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MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

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Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#511

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.

Many of the CLI tools have been updated to recent FreeBSD versions.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#512
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With M3 Max with 64GB of unified ram you can code with a local LLM, so the bar is much lower

But why? Spending several thousand dollars to run sub-par models when the break-even point could still be years away seems bizarre for any real usecase where your goal is productivity over novelty. Anyone who has used Codex or Opus can attest that the difference between those and a locally available model like Qwen or Codestral is night and day. To be clear, I totally get the idea of running local LLMs for toy reason…

I ran the qwen 3.5 35b a3b q4 model locally on a ryzen server with 64k context window and 5-8 tokens a second.

It is the first local model I've tried which could reason properly. Similar to Gemini 2.5 or sonnet 3.5. I gave it some tools to call , asked claude to order it around, (download quotes, print charts, set up a gnome extension) even claude was sort of impressed that it could get the job done.

Point is, it is really close. It isn't opus 4.5 yet, but very promising given the size. Local is definitely getting there and even without GPUs.

But you're right, I see no reason to spend right now.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#513

I love the following section of their copy: > Even More Value for Upgraders > The new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max mark a major leap for pro users. There’s never been a better time for customers to upgrade from a previous generation of MacBook Pro with Apple silicon or an Intel-based Mac. I read as "Whoops we made the M1 Macbook Pro too good, please upgrade!" I think I will get another 2-5 years…

My 32gb m1 max was probably the best purchase I've made. Still plenty of headroom in performance left in this beast. Wonder what reason they'll use to end software support in the future. Bet it'll be some security hardware they make up for the sake of forcing upgrades.

Some of my M1 MBP Max keys are losing their coating, and the battery is at 74% capacity. At some point soon I'll need a service. But other than that, I have no real complaints. Even the case edge where my arms constantly rest doesn't look too bad.

My next MBP will have 128GB memory, but these prices just wanna make me wait longer.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#514
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is simply marketing nonsense - what they really mean (I think) is they support matrix multiplication (matmul) at the hardware level which given AI is mostly matrix multiplications you'll get much faster inference (and some increase in training too) on this new hardware. I'm looking forward to seeing how fast a local 96gb+ LLM is on the M5 Max with 128gb of RAM.

We've already established in this thread that memory bandwidth isn't that much greater than M4 Max - 12%? However, I wonder if batched inference will benefit greatly from the vastly improved compute. My guess is that parallel usage of the same model will be a couple times faster. So, single "threaded" use not that much better, but say you want to run a lot of batch jobs, it'd be way faster?

Is this a reply to a different comment?

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#515
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. this is my exact opposite experience. my M3 Max from 2 years ago now has <2hrs battery life at best. wondering if any experts here can help me figure out what is going on? what should i be expecting?

My M3 Max can burn through battery much faster than my M1 Max ever could. And some apps are really inefficient. New Codex app drains my battery. If you are using Codex I recommend minimizing it, since it’s the UI that uses most power.

A couple weeks ago I was working remote and didn't bring a power adapter, and I realized a couple hours in that my battery was getting kind of low. I clicked on the battery icon and got a list of what was using a lot of power: 1 was an hour long video chat using Google Meet, the other was Claude desktop (which I hadn't used at all that morning).

What in the world is an idle Claude Desktop doing that uses so much power?

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my tinfoil hat theory is that they make small features depend on new hardware. for example, let's say the new os depends on m5's exclusive thumbnail generator accelerator, and let's say it improves speed by a 20%. now, your M1 notebook than on previous OSes uses standard gpu acceleration for thumbnails will not have this specialized hardware acceleration, it will have software fallback that will be 90% slower. you wo…

yes pretty much this. make useless features use up resources and make basic scrolling slow. the Liquid Glass for example probably is not so great when it comes to resources. Probably works better with latest metal and hardware blocks on the GPU in M5 as opposed to using GPU cores and unified memory on 8gb M1 making latest macOS work not so great. I have the M1 8gb air and it is really slow on Tahoe. It was snappy jus…

I downgraded today for the first time in my life. Sequoia is crazy fast in my MacBook Air m2 16gb

Not upgrading any of my Macs ever again. I was a fanboy looking for every new update like a present, for 13 years, not anymore. It took one Tahoe burn all that trust. Never upgrading major OS versions on hardware from Apple again.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#517

I love the following section of their copy: > Even More Value for Upgraders > The new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max mark a major leap for pro users. There’s never been a better time for customers to upgrade from a previous generation of MacBook Pro with Apple silicon or an Intel-based Mac. I read as "Whoops we made the M1 Macbook Pro too good, please upgrade!" I think I will get another 2-5 years…

My 32gb m1 max was probably the best purchase I've made. Still plenty of headroom in performance left in this beast. Wonder what reason they'll use to end software support in the future. Bet it'll be some security hardware they make up for the sake of forcing upgrades.

Ditto, I don't see myself upgrading in the near future, the 64GB M1 Max I paid 2499 at the end of 2023 still feels like a new machine, nothing I do can slow it down. Apple kept OS updated for around 6 years in Intel times, I don't see how they can drop support for this one tbh. I'm still paying for apple care since I depend on it so much

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because your countries mandate no power adapter for some stupid ewaste reason.

They didn't: https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/16/no-the-eu-didnt-ban-apple-fro... Devices should be offered without a charger. There's no law that states that that should be the default configuration. Nor that the charger should cost extra.

I know EU didn't ban chargers, but the common American sentiment somehow molded into that.

It is interesting to see how mass-propaganda is playing out right before our eyes...

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#519
post #367

I 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.

> 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. this is my exact opposite experience. my M3 Max from 2 years ago now has <2hrs battery life at best. wondering if any experts here can help me figure out what is going on? what should i be expecting?

As others have said, keep the battery in the 80%-30% range. Use the `batt` CLI tool to hard limit your max charge to 80%. Sadly, if you're already down to I type this from an M3 Max 2023 MBP that still has 98% battery health. But admittedly it's only gone through 102 charge cycles in ~2 years.

(use `pmset -g rawbatt` to get cycle count or `system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep -A3 'Health'` to get health and cycles)

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not cheap, though. Two weeks ago I bought a computer with a similar form factor (GMKtec G10). Worse CPU and GPU but same 16GB memory and a larger SSD for 40% the price of a base mac mini ($239 vs $599). It came with Windows preinstalled, but I immediately wiped that to install linux. Even a used (M-series) mac mini is substantially more expensive. It will cost me about an extra penny per day in electricity costs…

It's cheap for what you get. If you just need "a small box to make API calls and do minimal local processing" you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price of the GMKtec G10. All 3 serve a different purpose; just because you can buy a slower machine for less doesn't mean the price:performance of the M1 Mac Mini changes.

>you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price

lol. you need to look at rpi 5 prices again. they are insane.

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