As there target for that marketing, I can report it hits home!

But objectively, there is nothing wrong with my current experience at all.

I have never had that experience over many generations and types of machines. The M1 keeps looking better and better in hindsight.

—-

Looking forward, either the M5 is the next M1, a bump of good that will last. Or Apple will be really firing on all cylinders if it can “obsolete” the M5 anytime soon.

Of all the stupid things Apple has said lately, this is the most obtuse, pro-market-insulting nonsense. Intel-based Macs were knee-deep in issues Apple wasn’t fixing, and then along came the snappy and always-cool M1.

That was the best time for customers to upgrade. The new Silicon generations can be quite good, but they’re not worlds ahead in anything.

I’ll upgrade my M1 when Apple releases a macOS worthy of being used by its pro customers.

for example, let's say the new os depends on m5's exclusive thumbnail generator accelerator, and let's say it improves speed by a 20%.

now, your M1 notebook than on previous OSes uses standard gpu acceleration for thumbnails will not have this specialized hardware acceleration, it will have software fallback that will be 90% slower.

you won't notice it a first thought because it's stuff, fast, but it eats a bit of the processor.

multiply this by 1000 features and you have a slow machine.

I don't know how else to explain how an ipad pro cannot even scroll a menu without stuttering, it's insane how fast these things were on release

My next MBP will have 128GB memory, but these prices just wanna make me wait longer.

I thought the buyer was insane to buy it at that price. But, of course mine had a decent spec and still had the Apple care warranty with very low battery cycle count. After the sale, the buyer told me the truth: The M1 is the best chip Apple ever made and I wouldn't see much of a difference in real world between the M1 Pro and an M3 Pro unless it was the Max version of the chip.

I didn't believe him then. But, after a year of being on M3 Pro, I gotta say he was spot on. Don't get me wrong, the M3 Pro is definitely faster in a lot of things. But not 3x or 2x faster like Apple always like to market. I can open a few extra tabs without slowing down, compile times (Elixir) did get somewhat faster. But definitely not faster to the point where there were two generations worth of performance improvements like Apple claimed.

The M1 chip series is vastly underrated.

Nothing has broken and I consistently get 4-6 hours of heavy work time while on battery. An amazing machine for the price I paid.

Also, my wife's still using the older touch bar MBP, and we'll, it works fine for her too.

I'm not sure who needs the newer pros.

It's chiplets just like GB10, Strix Halo, etc. One die has the CPU and the other die has the GPU.

How is that different from the silicon [bridge] they were using before?

It's probably similar.

the two dies don’t have to fabbed next to each other

They never were; this is a widespread misunderstanding.

But would this affect the interconnect speed somehow?

Apple never documented the internal interconnect for the M4 Pro/Max and now they don't document it for the M5 Pro/Max so we don't know. It's probably better to read reviews and avoid theorycrafting and backseat driving.

Unfortunately, number always must go up (and the rate at which the number goes up, also must go up).

That G4 was a dog in Mac OS X 10.1. I installed Yellow Dog, and it lit a rocket under its ass.

i wish the new mbp had 256GB of ram :(

https://support.apple.com/self-service-repair

I don't see why I need a new computer at the moment. In the past, I always got to a stage where the machine felt sluggish.

(Can at least replace them via the self-service repair store. Fiddly job but worth it)

They seem to market it as a technological advancement, which it is, but rather than being excited im actually worried about hidden latencies that could come with that approach. Have you found any interesting info on that yet?

Incidentally, I just switched to Asahi Linux, but that was for software quality and openness reasons, rather than anything to do with performance.

this is my exact opposite experience. my M3 Max from 2 years ago now has <2hrs battery life at best. wondering if any experts here can help me figure out what is going on? what should i be expecting?

The new tensor cores, sorry, "Neural Accelerator" only really help with prompt preprocessing aka prefill, and not with token generation. Token generation is memory bound.

Hopefully the Ultra version (if it exists) has a bigger jump in memory bandwidth and maximum RAM.

This seems even likely as the memory bandwidth hasn't increased enough for those kinds of speedups, and I guess prefill is more likely to be compute-bound (vs mem bw bound).

Wondering if local LLM (for coding) is a realistic option, otherwise I wouldn't have to max out the RAM.

>I think I will get another 2-5 years out my mine.

I only own a M4 because the M1 had a hardware fault and I needed a replacement ASAP. (I sold the M1 after repair.)

Although I'm glad to have a newer machine with longer future support, I have yet to notice any meaningful performance difference.

The general case is hardly a "tinfoil hat theory". They openly do that, and the major reason is to tie to new hardware adoption.

