Here I am still on my twenty twenty eight gigabyte base model M one MacBook Air.
MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
661–670 of 1001 posts
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if Apple has foresight into locally running LLMs becoming sufficiently useful.
It won’t handle serious tasks but I have Gemma 3 installed on my M2 Mac and it is good for most of my needs—-esp data I don’t want a corporation getting its hands on.
What kind of tasks are you using it for? I haven't really found any uses for small models.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#663128GB RAM maximum? What a shame. I was ready to spend 8k on a laptop. My M3 MAX 128GB will suffice for now.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#664Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#665I chased down what the "4x faster at AI tasks" was measuring: > Testing conducted by Apple in January 2026 using preproduction 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 4TB SSD, and production 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB SSD. Time to first token measured with an 8K-to…
So it's not measuring output tokens/s, just how long it takes to start generating tokens. Seems we'll have to wait for independent benchmarks to get useful numbers.
It's going to be faster no matter what. My M3 MAX prints tokens faster than I can read for the new MoE models. It's the prompt processing that kills it when the context grows beyond a threshold which is easy to do in the modern agentic loops.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#666I chased down what the "4x faster at AI tasks" was measuring: > Testing conducted by Apple in January 2026 using preproduction 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M5, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 4TB SSD, and production 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 32GB of unified memory, and 2TB SSD. Time to first token measured with an 8K-to…
>Time to first token measured with an 8K-token prompt using a 14-billion parameter model with 4-bit quantization Oh dear 14B and 4-bit quant? There are going to be a lot of embarrassed programmers who need to explain to their engineering managers why their Macbook can't reasonably run LLMs like they said it could. (This already happened at my fortune 20 company lol)
Yeah no it didn’t. If you have a fully speced out M3/4 MacBook with enough memory you’re running pretty decent models locally already. But no one is using local models anyway.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
RAM is still RAM, the switch from crusty HDDs to fast NVMe SSDs may have helped to smooth things over when you spill into swap but it's not going to do miracles.
RAM isn't just RAM though. Unified memory on Apple Silicon provides significantly better memory management and efficiency compared to trad RAM
Says your rose-tinted marketing-loving glasses. Unified memory only means you lose some to graphics. Only your GPU wins this bargain, not your usual workloads.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was that one of the ones that could do "target display mode" and become a monitor for another machine?
Nope - they removed that feature, so now come the end of the year, they're all e-waste. It feels really stupid to have to throw away a perfectly capable machine with 64GB of RAM in 2026.
Throw asahi on it? I have access to one of those beasts and am considering it ...
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've upgraded to Tahoe at 26.2, zero complaints from my side. Haven't had any runaway memory leaks or similar that were reported.
Closing Tabs in Safari till takes more than a second though. And if you hold Cmd-W to close all of them it just completely locks up and crashes. Still not fixed since the release of Safari 26. Literally unusable
Do you have more info on those crashes (e.g. crashlogs)? I work on Safari and might be able to get that forwarded to other people.
Re: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
#670I love the following section of their copy: > Even More Value for Upgraders > The new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max mark a major leap for pro users. There’s never been a better time for customers to upgrade from a previous generation of MacBook Pro with Apple silicon or an Intel-based Mac. I read as "Whoops we made the M1 Macbook Pro too good, please upgrade!" I think I will get another 2-5 years…
The real improvement was the number of displays supported and, in some cases, removing the Touch Bar and adding HDMI/SD.
> removing the Touch Bar
Praise the lord. And the Tour Bar daemon takes, checks 2GB of ram alone.