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New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

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Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#551

Post by diffeomorphism »

mrkstu wrote: post #374
coldpie wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of us in America have no sales tax Not that many of us, actually. Only Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, and some parts of Delaware and Alaska have no sales tax. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sales_tax_by_county....

I'm sure plenty of Idahoans and Washingtonians, for instance, take advantage of their neighbor status for high ticket items like this...

Except that you then have to pay a "use tax" of 6%:

https://tax.idaho.gov/taxes/sales-use/use-tax/online-guide/

This is difficult to enforce, but it seems that "taking advantage" is strictly speaking just tax fraud.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#552

Post by chocrates »

joshstrange wrote: post #7

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.

Why use mac at all? If you want a docked machine you can build a PC with the exact specs you want. Throw a Linux distro on it and you will have a similar experience

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#553

Post by pettijohn »

chmod775 wrote: post #329
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not exactly "future proof" Computers are never "future proof".

They do however last a much longer time now. A 8 years old graphics card can still play modern games. Ten years ago playing a modern game on hardware that old would've been unthinkable. And with how the market is right now, we'll be stuck on the current "reference level" of hardware for a while longer.

I recently got a refurbished Strix Halo 128GB desktop for a steal ($2200) and I have a feeling it's going to be my last PC purchase for the next 3-5 years. Who knows how long this RAMpocalypse will last. My Lunar Lake 32GB laptop is already a couple years old, and it's not a speed demon but it ticks all the laptop boxes (portable, great battery).

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#554

Post by Damogran6 »

chocrates wrote: post #552
joshstrange wrote: post #7

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.

Why use mac at all? If you want a docked machine you can build a PC with the exact specs you want. Throw a Linux distro on it and you will have a similar experience

Because it's NOT the same experience. iCloud access, shared messages, Cut and paste between other Mac devices..I say this with a Ryzen 9 + rtx4090 super right next to the macs. (A studio and an M1 MBP with a new battery).

While they're theoretically at parity, in actual use, they're not.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#555

Post by Spooky23 »

joshstrange wrote: post #7

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.

This was my perspective for a long time. The issue is the Macbook Pro screen is awesome, and the display story for desktop computers is pretty grim.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#556

Post by jdcasale »

epolanski wrote: post #124
jdcasale wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd consider a 1tb machine at 20k, but I'm not going to pick up a 256gb one at all. 1TB fits a frontier-ish model in memory without massive quantization, which is a very interesting capability for a non-rack piece of compute.

But why...? At that point just rent proper GPUs in the cloud, you'd have way more power and pay only what you use for.

I think that within the next year or two we'll have the ability to put a frontier-class model on our desks, and I like the idea of playing around with that today to get ahead of it. I could be wrong, I often am.

I'm not optimizing for $$$ spent today and agree that this isn't the cheapest solution to a specific capability problem, but I don't super mind paying for a cool piece of compute that I can do some fun (and educational) stuff with.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#557

Post by alerighi »

LandR wrote: post #523
mrheosuper wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Computers are never "future proof". Till now. My thinkpad t14g1 with 16gb ram somehow still relevant today.

My main PC at home is 15 years old at this point, running linux. It's fine. I don't play games, but it still chugs along perfectly fine and for what I use it for I rarely think that it's too slow.

Same thing, I still have at home a desktop I've built when I was 17 (now I'm 30!) and still runs fine for day to day tasks, of course with Linux on it. It has 8Gb of RAM (DDR3), 512Gb SSD (not original of course because back then they did cost an astronomic price) and an i7 CPU that I've overclocked, an NVIDIA GPU with 2Gb of memory that still plays older games fine.

To me there is no reason to update a PC if you don't use Windows or MacOS that forces you to purchase a new hardware to do the same things. Just look at Windows 11, full of useless AI features, weights a ton, and in the end it's probably faster a PC from 25 years ago with Windows XP.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#558

Post by bmacho »

loehnsberg wrote: post #404
AshleyGrant wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a definite mental aspect for most WFH folks to having a space that is dedicated to work. I'm not unique in saying this, but the way I put it is "If you work from anywhere in your house, then you're always at work." And that, from mental load standpoint, is not healthy for most folks.

On some days I wor from home but need to be present and the sun is out. So I take my laptop outside and work from there. I cannot do this with a desktop. Wouldn‘t the workaholic just stay inside and miss out?

What if there was a way to use your home computer from a very cheap laptop?

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#559

Post by jmull »

dakolli wrote: post #290
GodelNumbering wrote: post #150

1.2 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…

How much would is the cost for that machine though, I'm pretty sure I could just buy tokens from a provider and never run out of money for 10 years, and get far better quality output because inference is being served by professionals on far better hardware and this machine would be obsolete long before that as well. Hosting local seems like a possibly the dumbest thing you could possibly do from an economics perspect…

One way to gauge how close to viable local inference is the quality of the arguments against it are.

$100/mo for ten years is $12K. $200/mo is $24K. When you look at the valuations of the companies providing these tokens, you don't necessarily see these rates going down.

Your argument against privacy is so obviously bad I don't think it needs a response.

Today, most companies and individuals (including me) are still going to be buying tokens from the cloud. But for many it makes sense to go local today, and it seems pretty clear the day where we turn the corner isn't that far away. E.g., suppose the RAMpocalyse eases in 3 years and Apple releases the M7 ultra, which has actually been designed for local inference (and other players are making their moves as well). I suspect it will become something of a no-brainer to do most inference locally, perhaps supplemented by lighter usage of per-token plans from the cloud for access to specialized models.

Re: New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

#560

Post by alerighi »

drnick1 wrote: post #204

Why doesn't Apple make a tower PC with a standard ATX motherboard, power supply, extension cards, etc, like in the old days? That's immensely more upgradable, easier to cool, and I don't believe most people expect their desktops PCs to be tiny.

For this reason: more upgradable

Apple wants to sell you a new system every couple of years, they don't want you to upgrade. They want you to throw it away the system completely and replace it (and they claim they are environmentally sustainable, btw) when in the PC world you would replace RAM, CPU, GPU, motherboard, maybe the SSD, but surely you can keep the power supply for decades, keep cooling fans, not talking about the chassis that could last 50 years because it's a just metal box.

They are a rip off these products, and I don't understand people that buys them.

BTW even when Apple did produce towers like Mac Pro they did so in a purposely non-standard way, such that you couldn't, for example, replace the PSU with a standard ATX one, the only standard components were really RAM, HDD, CD-ROM drive and in Intel models the CPU, and of course PCI expansion boards (sort of, because to work GPUs needed to have an Apple specific firmware in the old PowerPC models). You couldn't for example upgrade the motherboard, if you wanted to change the CPU to a new generation you also needed to buy a entirely new Mac with a new chassis, new PSU, etc even if what you had were perfectly fine.

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