That said, it doesn't usually work like you call it. It's not adding new features depending on HW optimization to slow older machines down (after all one could just not use those features in an older machine, or toggle them off).

It's rather: you want to get these shiny new features, which is all we advertise for iOS/macOS N+1, and the main new changes? The big ones will only work if you have a newer machine, even though we could trivially enable them on older machines (and some don't even need special hardware, as there are third-party hacks that unlock them and they work fine).

the Liquid Glass for example probably is not so great when it comes to resources. Probably works better with latest metal and hardware blocks on the GPU in M5 as opposed to using GPU cores and unified memory on 8gb M1 making latest macOS work not so great. I have the M1 8gb air and it is really slow on Tahoe. It was snappy just a couple of years ago on a fresh install.

Yes, different computers have different keyboards. Macs have had Mac conventions since 1984, and if you're not used to it you're not used to it. Instead of sticking to "the thing I'm not used to is wrong", I would suggest trying to be objective about which is the better UX.

I spent the first 25 years of my computer use being a Linux and Windows user and barely ever touching a Mac, so I've had to adjust, but to be honest, the truth is that Apple was always right and Microsoft made the wrong call.

Ctrl is meant to send control characters. This has been well defined since the birth of ASCII. In macOS, cmd-C is always copy, cmd-V is always paste. It does not matter what mode or program you are in.

Windows was designed for an IBM PC where the keyboard only had Ctrl and Alt, and when they copied Apple conventions (like cmd-X, C, V for cut, copy, paste) they made the wrong decision in using Ctrl for it. We've paid for this debt ever since. GNOME, KDE, XFCE, [...] devs continued this travesty by copying Windows, and so now on Linux Ctrl-C is copy in GUI apps, unless it's a terminal, in which case Ctrl-C will break out of your process, and copy is Ctrl-Shift-C. This is insane and bad UX.

The correct choice for a Linux DE would have been to use the "super" key ("Windows logo") for copy/paste etc, but of course they couldn't do that because 1) not everyone had that key and 2) it would confuse Windows users.

- Select with touchpad?? You must physically press its button like WTF

System Settings -> Touchpad -> Tap to click

- Mouse with backward/forward button?? Good luck!!

This is stupid. I will agree that Apple's insistence to not really support anything other than their own severely limited input devices is boneheaded. I recommend installing SensibleSideButtons.

I think at this point Apple will just release new versions of laptops whenever new CPU revisions and yields allow. M5 Pro wasn't ready for October so delayed until now.

And another rumor said these are going to be updated again this fall but I’m not sure about that. With OLED screens and M6 (supposedly).

While it’s workable, anything less than 24GB to me feels rather constrained. I definitely am not efficient though - leaving way too many browser tabs open I never actually get back to, running a few chrome profiles for work/side hustle/personal, etc.

I don’t think I’ve ever been CPU constrained for many years now. The few times I need to something that maxes out CPU just isn’t worth the upgrade vs taking a break to grab a cup of coffee.

I recently swapped out my work PC (a beefy workstation laptop) for an M4 Pro and it’s an amazing upgrade.

Also can you run batchwise effectively like vllm on cuda?

Enough to run multiple agents at the same time with throughput?

Neural Accelerators (aka NAX) accelerates matmults with tile sizes >= 32. From a very high level perspective, LLM inference has two phases: (chunked) prefill and decode. The former is matmults (GEMM) and the latter is matrix vector mults (GEMV). Neural Accelerators make the former (prefill) faster and have no impact on the latter.

• Studios with Ultra Mx, now 4-way RDMA over Thunderbolt 5, and enormous RAM and SSD options, suggest a strong focus. I don't know what else that RAM would be intended for. Four Studio Ultras (total of 360 GPU cores with M5 Ultras?) with 2TB of unified RAM is a local model beast.

• They refashioned their GPU cores to better support both graphic and neural processing, despite already having focused NPU cores.

I would say they have been leaning into local models for several years.

I expect we will see more models being optimized for smaller sizes, as demand for them increases. With hardware performance and neural focus trending up, and model requirements/quality trending down, the next few years will be interesting times.

What would make me happy: Ultra x 2 (i.e. 2xUltra, 4xMax, 8xPro, 16xM5) packaging in the Studio. With 8-way RDMA. Mac Kong. Perhaps Apple will start making server cards again.

  Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?

Apple's stated AI strategy is local where it can and cloud where it needs. So "doubling down"? Probably not. But it fits in their strategy.

The base M5 has super/efficiency cores.

The Pro and Max have super/performance cores.

