Due to pricing insanity (not that Apple prices weren’t insane before the ram/ssd shortages) I’m not in the market but I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked. Might be better to just run a Studio and Neo for the very few times I actually need remote capabilities.
I would not use Neo, Air with 24 GB ram should be your minimum because you will want to do some work locally even when you're running a VPN/SSH thin client setup. I'm currently SSH-ing into my workstation from my M4 Air with 24 gb ram and it's ideal for this flow. Slack/editors/clients/browsers/etc. easily gobble up over 16 GB. I have no more dev tools/compilers/source on my client machines, everything is dockered up…
New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
311–320 of 570 posts
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#312Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me the idea of working on (non-docked) laptop always seemed like an idea that you would do only if there is no other possible way. Screen is small and is only one. Ergonomics is entirely messed up. Either your screen is too low, or your keyboard is too high. Keyboards are non-ergonomic and have to be made with compromises due to height limits. Touchpad instead of mouse/trackball is compromise for many - and also s…
It sounds like you don't code much in bed or with your feet up. A laptop is a distinct tool from a desktop and if you try to use it like a desktop, I agree it is a terrible substitute. Personally I find laptops vastly more ergonomic than a desktop, but I never program with my feet on the ground.
I've found my smartphone's the best device for that. I wrote an entire programming language using my phone.
Been trying to make a handheld cyberdeck to replace the phone with something better, but it's still a long way from being real.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#31410 grand for 256GB memory. Likely double that for 512GB, but won't be available or finalized until October. Thunderbolt 5 is highest bandwidth external IO available at 120Gb/s. 1.2TB/s claimed max internal memory bandwidth. Not exactly "future proof" for >1T parameter models but good for targeting specific lower-parameter models, or if you can rely on pipeline parallelism and run a cluster.
> Not exactly "future proof" Computers are never "future proof".
i'm still using an old i7 3770k @ 4.8ghz with 16gb (ddr3) ram running linux for random tasks like executing tests. obviously, power consumption is higher.
my main machine is a MBP M1 Max which i use for everything. i also have my main linux desktop workstation that has a 5950x with 128gb (ddr4) ram.
i'll probably get 2-5 years out of my MBP, and my AMD workstation will probably be good for another 5-10 years.
i'm not a gamer, but i have a 3080. i'm sure my 5950x will still be good for gaming in 10 years if paired with a modern GPU.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus remote work is getting easier and easier. There are so few instances when I'm not able to get online. If we lived in a world where hardware were getting cheaper, it might make sense to splurge. In this environment I think the Neo is perfect.
Build quality of the Neo is extremely good, I love the keyboard — it’s more tactile and reminds me of early 2010s MacBooks. I’ll be selling my M4 MBA soon, I genuinely use the Neo more. Huge difference in typing experience. Great repairability is a plus. It was super easy, and actually fun to open. Felt like unboxing an Apple product. Applied the thermal paste mod for $10 which works excellently; I’ve had it shortly…
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#316Due to pricing insanity (not that Apple prices weren’t insane before the ram/ssd shortages) I’m not in the market but I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked. Might be better to just run a Studio and Neo for the very few times I actually need remote capabilities.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 10 grand for 256GB memory. A NVIDIA RTX 6000, 96 GB at 1.7 TB/s, is 13 grand. This 256 GB at 1.2 TB/s Mac is extremely competitive, it will be sold out everywhere.
The relevant comparison isn't one mac studio to one RTX 6000, it's a 24 channel DDR5 system, which also has ~1.2TB/s of memory bandwidth (or more when Xeon 6 compatible 8800mt/s memory becomes widely available), vastly higher prefill due to more CPU horsepower, orders of magnitude faster networking, can hook into GPU accelerators, can be upgraded etc. A baseline 384GB system from eg Puget is ~30K vs ~12K for the 256G…
It feels like PCIe is a bit of a boat anchor here. There's a SATA->NVMe style transition waiting in the wings to make this all so much better. We really need post-PCIe GPUs. CXL with it's very small low latency flits. This is an "almost certainly not" but I wonder if you could mix PCIe and CXL so you could have the GPU memory expose vmeme as a bunch of CXL.mem pools but still have an otherwise pretty normal GPU. It seems madness that UALink went all in on GPU-to-GPU with no affordances for connecting to host computers.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#318Due to pricing insanity (not that Apple prices weren’t insane before the ram/ssd shortages) I’m not in the market but I do wonder if my next computer should be a Mac Studio instead of a MBP that lives its life docked. Might be better to just run a Studio and Neo for the very few times I actually need remote capabilities.
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#3191.2 TB/s bandwidth of M5 Ultra comes from two dies of M5 Max (each 614 GB/s) connected together using 4.4 TB/s inter-die fabric. For a non-quantized Deepseek V4 flash on an ultra, I would estimate about 1000+ tokens per second prefill and 50+ tokens per second on generation. This is actually quite usable and near parity to cloud. They mention "adds the GPU Neural Accelerators." which, if exploitable for LLM loads, wo…
Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
I enjoyed "up to an 80-core GPU, and a staggering 512GB of unified memory" Staggering?? I can count on no hands the number of times that a fact or figure has caused me to stagger.
Idk 512GB of (essentially) ram is pretty damn insane for a consumer machine