Live data from Hacker News

Apple M5 chip

apple.com

101–110 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple M5 chip

#101
post #34
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memory capacity to me is an even bigger problem, at 32GB max.

That'll come in the MacBook Pro etc cycle, like last time, then you'll have 512GB RAM

Is the M4 Ultra even out yet? I can't see anything with 512 GB but the M3 Ultra on the Mac Studio (for a cool $4000 more).

Re: Apple M5 chip

#102
post #2

This is only the base model, no upgrades yet for the Pro/Max version. The memory bandwidth is 153GB/s which is not enough to run viable open source LLM models properly.

I am interested to learn why models move so much data per second. Where could I learn more that is not a ChatGPT session?

Re: Apple M5 chip

#103

The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet). All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware. Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same task…

The Broadcom WiFi support 320Mhz while N1 is stuck with 160Mhz. There were report of N1 not supporting 4096 QAM as well but I didn't check.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#104

And here I am, selling my Macbook M4 Pro to buy a Macbook Air and a dedicated gaming machine. I've tried gaming on the Macbook with Heroic, GPTK, Whiskey, RPCS3 emu and some native. When a game runs, the performance is stunning for a Laptop - but there is always glitches, bugs and annoyances that take out the joy. Needles to mention lack of support from any sort of online multiplayer, due to the lack of anticheat sup…

Yeah I agree. If it weren't for gaming I would have already uninstalled Windows permanently. It's really unfortunate because it sticks out as the one product in my house that I truly despise but I can't get rid of, due to gaming.

I've been trying to get Unreal Engine to work on my Macbook but Unity is an order of magnitude easier to run. So I'm also stuck doing game development on my PC. The Metal APIs exist and apparently they're quite good... it's a shame that more engines don't support it.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#105
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people blame the lack of OpenGL/Vulkan... but I really don't buy it. It doesn't pass the sniff test as an objection. PlayStation doesn't support OpenGL/Vulkan (they have their own proprietary APIs, GNM, GNMX, PSSL). Nintendo supports Vulkan but performance is so bad, almost everyone uses the proprietary API (NVN / NVN2). Xbox obviously doesn't accept OpenGL/Vulkan either, requiring DirectX. Understanding of Meta…

The primary reason is Apple's environment is too unstable for gaming's most common business model. Most games are developed, released, and then sold for years and years with little or no maintenance. Additionally, gamers expect the games they purchased to continue to work indefinitely. Apple regularly breaks backwards compatibility in a wide variety of ways (code signing requirements; breaking OS API changes; hardwar…

Game developers make most of the money shortly after a game release, so having a 15 years old game not working anymore shouldn't make much difference in term of revenues.

Anyway, the whole situation was quite bad. Many games were still 32-bit, even if macOS itself had been mainly 64-bit for almost 10 years or more. And Valve didn't help either, the Steam store is full of 64-bit mislabeled as 32-bit. They could have written a simple script to check whether a game is actually 64-bit or not, instead they decided to do nothing and keep their chaos.

The best solution would have been a lightweight VM to run old 32-bit games, nowadays computer are powerful enough to do so.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#106

And here I am, selling my Macbook M4 Pro to buy a Macbook Air and a dedicated gaming machine. I've tried gaming on the Macbook with Heroic, GPTK, Whiskey, RPCS3 emu and some native. When a game runs, the performance is stunning for a Laptop - but there is always glitches, bugs and annoyances that take out the joy. Needles to mention lack of support from any sort of online multiplayer, due to the lack of anticheat sup…

I can't sell my MacBook Pro because the speakers are so insanely good. Air can't compare. The speakers are worth the extra kilos.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#107

The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet). All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware. Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same task…

[flagged]

What I have seen with iPhones is that the ram has gone from 4gb to 12gb very quickly compared to how it went from 1gb to 3gb.

Apps used to use less ram but over the years apps have become big and more complicated. This is probably why iPhones feel sluggish because new iPhones have more memory and apps snap back faster as newer iPhones which also have faster storage and memory bandwidth to reduce latency of reading more data from the flash.

Batteries are also a problem as maintaining voltage is difficult for a 2-3 year old battery. An official battery swap at apple service for a 3 year old iPhone will make it run much better.

I used to believe (and sometimes I still do) that apple intentionally makes everything heavier to make old phones and devices feel slower but I don't think thats the case.

I think that more things are happening on newer phones and devices and that same task feels slower on older device. This happens are lot faster on iPhones and phones in general (a year or two) as opposed to Macs/computers which can show signs of aging in 4-5 years.

My 2018 intel computer feels very slow in 2025 running Gnome. No one slowed it down. It's just that the 2025 world of software is a lot heavier and 2026 will be even more and so on.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#108
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the first time this has happened in Apple’s history. The transition from the 68k architecture to the PowerPC brought major performance improvements, but Apple’s software didn’t take full advantage of it. If I remember correctly, even after the PowerPC switch, core elements of the classic Mac OS still ran in emulation as late as Mac OS 9. Additionally, the classic Mac OS lacked protected memory and preempt…

Sixteen years ago, John Gruber wrote: > Hardware and software both matter, and Apple’s history shows that there’s a good argument to be made for developing integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which matters more, I wouldn’t hesitate to say software. All things considered I’d much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac running Windows. https://daringfireball.net/2009/11/the_os_opportunity At the time I…

That’s so wild to me - my personal laptop is still a Mac but I’m in windows all day for work. Some of the new direction of macOS isn’t awesome but the basics are still rock solid. Touchpad is perfect, sleep works 100% of the time for days on end, still has UNIX underneath.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#110
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except community-developed open source software, which (slowly, perhaps) keeps getting better and has high resistance to enshittification.

Remember log4j? I don't share your enthusiasm. At least its open source and free I guess.

Wow.
Post reply on HN