  Whoah, both the Pro and Max CPUs feature 18 cores. This hasn't happened since M1 Pro/Max. This is a surprise.

I think I read somewhere long time ago that Capture One is also using Qt for GUI, though cannot find this anymore, so probably not true.

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

Batch-1 token generation, that is often quoted, does not benefit from this. It's purely RAM bandwidth-limited.

For example, grab yourself an Omen Transcend 14, spec it to 64GB RAM and the RTX 5070. You’re under $2000 and getting better graphics performance for anything that isn’t AI, and you’ve got an upgradable 1TB SSD and removable WiFi card.

You’re also getting an OLED screen which most people would prefer.

This model in particular I’ve chosen because it’s just as quiet as the M4 MacBook Pro models within 3dB during high intensity usage and gets very similar battery life, actually better battery life than the M4 Pro/Max models for light tasks.

Phones have less configurability, they sell more, and colors seem more important.

not too annoying to setup if the first thing you install is claude-cli

You start having problems when an heavy compilation is required, e.g. Android / iOS builds

Now extrapolating in line with how Sun servers around year 2000 cost a fortune and can be emulated by a 5$ VPS today, Apple is seeing that they can maybe grab the local LLM workloads if they act now with their integrated chip development.

But to grab that, they need developers to rely less on CUDA via Python or have other proper hardware support for those environments, and that won't happen without the hardware being there first and the machines being able to be built with enough memory (refreshing to see Apple support 128gb even if it'll probably bleed you dry).

Apple is in the hardware business.

They want you to buy their hardware.

People using Cloud for compute is essentially competitive to their core business.

I assume they have a moderate bet on on-device SLMs in addition to other ML models, but not much planned for LLMs, which at that scale, might be good as generalists but very poor at guaranteeing success for each specific minute tasks you want done.

In short: 8gb to store tens of very small and fast purpose-specific models is much better than a single 8gb LLM trying to do everything.

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.

Remains to be seen how capable it actually is. But they're certainly trying to sell the privacy aspect.

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.

I think this is a new design, with Apple having three tiers of cores now, similar to what Qualcomm has been doing for a while.

I think how it breaks down is:

- "Super" are the old "P" cores, and the top tier cores now

- "Performance" cores are a new tier and seen for the first time here, slotting between "old" P and E in performance

- "Efficiency" / "E" are still going to be around; but maybe not in desktop/Pro/Max anymore.

I believe they lower the clock speed, limit how much work is done in parallel on each core, and limit how aggressive the speculative execution is so less work is wasted.

128 GB maximum.

Sigh.

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)

0: https://entrpi.github.io/eemicrogpt/

M5 128GB RAM with 614GB/s memory transfer

This is a huge step over M4 32GB 153GB/s memory transfer

For local LLM this make it a replacement for a DGX Spark, which offers a third of the transfer speed and is not something you toss in your backpack as your laptop. It’s practically useful for a lot of local use cases and that I think is the 4x factor (memory xfer) - but the 128Gb unified headroom tremendously improves the models you can run and training you can do.

Before:

"We have 6 performance cores and 12 efficiency cores"

After:

"We have 6 super cores and 12 performance cores"

"Wow, how did you achieve this?"

"We changed the names."

We’ve really had it good with these Apple Silicon Mac’s

I’m not even sure how it got installed, possibly when I installed Zoom for an interview once but I don’t know. Point is, at least in one case, AI can help track down battery hogs.

Apple will replace the battery for $249 if you choose to. https://support.apple.com/mac-laptops/repair?services=servic...

Which is fine, I use Firefox usually, but any time I open Chrome it just seems to drain the battery super fast.

Unless of course you're doing something that truly sucks down your battery! If I spin up a few Docker instances doing 100% CPU then obviously battery will go down much quicker.

They also probably had RAM contracts in place far enough in advance to avoid the worst of the price spikes.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/05/mac-studio-no-512gb-ram...

I type this from an M3 Max 2023 MBP that still has 98% battery health. But admittedly it's only gone through 102 charge cycles in ~2 years.

(use `pmset -g rawbatt` to get cycle count or `system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep -A3 'Health'` to get health and cycles)

I'm typing this on an M3 Max; its max battery capacity is 88%. I've got some things running (laptop average temp is 50-55C, fans off), screen is half brightness, and it's projected to go from 90% to 0% in five hours. I don't usually baby it enough to test this, but 8-10 hours should be achievable.

The only plausible answers are either: something you’re running is eating CPU/GPU cycles like crazy (browser tabs gone amok, background processes) or you have a defective battery. Use Activity Monitor to look for energy usage and that will give you a pretty good idea.

