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MacBook Air with M5

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Re: MacBook Air with M5

#201

Post by HanClinto »

Is it weird to anyone else that the M5 keeps the same limitations of the M4, and tops out at 128 GB of RAM?

If one wants to serve large-ish LLMs locally, an M3 Mac Studio w/ 512 GB/RAM is still a super compelling option, and I was hoping that the M5's would bump us up to 1TB of unified memory.

Don't get me wrong -- seeing them use LMStudio as the benchmark for measuring local LLM inference is super awesome for the local / open-source LLM community, but seeing this have the same 128GB cap as the M4 is... disappointing?

M3 Studio is still the best option if one wants 512GB.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#202

Post by dijit »

Xeoncross wrote: post #74

I'm glad the air now comes standard with 16GB of RAM and 512GB disk space. It's not that the M1 with 8/256GB was slow at all, but even browsing the web gets into 12GB of usage and exhausting the 256GB is fairly easy if you backup your 256GB phone, try to edit a few videos, download enough Gradle/Go/Cargo/Node packages, or install enough 20GB office apps. Any apple silicon with 16GB / 512GB of stage (even the M1 serie…

Lets be real, the fact that the Air is good for developers is.. honestly, great.

But these devices are meant for home users.

Not a tremendous amount of home users having huge gradle/go/cargo/node packages in my experience.

The backup problem is real, I'm surprised Apple doesn't come out with a new time capsule (edit: for phones/tablets)- but I guess they want that sweet iCloud services dollar.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#203

Post by tracker1 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #168
tracker1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The keyboard and touchpad experience are nearly identical between the two... not nearly as good as old IBM Thinkpads used to be, but that's a trade with IMO the much better touchpad experience on Mac. That said, I just don't think I can keep buying Apple hardware, just not a fan of the company... I only begrudgingly use Android as there isn't a reasonable, more open option. I'll probably stick with my M1 air for pers…

At current rates they aren’t overpriced at all. Frankly I’m surprised we didn’t see a big increase in cost with this generation.

Apple has their supply lines locked in a few years ahead of time... they likely won't see downward pressure for a couple years still. Not that they might not still take advantage... though downward sales pressure is a trade off too.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#204

Post by soared »

jmyeet wrote: post #193

What I find interesting is how over a long period Apple had to basically reverse everything Johnny Ive was probably responsible for before he left and how we got back to where we were 10-15 years ago in many ways. Remember how cool MagSafe was? Tripping over a cable no longer meant smashing your laptop. In the late 2000s, this was amazing. Then they made the laptops thinner so we got MagSafe 2. Annoying if you had ch…

What is the importance of going to a store and buying one? If you live in any major metro you can just go to any big box retailer, or a microcenter if you have one, and buy any other brand’s laptop.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#205

Post by avhception »

smelendez wrote: post #163
dillydogg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed something similar. With the computer science undergrads and grad students I work with, Air is much more common than with the premeds and med students, many of whom have MBPs (who I am presuming do not need that much power).

It’s possible that their departments give them computer recommendations that exceed what they actually need. I’m not sure why this happens or who formulates these recommendations, but I’ve seen it before with students in fields that just don’t do much heavy duty computation or video editing being told to buy laptops with top-of-the-line specs.

I think there is a tendency to simply give in and buy bigger hardware if something doesn't work. With friends and family, I sometimes feel like having to talk them off the roof with regards to pulling the trigger on really expensive (relative to the tasks they're doing) hardware, simply because performance is often abysmal due to the fact that they trashed their OS with malware and bloatware and whatnot and can't understand all of that.

It's the same at work, to some degree. Our in-house ERP software performs like kicking a sack of rocks down a hill. I don't know how often I had to show devs that the hardware is actually idle and they're mostly derailing themselves with DB table locks, GC issues and whatnot. If I weren't pushing back, we probably would have bought the biggest VMs just to let them sit idle.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#206

Post by jimbokun »

ajross wrote: post #141
bhouston wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MBA is an absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs. I use it (MBA 15" M3) with a large complex TypeScript code base, and it is fast and amazing at 24GB of ram or more. PS. The biggest speedup I got this past year (10x) was switching to native TypeScript (tsgo) and native linting (biome or oxlint).

> absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box. The news here isn't "The M5 Air is a disappointment", it's "Laptops are commoditized and boring".

As a developer my quality of work life improved radically when they let me have a Mac instead of the Windows laptop I was using.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#207

Post by avhception »

t1234s wrote: post #173

I was hoping they would move one of the usb c ports over to the right side. this is the only thing I dislike about the M4 air

I have 2 thinkpads, and one of them is better in every aspect - except that the inferior one has it's 2 USB-C ports on opposite sides of the laptop, while the other one has both ports on the same side. Being able to plug in the charger from either side is really great, will definitely look for that in a future laptop.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#208

Post by browningstreet »

HanClinto wrote: post #201

Is it weird to anyone else that the M5 keeps the same limitations of the M4, and tops out at 128 GB of RAM? If one wants to serve large-ish LLMs locally, an M3 Mac Studio w/ 512 GB/RAM is still a super compelling option, and I was hoping that the M5's would bump us up to 1TB of unified memory. Don't get me wrong -- seeing them use LMStudio as the benchmark for measuring local LLM inference is super awesome for the lo…

Apple hasn't suddenly stopped being Apple. They strongly differentiate the boundaries of their product lines and have never let use case leakage spread across their product lines.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#209

Post by jama211 »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #58
theowaway213456 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - I just can't get excited about the world's fastest CPU core running on the world's most locked-down and developer-unfriendly OS.

World's most developer-unfriendly OS seems a bit hyperbolic when such a large number of devs use MacOS as their primary dev OS.

Agreed, it’s Unix like, homebrew is great, it’s like GP forgot about windows

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#210

Post by brokencode »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #187
elxr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news, intel panther lake (and the laptops they come in) are on par with M5 macbooks in almost every way. This year is a lot more competitive than any of the past ~4 years for premium laptops. The asus expertbook ultra even has a much better screen, a much better keyboard, and a very similar haptic trackpad. Weighs less than a 13 inch macbook air too. There's cheaper options too that are close to as good (minus t…

Are there any non-Apple laptops yet where you can just close the lid and put the laptop in your bag and not worry about it being on?

It’s funny that this is even remotely a concern in 2026. We have computers you can talk to but Windows laptops maybe won’t go to sleep in your backpack.

I do hope that it’s fixed though. I haven’t followed Windows laptops that closely, but my work laptop from a few years ago does lose battery surprisingly quickly when “sleeping”.

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