience.

I was considering it but got cold feet when I've been told that you could damage it when cleaning it. When I open/close my laptop I leave a ton of finger prints. I'm not too good with delicate hardware stuff.

Why are you touching the screen when you open/close your laptop??? Do you close your car doors with the window?
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