Hot take: people should get used to, and expect to, replace device batteries 1 or 2 times during the device lifetime. They're the main limiting factor on portable device longevity, and engineers make all kinds of design tradeoffs just to make that 1 battery that the device ships with last long enough to not annoy users. If we could get people used to taking their device in for a battery once every couple of years, we could dramatically reduce device waste, and also unlock functionality that's hidden behind battery-preserving mechanisms.

And some apps are really inefficient. New Codex app drains my battery. If you are using Codex I recommend minimizing it, since it’s the UI that uses most power.

Most stuff ends up running Metal -> GPU I thought

Or they value things differently than you do.

Like screen brightness. Or external IO. Or more than 64GB of memory. Or not being stuck with Windows. Or an SSD larger than 2TB.

> removable WiFi card

I could stick my hand into a wood chipper and still use the stump to count the number of people I've ever seen mention much less desire a removable wifi card in the decision making process about a laptop.

No government mandates lack of charger.

I've never owned an iPhone, but if I did, it would be a sweet luxury to be able to colour match the phone to the mac. Orange on orange, orange on purple, purple on green. iPads can do it and they're practically useless e-waste

The high memory Macs have been great for being able to run LLMs, but the prompt processing has always been on the slow side. The new AI acceleration in these should help with that.

There are also workloads like compiling code where I’ll take all the extra speed I can get. Every little bit of reduced cycle time helps me finish earlier in the day.

And then there’s gaming. I don’t game much, but the M1 and M2 era Apple Silicon feels sluggish relative to what I have on the nVidia side.

You sadly just missed the window or cancelled too soon.

Normally if your current order is in progress they swap it out for the best closest spec for the exact same price you ordered the M4.

I am on a Macbook Pro M1 Pro running Asahi and a 28 inch external display via USB-C / dp alt mode as of typing this comment. They have a `fairydust` branch in their kernel repo which is meant for devs to test and hack on dp alt mode support, but it just works for me without problems.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1pzht74/dpaltmo...

People always overlook that CUDA is a polyglot ecosystem, the IDE and graphical debugging experience where one can even single step on GPU code, the libraries ecosystem.

And as of last year, NVidia has started to take Python seriously and now with cuTile based JIT, it is possible to write CUDA kernels in pure Python, not having Python generate C++ code that other tools than ingest.

They are getting ahead of Modular, with Python.

It's the best. We all turned it off. 100% privacy.

> But I'm def not buying into their rebranding of integrated GPU under the guise of Unified Memory.

But it is Unified Memory? Thanks to Intel iGPU term is tainted for a long time.

  The M5 performance cores can be scaled down to match efficiency cores in performance and power usage.

> The industry-leading super core was first introduced as performance cores in M5, which also adopts the super core name for all M5-based products

But new "performance" is claimed to be new design (= not just overclocked efficiency core from M5?):

> M5 Pro and M5 Max also introduce an all-new performance core that is optimized to deliver greater power-efficient, multithreaded performance for pro workloads.

quotes from https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-debuts-m5-pro-a...

CoreImage - GPU accelerated image processing out of the box;

ML/GPU frameworks - you can get built-in, on device's GPU running ML algorithms or do computations on GPU;

Accelerate - CPU vector computations;

Doing such things probably will force you to have platform specific implementations anyway. Though as you said - makes sense only in some niches.

The only differences that are more expensive EU vs US is the AppleCare+ and taxes.

US looks like you pay yearly for AppleCare+ while EU it has to be for a fixed number of years.

So, if you want one of mine, you can have one. On me. Because I'm fucking drowning in the things and appreciate not having to deal with another one.

The EU requires that users must be able to buy a device without a charger. It's a huge supply chain challenge to add two variants of every single SKU, one with a charger and one without. So the obvious solution is to sell the charger separately, since you need that regardless, and always sell the device without a charger. You avoid having two variants of everything that way.

Now, you could maybe argue that Apple should default to bundle a charger with your laptop, so that you'd have to uncheck a "bundle charger" checkbox on their website. But do you really care whether your laptop costs $2200 and you can buy a charger for $60 or your laptop costs $2260 and you can save $60 by removing the charger?

You can make an argument that doing it Apple's way hides a price increase. And yeah, that's probably fair. But it's not like Apple is afraid of non-hidden price increases either.

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

The prompt processing sped up.

Not the output generation.

M4 was notoriously slow at this compared to DGX etc.

That's how they make loot on their 128GB MacBook Pros. By kneecapping the cheap stuff. Don't think for a second that the specs weren't chosen so that professional developers would have to shell out the 8 grand for the legit machine. They're only gonna let us do the bare minimum on a MacBook Air.

