It doesn't feel like much has changed from the previous gen? Just a new chip + memory?
What did you expect?
MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
401–410 of 1001 posts
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The increased adoption of webviews has resulted in a death by a thousand cuts effect on Windows 11 performance. The speed bump that comes from going from an up to date Windows 11 install to a up to date Windows 10 install on the same machine is stunning… W10 is much more snappy in every regard despite being nearly identical functionally speaking. I won’t try to claim that Electron and friends have no place is softwar…
> but we absolutely should be pushing back
Every modern desktop uses webviews in some capacity. macOS renders many apps with webviews, GNOME uses gjs to script half the desktop. The time to push back was 10-20 years ago, it's too late to revert now.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#403Was hoping to see Apple break the 128GB barrier in a laptop that they previously set, though 128GB is still pretty sweet for local LLM inference on consumer hardware. My 128GB M3 Max is still shredding tokens pretty well (with that annoying slow initial prompt processing), so no major complaints there. I guess the question is, given access to the same amount of RAM, does the M5 really do an order-of-magnitude better than 128GB on a M3 or M4?
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#404Whoah, 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…
Whoah, both the Pro and Max CPUs feature 18 cores. This hasn't happened since M1 Pro/Max. This is a surprise.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#405I barely push my M2 Pro MBPs. Most of my wants aren't hardware-related, they're software-related. How it runs some games from 10-20 years ago very well, but only through hacky compatibility layers that shouldn't be necessary. How some parts of the OS have gotten "out of sync" with each other.
Actually, I can think of one hardware want: have they gotten it to where you can do external GPUs and the like more easily?
Would still buy one over any other laptop on the market today for what I use them for.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#406Still why especially for Pro there is still version with 24 GB of RAM? It is scary....
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#407Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm kind of curious how Apple's supply contracts actually work, because it's currently more attractive to buy a Mac with a lot of RAM than it usually is, relative to a PC. So if it's "we negotiated a price and you give us as much RAM as we sell machines" the company supplying the RAM is getting soaked because they're having to supply even more RAM to Apple for a below-market price.
But if the contract was for a specific amount of RAM and then people start coming to Apple more for high RAM machines, they're going to exhaust their contract sooner than usual and run out of cheap memory to buy. Then they have to decide if they want to lower their margins or raise the already-high price up to nosebleed levels.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#409I have absolutely no need and yet I want ittttt
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#410Why doesn't this excite me anymore?
Because it's the same shit every year for the past 5 years with the M line. 2010 to 2015 was a major improvement, 2015 to 2020 was a major improvement, now they pretty much solved the computer/laptop problem for 99% of people. I'm on a 16gb m1 air, I see absolutely no reason to update.
Watch this video if you have time: https://youtu.be/6AtTk3XoQVs
TL;DW: 2010s intel mac era laptops have seen at very best 35% single core CPU performance over in 5 years time! This happens almost every year now with M line macs.
Rant:
Retina macs were great and had great form factor over unibody macs. Touch-bar macs in the mid 2010s was IMHO a disaster. Terrible keyboard, poorer thermal capacity, missing essential ports, adapters galore.
But when it comes to performance - early 2010s macbooks with dedicated gpus had serious overheating issues.
Retina macbooks were decent, both form factor and performance.
Touch-bar macs were totally abysmal, all performance gains over previous generations was all through pumping more heat. CPUs constantly pegged at 90C+, cannot have laptop on your lap, Apple planning and delaying release schedules around intel fumbling their tik/tok cycles (as far as i remember some macs did not get any improvements for 2 years+ if not way more). Upgrades sometimes were total jokes, because of thermal throttling there was no point to put more hardware than it could work with. From reviews buying higher level cpu sometimes didn’t give noticeable real life gains because, again, thermal throttling kicking in instantly. 2020 intel macbook pro has fans spinning almost all the time. Having a remote call - your battery is dead in 2h max (essentially 1% per 1min).
M1 mac gave insane perceived performance boost - no noticeable throttling. Macbook airs are fully passively cooled, never heard M Macbook pro with fans screeching.
Also real full work day battery doing real work without power adapter at full performance. Cool to touch most of the time.
I made homework for a job in 2020 on a 2013 personal macbook. Apart from memory footprint - I could not feel noticeable difference on development experience. Editing images was frustrating on both. With M macs - its silent, smooth fast.
Number of parallel cores matching best intel cpus on base models, GPU blowing any mobile gpu in price range out of the water with thermal capacity to peg it 100% no problem. Unified memory for those GPUs to do what you could only imagined doing on GPUs that cost 3 times more than the macbook.
It’s a such excellent architecture that yeah - it’s “boring” you can nitpick about M69 Ultra Pro Max performance, but take a base MBP of any M line and it blows almost any laptop out of the water, even to this day.