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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

#101

Post by kamranjon »

butILoveLife wrote: post #53
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.

[flagged]

I'm not sure if you're just unaware or purposefully dense. It's absolutely possible to get those numbers for certain models in a m4 max and it's averaged over many tokens, I was just getting 127tok/s for 700 token response on a 24b MoE model yesterday. I tend to use Qwen 3 Coder Next the most which is closer to 65 or 70 tok/s, but absolutely usable for dev work.

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle, many people don't realize just how performant (especially with MLX) some of these models have become on Mac hardware, and just how powerful the shared memory architecture they've built is, but also there is a lot of hype and misinformation on performance when compared to dedicated GPU's. It's a tradeoff between available memory and performance, but often it makes sense.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#102

Post by atwrk »

Hamuko wrote: post #67
butILoveLife wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its just marketing, and the marketing is working. Look how many people bought Minis and ended up just paying for API calls anyway. (Saw it IRL 2x, see it on reddit openclaw daily) I don't mind it, I open Apple stock. But I'm def not buying into their rebranding of integrated GPU under the guise of Unified Memory.

I've tried to use a local LLM on an M4 Pro machine and it's quite painful. Not surprised that people into LLMs would pay for tokens instead of trying to force their poor MacBooks to do it.

Local LLM inference is all about memory bandwidth, and an M4 pro only has about the same as a Strix Halo or DGX Spark. That's why the older ultras are popular with the local LLM crowd.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#103

Post by cosmic_cheese »

lynx97 wrote: post #62
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.…

The topic is MacBook, so my criticism is a little off. However, I really dont believe in this "local LLM" promise from Apple. My phone already gets noticeably warm if I answer 5 WhatsApp messages. And looses 5% of battery during the process. I highly doubt Apple will have a useable local LLM that doesn't drain my battery in minutes, before 2030.

Something is not right if WhatsApp is seriously draining your phone like that. Admittedly I’m not a big WhatsApp user my iPhone hasn’t had any trouble like that with it.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#104

Post by zarzavat »

boriskourt wrote: post #3

Nice starting storage bump MacBook Pro with M5 Pro now comes standard with 1TB of storage, while MacBook Pro with M5 Max now comes standard with 2TB. And the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 now comes standard with 1TB of storage.

It's not exactly a bump if they raise prices at the same time, though with the RAM situation I'm not mad.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#106

Post by jmyeet »

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.…

Apple absolutely has a massive opportunity here because they used a shared memory architecture.

So as most people in or adjacent to the AI space know, NVidia gatekeeps their best GPUs with the most memory by making them eye-wateringly expensive. It's a form of market segmentation. So consumer GPUs top out at 16GB (5090 currently) while the best AI GPUs (H200?) is 141GB (I just had to search)? I think the previou sgen was 80GB.

But these GPUs are north of $30k.

Now the Mac Studio tops out currently at 512GB os SHARED memory. That means you can potentially run a much larger model locally without distributing it across machines. Currently that retails at $9500 but that's relatively cheap, in comparison.

But, as it stands now, the best Apple chips have significantly lower memory bandwidth than NVidia GPUs and that really impacts tokens/second.

So I've been waiting to see if Apple will realize this and address it in the next generation of Mac Studios (and, to a lesser extend, Macbook Pros). The H200 seems to be 4.8TB/s. IIRC the 5090 is ~1.8TB/s. The best Apple is (IIRC) 819GB/s on the M3 Ultra.

Apple could really make a dent in NVidia's monopoly here if they address some of these technical limitations.

So I just checked the memory bandwidth of these new chips and it seems like the M5 is 153GB/s, M5 Pro is ~300 and M5 Max is ~600. I was hoping for higher. This isn't a big jump from the M4 generation. I suspect the new Studios will probably barely break 1TB/s. I had been hoping for higher.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#107

Post by ChrisGreenHeur »

Someone1234 wrote: post #100
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.…

Apple's AI strategy really kind of threads the needle cleverly. "AI" (LLMs) may or may not have a bubble-pop moment, but until it does Apple get to ride it on these press releases and claims. But if the big-pop occurs, then Apple winds up with really fantastic hardware that just happens to be good at AI workloads (as well as general computing). For example, image classification (e.g. face recognition/photo tagging),…

those things could likely just run fine on the gpu though

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#108

Post by stetrain »

wincy wrote: post #12

I typed “RAM” to search for it and boy they hammer home how lucky I am to be getting 1TB SSD standard, but no mention of RAM anywhere on this page. Anyway, the MacBook Pro starts with 16GB of RAM. It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB. Interestingly, 36-128GB models are showing as “currently unavailable” on the store page, and you can’t even place an order for them right now? But for anyone curious, it’s quoting $5099 fo…

On the M5 Pro tier (not the base M5 tier that was released last November), the base memory is 24GB.

My M3 Pro from a few years ago for the same price had 18GB.

Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max

#110

Post by [deleted] »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #75
fny wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the push by devs towards Metal compatibility has been 10x than AMD. I assume that's because the majority of us run MacBooks.

Who is "us" in this case? Majority of devs that took the stack overflow survey use Windows: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#1-computer-...

[deleted]
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