I'd take that tradeoff. On my M3 Ultra, the inference is surprisingly fast, but the prompt processing speed makes it painful except as a fallback or experimentation, especially with agentic coding tools.

That's actually the biggest growth area in LLMs, it is no longer about smart, it is about context windows (usable ones, note spec-sheet hypotheticals). Smart enough is mostly solved, combating larger problems is slowly improving with every major release (but there is no ceiling).

But I think this predates Tahoe.

   and that’s with doing pretty demanding 3D and LLM work.

Now it starts at $1699, a $100 bump but comes with a 1TB SSD. Previously it would have cost $1799 for the 1T SSD, so it's a $100 bump on base price but you are also getting 1TB SDD for $100 less than before.

Oh really, it's universally better?

> For those of us with astigmatism it's really night and day experience.

Oh. So it's better for someone else with a specific eye condition, who is practically guaranteed to never use a MacBook that I buy?

Aren't the OpenClaw enjoyers buying Mac Minis because it's the cheapest thing which runs macOS, the only platform which can programmatically interface with iMessage and other Apple ecosystem stuff? It has nothing to do with the hardware really.

Still, buying a brand new Mac Mini for that purpose seems kind of pointless when a used M1 model would achieve the same thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_RsUxRjKU

5090 has 32GB, and the 4090 and 3090 both have 24GB.

For example, 6 super, 8 performance, and 4 efficiency.

You can buy two m5 pro base model for the same price as a single 5090...

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/10/15/eu-gets-what-it-a...

In the US they provide one in the box free of charge.

Interesting that this hasn't budged since the memory shortages appeared.

No change from the previous models then, 16GB->32GB was already $400. They're cutting into their previously enormous margins to keep the prices stable, rather than hiking the prices to maintain their margins.

Isn't this it?

It's the first time I've ever been so repulsed by a design that I actively avoid it just... out of sheer preference.

If you move your home directory to a different disk partition, you can even share it between two different macOS versions!

Yes, I'm sure by then there will be better models on offer via cloud providers, but idk if I'll even care. I'm not doing science / research or complex mathematical proofs, I just want a model good enough to vibe code personal projects for fun. So I think at that point I'll stop being a OpenAI / Anthropic customer.

And not even diehard Apple fanboys deny this.

I genuinely feel bad for people who fall for their marketing thinking they will run LLMs. Oh well, I got scammed on runescape as a child when someone said they could trim my armor... Everyone needs to learn.

~9 years later, there are a lot of people still using it as their main machine, waiting until we get kicked off the corp network for lack of software support.

But, I don’t feel totally corrected since that laptop only has one binary choice besides color. It’s 256GB w/o Touch ID or 512GB w/ Touch ID.

M5 Supports up to two external displays over any combination of Thunderbolt and HDMI ports:

Two displays up to a native resolution of 6K at 60Hz or 4K at 144Hz or

One display up to a native resolution of 8K at 60Hz or 5K at 120Hz or 4K at 240Hz

M5 Pro Supports up to three external displays over any combination of Thunderbolt and HDMI ports:

Three displays up to a native resolution of 6K at 60Hz or 4K at 144Hz or

One display up to a native resolution of 8K at 60Hz or 5K at 120Hz or 4K at 240Hz plus a second display up to a native resolution of 5K at 120Hz or 4K at 200Hz

Underneath it all is Wine which is the open source compatibility layer project which Crossover contributes to.

M5 Max maxes out at 128GB, so that will have to wait for the eventual M5 Ultra anyways.

Basically, too many choices to "focus on" makes non a winner except the incumbent.

This arb you’re talking about doesn’t exist. An m1 studio with 64 gb was $1300 prior to openclaw. You’re not getting that today.

I would have preferred that too since I could Asahi it later. It’s just not cheap any more. The m4 is flat $500 at microcenter.

Liquid Glass is really killing my love for Apple products. I'll probably get a Framework and an Android phone for my next device purchases.

They really need to just admit it was a bad move and make like Sonic.

They mandate that the charger be optional. The charger is indeed optional, and you don't pay for the charger if you don't opt-in.

What exactly else do you want?

SSD larger than 2GB? That's not a differentiating feature of a Mac. As a completely random example, an HP Omen Transcend 14 has DUAL M.2 SSD slots and that's not even a high end PC laptop. Macs are the only systems on the market where you can't upgrade the storage after purchase and you're doing so at insane markups.

