They’re giving us extra storage… but they’ve put the price up by 200, which is as much as they charged for the storage anyway.
Why do you think the price went up by $200?
MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s exactly that. They are buying the base model just for that. You are not going to do much local AI with those 16GB of ram anyway, it could be useful for small things but the main purpose of the Mini is being able to interact with the apple apps and services.
No one is buying a base model Mac for local LLM. Everyone is forgetting the PC prices have drastically increased due to RAM and SSD. Meanwhile, Macs had no such price change… at least for the models that didn’t just drop today. Mac’s are just a good deal at the moment.
the new models cost $200 more for each 8GB of Ram you add.. Ouch...
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s exactly that. They are buying the base model just for that. You are not going to do much local AI with those 16GB of ram anyway, it could be useful for small things but the main purpose of the Mini is being able to interact with the apple apps and services.
No one is buying a base model Mac for local LLM. Everyone is forgetting the PC prices have drastically increased due to RAM and SSD. Meanwhile, Macs had no such price change… at least for the models that didn’t just drop today. Mac’s are just a good deal at the moment.
> Meanwhile, Macs had no such price change
Yeah because Mac upgrade prices were already sky high, long before the component shortage. 32GB of DDR5-6000 for a PC rocketed from $100 to $500, while the cost of adding 16GB to a Mac was and still is $400.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
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Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
With M3 Max with 64GB of unified ram you can code with a local LLM, so the bar is much lower
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if you're just unaware or purposefully dense. It's absolutely possible to get those numbers for certain models in a m4 max and it's averaged over many tokens, I was just getting 127tok/s for 700 token response on a 24b MoE model yesterday. I tend to use Qwen 3 Coder Next the most which is closer to 65 or 70 tok/s, but absolutely usable for dev work. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, many peop…
what inference runtime are you using? You mentioned mlx but I didn't think anyone was using that for local llms
LM Studio (which prioritizes MLX models if you're on Mac and they are available) - I have it setup with tailscale running as a server on my personal laptop. So when I'm working I can connect to it from my work laptop, from wherever I might be, and it's integrated through the Zed editor using its built in agent - it's pretty seamless. Then whenever I want to use my personal laptop I just unload the model and do other things. It's a really nice setup, definitely happy I got the 128gb mbp because I do a lot of video editing and 3d rendering work as a hobby/for fun and it's sorta dual purpose in that way, I can take advantage of the compute power when I'm not actually on the machine by setting it up as a LLM server.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#277On M4 Max 128GB we're seeing ~100 tok/s generation on a 30B parameter model in our from scratch inference engine. Very curious what the "4x faster LLM prompt processing" translates to in practice. Smallish, local 30B-70B inference is genuinely usable territory for real dev workflows, not just demos. Will require staying plugged in though.
The marketing subterfugue might be about this exactly, technically prompt processing means the prefill phase of inference. So prompt goes in 4x as fast but generates tokens slower.
This seems even likely as the memory bandwidth hasn't increased enough for those kinds of speedups, and I guess prefill is more likely to be compute-bound (vs mem bw bound).
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#278I feel like Apple pulled an Instant Pot with the M1 MacBook Pro. I still haven't had a single situation where I felt like spending more money would improve my experience. The battery is wearing out a bit, but it started out life with so much runtime that losing a few hours doesn't seem to matter.
I wish this sort of thing was encouraged in the modern capitalist technology space.
Unfortunately, number always must go up (and the rate at which the number goes up, also must go up).
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#279[flagged]
The RTX 5090 only has 32gb of VRAM. So the tradeoff is NVIDIA is for blazing speed in a tiny memory pool, but Apple Silicon has a larger memory pool at moderate speed.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#280The 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 moved away from mac because of the OS and couldn't be happier. The hardware may be great but non-Apple hardware is fine too, and Linux is significantly better experience than MacOS these days.