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MacBook Air with M5

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Re: MacBook Air with M5

#291

Post by PaulHoule »

storus wrote: post #260
PaulHoule wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my Mac is is beachball… beachball… beachball… reboot… beachball… beachball… beachball.. you’d have thought somebody gets paid to make me watch the beachball for how much it happens. And this is a top of the line M4 mini with maxed out RAM and everything.

My 128GB RAM M3 Max had logic board replaced 3x and I am still getting beachball alongside screen falling apart in blocks... There is something wrong with their firmware, especially when you are switching between multiple users often.

I think user switching is part of the problem in my case.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#292

Post by HanClinto »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #280
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…

It was the M3 Ultra that had that much RAM capacity, not the Pro or the Max. It is disappointing they didn't up it to at least 256GB on the laptops, but we'll have to wait for the next iteration of the studio to see if they'll give us 1TB unified memory.

Oh nice. Super good clarification, I appreciate the correction -- thank you!

Here's holding out hope that we'll still be able to see an M5 Ultra then! :)

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#294

Post by cromka »

std_move wrote: post #216

This is the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k. - it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent - a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use - best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU - no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff a…

> very good speakers

All of the above is true but this, actually, is not entirely: they use a lot of DSP. If you try the same speakers with regular Fedora Asahi with no DSP profile (i.e. vanilla sound), they're very mediocre and do not handle bass well. So, like with many aspects of Apple hardware, this is an example of their software/firmware complimenting the hardware.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#296

Post by cromka »

bilegeek wrote: post #228
orthoxerox wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it didn't have to run OSX.

Eventually Asahi will catch up... if Apple doesn't turn around and purposely make it harder, hopefully we didn't just get lucky they were feeling "benevolent" with earlier M-series.

I believe they'll make it easier, actually. With this hardware at these prices, if they offered BootCamp again for Linux and Windows, they'd basically own the market almost overnight.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#297

Post by noman-land »

std_move wrote: post #216

This is the best laptop for the general consumer around $1k. - it has no annoying fans, it is completely silent - a high res display with no PWM flickering and reasonable response times, no burn-in issues, enough brightness for outdoor use - best-in-class hardware, very very efficient, amazing single thread performance, good multi thread, very good GPU - no Microsoft Windows annoyances, ads, bloatware, broken stuff a…

"it has no annoying fans"

I beg to differ ;)

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#298

Post by astrange »

et-al wrote: post #279
astrange wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M5 is not an incremental upgrade, it has MTE.

What’s MTE? I couldn’t find a reference to this anywhere in the press release or spec comparisons.

https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#299

Post by bobbane »

timothyduong wrote: post #270
PaulHoule wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my Mac is is beachball… beachball… beachball… reboot… beachball… beachball… beachball.. you’d have thought somebody gets paid to make me watch the beachball for how much it happens. And this is a top of the line M4 mini with maxed out RAM and everything.

Base m4 Mac mini. Only beach balling is when I saturate 16GB with compiles and builds. That thing of yours is a lemon.

Lemons do happen with Apple Silicon.

I had a Mac Studio that would kernel panic on a semi-weekly basis. Apple Care put me through the reinstall OS / remove all external devices tap-dance for weeks, insisting that hardware was the last thing to suspect - before Apple Silicon, kernel panics were almost always hardware, particularly RAM.

Ultimately I bought another Studio and swapped it in - kernel panics went away. With that evidence, Apple acknowledged the problem and exchanged my Studio for another one from the factory. I returned the swap unit within the 30 day window, so it didn't cost me anything but annoyance.

Re: MacBook Air with M5

#300

Post by PaulHoule »

stefanfisk wrote: post #295
PaulHoule wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What am I supposed to do, drive 300 miles to the nearest Genius Bar?

What have you tried?

Mostly getting stuff done on the Windows machine in the next room or playing music off a different stereo or playing music on cassette tape or minidisc on the same stereo, etc. It's easier to fall back to a world of 20th century electronics where latency is imperceptible than it is to dive into a world of third-party apps that were all designed around somebody's inscrutable KPIs but didn't consider at all my convenience or inconvenience. Probably it is Creative Cloud updating or some software for the mouse or some kind of crap and if I sat in front of the machine for 30 minutes it might settle down but it's rare that I sit in front of it for 30 minutes. It used to be that kind of thing wrecked the Windows experience but over a long period of time Microsoft did a lot of work to balance to load of startup processes and mostly you don't feel it.

My wife browses the web a lot on that Mac, she hasn't complained since I installed Firefox + uBlock Origin but maybe she expects it to be slow.

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