More than 64GB of memory, yeah, that's also available on other PCs. Numerous PCs. I found multiple models from multiple manufacturers that support the same 128GB maximum. My Framework 13 supports 96GB and it's socketed DDR5 so I can just buy it at a store after purchase, or you can look at the new Lenovo T series Gen 7 (10/10 iFixit Repair Score) which has LPCAMM2 memory, allowing for BOTH repairability/upgradability AND high memory speed.

External IO, again, Apple isn't the gatekeeper of Thunderbolt 5. Where is the MacBook Pro with Oculink for the best external GPU performance? My Framework 13 has four fully customizable ports, I can literally put whatever ports I want on the machine and switch them out. Apple can't be bothered to put a USB-A port on a device despite the fact that it's still widely used and it would be convenient to just have one on there.

Apple doesn't make their own display panels. You can get a PC laptop with a wide variety of panels including the same mini-LED technology. Where is the MacBook Pro with a tandem OLED panel? You don't really get a choice with a Mac, you are stuck with the two different panels that they sell.

On Mac you're stuck with macOS. On a PC laptop you have more choices, Windows or a wide variety of Linux and BSD derivatives. Linux on Mac hardware is not fully functional and compatible with the hardware. Being stuck with Mac means you are unable to run a far wider array of software than being stuck with Windows or Linux. Imagine it this way: you just bought a top of the line MacBook Pro with the M5 Max chip, you've got a beast of a machine! You just spent your day crushing high intensity productivity tasks. Now you'd like to leverage the insane speed of your MacBook Pro playing some AAA video games. Oops! The macoS game library is miniscule, and CrossOver ($ annual license fee) is not ideal compared to Steam on Windows or Steam/Proton on Linux. I guess I can just play Cyberpunk 2077 or Rise of the Tomb Raider for the 10th time on my Mac!

Nobody mentions a removable WiFi card until their WiFi/Bluetooth stops working and they're stuck with an astronomical repair bill and now because they're Apple customers they are buying an entirely new system and "recycling" their old laptop. On a system like a Framework or a Lenovo T series 7th gen, components like USB-C ports are removable in case they are physically damaged, and you can buy parts directly from the manufacturer. Apple's strategy is to upsell you on an extended warranty/insurance plan to try and avoid astronomical repair bills.

For example, up until MacBookPro M2, MacBookPro M2 came with M2 Pro chip.

However, starting with M3, Apple lowered the MacBookPro MSRP to $1599, but its base configuration was downgraded to M3 chip from M3 Pro. To get the M3 Pro, you had to pay $1999. There's substantial performance between the two.

Same with M4. To get the M4 Pro chip, you had to pay $1999.

Now to get M5 Pro chip, it's $2199. Still a good value, but just saying it's a deviation from the trend.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#1-computer-...

I certainly only use Macs when being project assigned, then there are plenty of developers out there whose job has nothing to do with what Apple offers.

Also while Metal is a very cool API, I rather play with Vulkan, CUDA and DirectX, as do the large majority of game developers.

That's likely only part of the reason. Mac Mini is now "cheap" because everyone exploded in price. RAM and SSD etc have all gone up massively. Not the mention Mac mini is easy out of the box experience.

For the same price in API calls, you could fund AI driven development across a small team for quite a long while.

Whether that remains the case once those models are no longer subsidized, TBD. But as of today the comparison isn't even close.

Apple has had enough war chests with the ability of buying the entirety of TSMC's new capacity years in advance in the past.

If I were to guess, Apple locked in their entire BOM and production capacity two years ago. That's something even the large players cannot replicate because they run cash-lean and have too many different SKUs, and the small players (Framework, System76, even Steam) are entirely left to the forces of the markets.

There definitely are some who fit into this category, but if they're buying the latest and greatest on a whim then they've likely got money to burn and you probably don't need to feel bad for them.

Reminds me of the saying: "A fool and his money are soon parted".

For reference:

  | model                          |       size |     params | backend    | threads |            test |                  t/s |
  | ------------------------------ | ---------: | ---------: | ---------- | ------: | --------------: | -------------------: |
  | qwen35 ?B Q5_K - Medium        |   6.12 GiB |     8.95 B | MTL,BLAS   |       6 |           pp512 |        288.90 ± 0.67 |
  | qwen35 ?B Q5_K - Medium        |   6.12 GiB |     8.95 B | MTL,BLAS   |       6 |           tg128 |         16.58 ± 0.05 |

  | model                          |       size |     params | backend    | threads |            test |                  t/s |
  | ------------------------------ | ---------: | ---------: | ---------- | ------: | --------------: | -------------------: |
  | gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE          |  11.27 GiB |    20.91 B | MTL,BLAS   |       6 |           pp512 |        615.94 ± 2.23 |
  | gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE          |  11.27 GiB |    20.91 B | MTL,BLAS   |       6 |           tg128 |         42.85 ± 0.61 |

  Klein 4B completes a 1024px generation in 72seconds.

