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

MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 1001 posts

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#451

Post by ErneX »

satvikpendem wrote: post #134
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

The next macOS will be touch screen centric with elements getting bigger when you're close to touching them, rumors say. That being said, I run Tahoe and it works perfectly fine to me, I am not sure what issues people have with it. Sure, some corner radii aren't exactly the same but I honestly couldn't give less of a shit as long as it runs the programs I need.

I read a rumor about it being “touch friendly instead of touch 1st”.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#452

Post by petercooper »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #151
pdpi wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's reasonable to say that the people responding to surveys on Stack Overflow aren't the same people who work on pushing the state of the art in local LLM deployment. (which doesn't prove that that crowd is Apple-centric, of course)

Perhaps. Though Windows has been the majority share even when stack overflow was at it's peak, and before.

It's not the whole answer, but SO came from the .NET world and focused on it first so it had a disproportionately MS heavy audience for some time. GitHub had the same issue the other way around. Ruby was one of GitHub's top five languages for its first decade for similar reasons.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#453

Post by bilbo0s »

lastdong wrote: post #423
jbellis wrote: post #298

I chased down what the "4x faster at AI tasks" was measuring: > Testing conducted by Apple in January 2026 using preproduction 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 4TB SSD, and production 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB SSD. Time to first token measured with an 8K-to…

14-billion parameter model with 4-bit quantization seems rather small

It is.

That's how they make loot on their 128GB MacBook Pros. By kneecapping the cheap stuff. Don't think for a second that the specs weren't chosen so that professional developers would have to shell out the 8 grand for the legit machine. They're only gonna let us do the bare minimum on a MacBook Air.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#454

Post by re-thc »

whynotmaybe wrote: post #433
jbellis wrote: post #298

I chased down what the "4x faster at AI tasks" was measuring: > Testing conducted by Apple in January 2026 using preproduction 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 4TB SSD, and production 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB SSD. Time to first token measured with an 8K-to…

Quite interesting that it's now a selling point just like fps in Crysis was a long time ago.

Next is the fps of an AI playing Crysis.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#455

Post by asimovDev »

zffr wrote: post #399
heurs wrote: post #131

Honest question. Is it possible to install an earlier version of macOS on these machines? Liquid glass looks so.. unprofessional to my eyes. And I hear it's also unstable.

Yes. This page has several ways to get older macOS versions: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662 , but the earliest macOS version you can use on Apple Silicon is macOS 11. If you move your home directory to a different disk partition, you can even share it between two different macOS versions!

these Macs can't go below Tahoe. People on Mac Rumours were complaining about M5 MacBooks unable to install Sequoia, so it's safe to assume Pro/Max chips will be the same.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#456

Post by ErneX »

butILoveLife wrote: post #449

>unified memory This is just marketing speak. Stop repeating marketing. It isnt a walled garden, its a walled prison. Unified memory is just regular memory. There is nothing special about integrated GPUs.

Isn’t that is how it’s called though? PS4/PS5, Xbox consoles all referred to it like that on the spec sheets.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#457

Post by petercooper »

fulafel wrote: post #277
dirk94018 wrote: post #37

On 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).

So prompt goes in 4x as fast but generates tokens slower.

I'd take that tradeoff. On my M3 Ultra, the inference is surprisingly fast, but the prompt processing speed makes it painful except as a fallback or experimentation, especially with agentic coding tools.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#458

Post by Greed »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #424
Greed wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not. I've got a single one of those 512GB machines and it's pretty damn impressive for a local model.

Assuming you ran the gamut up from what you could fit on 32 or 64GB previously, how noticeable is the difference between models you can run on that vs. the 512GB you have now?

I've been working my way up from a 3090 system and I've been surprised by how underwhelming even the finetunes are for complex coding tasks, once you've worked with Opus. Does it get better? As in, noticeably and not just "hallucinates a few minutes later than usual"?

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#459

Post by causal »

tiffanyh wrote: post #170
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.…

> Are they doubling down on local LLMs then? Apple is in the hardware business. They want you to buy their hardware. People using Cloud for compute is essentially competitive to their core business.

"Doubling down on already being the best hardware for local inference"

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#460

Post by cardanome »

sgt wrote: post #373
jsheard wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB. No change from the previous models then, 16GB->32GB was already $400. They're cutting into their previously enormous margins to keep the prices stable, rather than hiking the prices to maintain their margins.

In practice, you can really go a long way on 16GB on a Mac with unified memory. I like to say it's comparable to 32GB during the old Intel days.

They advertise local LLMs which will be servery limited with 16GD of RAM. Plus the GPU could in theory provide decent gaming performance but again might suffer from the RAM limit.

Most people can totally live with 16gigs but it is kind of a waste for the horsepower. They know what they are doing. Apple is a master in upselling.

Though personally I don't mid the aggressive upsellign as long as the quality is there. Problem is, the hardware quality is great but the software side is severely lacking and getting worse.

Post reply on HN