They could have just made some layout improvements without trashing everything visually; that's sad, really.

The contour they put around the icon is really, really bad. How the fuck did they approve that?

Booting a 15 year old Mac a while ago had me surprised how clean the interface actually is. The Dock/Desktop look a lot better in the old versions, and the age is mostly showing in apps like Finder which do look a bit dated.

I really hope someone at Apple is going to make the call to drastically reduce the Liquid Glass design and start complying with their own UX guidelines again.

TL;DW: 2010s intel mac era laptops have seen at very best 35% single core CPU performance over in 5 years time! This happens almost every year now with M line macs.

Rant:

Retina macs were great and had great form factor over unibody macs. Touch-bar macs in the mid 2010s was IMHO a disaster. Terrible keyboard, poorer thermal capacity, missing essential ports, adapters galore.

But when it comes to performance - early 2010s macbooks with dedicated gpus had serious overheating issues.

Retina macbooks were decent, both form factor and performance.

Touch-bar macs were totally abysmal, all performance gains over previous generations was all through pumping more heat. CPUs constantly pegged at 90C+, cannot have laptop on your lap, Apple planning and delaying release schedules around intel fumbling their tik/tok cycles (as far as i remember some macs did not get any improvements for 2 years+ if not way more). Upgrades sometimes were total jokes, because of thermal throttling there was no point to put more hardware than it could work with. From reviews buying higher level cpu sometimes didn’t give noticeable real life gains because, again, thermal throttling kicking in instantly. 2020 intel macbook pro has fans spinning almost all the time. Having a remote call - your battery is dead in 2h max (essentially 1% per 1min).

M1 mac gave insane perceived performance boost - no noticeable throttling. Macbook airs are fully passively cooled, never heard M Macbook pro with fans screeching.

Also real full work day battery doing real work without power adapter at full performance. Cool to touch most of the time.

I made homework for a job in 2020 on a 2013 personal macbook. Apart from memory footprint - I could not feel noticeable difference on development experience. Editing images was frustrating on both. With M macs - its silent, smooth fast.

Number of parallel cores matching best intel cpus on base models, GPU blowing any mobile gpu in price range out of the water with thermal capacity to peg it 100% no problem. Unified memory for those GPUs to do what you could only imagined doing on GPUs that cost 3 times more than the macbook.

It’s a such excellent architecture that yeah - it’s “boring” you can nitpick about M69 Ultra Pro Max performance, but take a base MBP of any M line and it blows almost any laptop out of the water, even to this day.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/16/no-the-eu-didnt-ban-apple-fro...

Voice —> Speech to Text -> LLM to determine intent -> JSON -> API call -> response -> LLM -> text to speech.

TTFT is irrelevant, you have to process everything through the pipeline before you can generate a response. A fast model is more important than a good model

Source: I do this kind of stuff for call centers. Yes I know modern LLMs don’t go through the voice -> text -> LLM -> text -> voice anymore. But that only works when you don’t have to call external sources

For example just now from the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242637 "Speculative Speculative Decoding"

Or this: https://openreview.net/forum?id=960Ny6IjEr "Low-Rank Compression of Language Models Via Differentiable Rank Selection"

https://creativestrategies.com/research/m5-apple-silicon-its...

What is "it" and what didn't it do?

Barring removal of Esc key, I think the touch bar was useful because it showed contextual actions. But not every app used it so it didn't really get a chance to shine.

I think people that do do tasks where a touch screen makes sense are probably just doing most of their work on an iphone or an ipad anyway.

Now gesture control on VR/AR setups? Sure, that feels like a new human/computer interaction system that makes sense. Jabbing at my laptop screen with one hand on my keyboard, not so much.

Sonnet is so fast too. GPT-5.2 needs reasoning tuned up to get tool calling reliable and Qwen3 Coder Next wasn’t close. I haven’t tried Qwen3.5-A3B. Hearing rave reviews though.

If you’re using successfully some model knowing that alone is very helpful to me.

And while it is stupid slow, you can run models of hard drive or swap space. You wouldn’t do it normally, but it can be done to check an answer in one model versus another.

Part of this has to be blamed on Apple, as the chassis designer and system integrator. Intel did not force them to put an i9 in the 16" MBP, Apple made that decision. Even now, Apple refuses to use the old Touchbar chassis for anything other than passively-cooled base model chips. It's a tacit admission that they know the design failed; it probably would still suck with Pro and Max chips inside them.

The paper-thin unibody, Butterfly keyboard and Touchbar were all unpopular features, but Apple shipped them anyways. It really shouldn't take 4+ years to respond to critical design flaws, especially if you're a trillion-dollar business.

Regardless, point still stands, they probably ordered this several years ago.

Most people can totally live with 16gigs but it is kind of a waste for the horsepower. They know what they are doing. Apple is a master in upselling.

Though personally I don't mid the aggressive upsellign as long as the quality is there. Problem is, the hardware quality is great but the software side is severely lacking and getting worse.

Which, I mean, I love unified memory, as one of those weirdos that does do local LLM stuff and am contemplating if it's time to upgrade my m2 max.

But if you needed 32gb then you still need at least 32gb now. Unless swap on nvme disks is enough for you - and it isn't for me.

The M4 Max has 546 GB/s compared to 614GB/s for the M5 Max. Which is like 12% faster not 4x.

I use my laptop for development. I don't actually use most of the built in applications. My browser is Firefox, I use codex, vs code, intellij, iterm2, etc. Most of that works just fine just as it did on previous versions of the OS. I actually on purpose keep my tool chains portable as I like to have the option to switch back to Linux when I want to. I've done that a few times. I come back for the hardware, not the OS.

In my experience, if you don't like Apple's OS changes that is unfortunate but they don't seem to generally respond to a lot of the criticism. Your choices are to get further and further out of date, switch to something else, or just swallow your pride. Been there done that. Windows is a "Hell No" for me at this point. I'll take the UX, with all the pastel colors that came and went and all the other crap that got unleashed on macs over the last ten years. Definitely a case of the grass not being greener on Windows. Even with the tele tubby default desktop in XP back in the day.

I can deal with Linux (and use that on and off on one of my laptops). However, that just doesn't run that well on mac hardware. And any other hardware seems like a big downgrade to me. Both Windows and Linux are arguably a lot worse in terms of UX (or lack thereof). Linux you can tweak. And you kind of have to. But it just never adds up to consistent and delightful. Windows, well, at this point liking that is probably a form of Stockholm Syndrome. If that doesn't bother you, good for you.

So, Mac OS it is for me as everything else is worse. I've in the past deferred updates to new versions of Mac OS as well. Generally you can do that for a while but eventually it becomes annoying when things like homebrew and other development toys start assuming you run something more recent. And of course for security reasons you might just not drag your feet too long. Just my personal, pragmatic take.

Latency to the first token is not like a web page where first paint already has useful things to show. The first token is "The ", and you'll be very happy it's there in 50ms instead of 200ms... but then what you really want to know is how quickly you'll get the rest of the sentence (throughput)

Not upgrading any of my Macs ever again. I was a fanboy looking for every new update like a present, for 13 years, not anymore. It took one Tahoe burn all that trust. Never upgrading major OS versions on hardware from Apple again.

Literally unusable

That's amazing. I have an early 2023 M2 Max MBP that mostly charges in desktop mode, which limits to 80%. I just looked in battery health and it says 82%. Damn! :(

For giggles, earlier today I asked Apple how much they'd give me for this machine if I traded it in on a brand new $5K M5 Max equivalent. $825. Ouch. I think I will keep it for a few more years. 96GB is enough memory to do anything I want, and it's been such a great performer that it's easily my favorite MacBook ever. I do wish the battery weren't so degraded though.

For anec-science, here goes:

  % pmset -g rawbatt
  03/03/2026 18:29:51
   AC; Not Charging; 76%; Cap=76: FCC=100; Design=6075;   Time=1092:15; 0mA; Cycles=63/1000; Location=0;
   Polled boot=02/09/2026 07:24:50; Full=03/03/2026   18:24:52; User visible=03/03/2026 18:28:52

  % system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep -A3 'Health'
        Health Information:
            Cycle Count: 63
            Condition: Normal
            Maximum Capacity: 82%

What in the world is an idle Claude Desktop doing that uses so much power?

> Hot take: people should get used to, and expect to, replace device batteries 1 or 2 times during the device lifetime.

I agree that people should get used to replacing device batteries, but if you accept that then you should just stop worrying about charge habits. An MBP that doesn't have a defective or extreme-heat-damaged battery should stay above 80% battery capacity for at least 600 charge cycles without any special care at all. That's many years of regular charging, and 80% capacity is still good for all day usage.

Replies like "but, but other laptops" are very weak attempts at deflection.

I won’t try to claim that Electron and friends have no place is software development but we absolutely should be pushing back harder against stuffing it everywhere it possibly can be.