MacBook Pro with new M5 Pro and M5 Max

I 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-token prompt using a 14-billion parameter model with 4-bit quantization, and LM Studio 0.4.1 (Build 1). Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Air.

"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. Wondering if that will change with the overhaul of Siri this spring.

I 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 out my mine.

Apple: If you document the hardware enough for the Asahi team to deliver a polished Linux experiene, I'll buy one this year!

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 for the 128GB RAM 14” MacBook Pro model.

1.35x speed up in single core versus M3 Max. Insane. Everyone else has failed to bump single core performance in years. Where are these single core gains coming from?

I feel like Apple pulled an Instant Pot with the M1 MacBook Pro. I still haven't had a single situation where I felt like spending more money would improve my experience. The battery is wearing out a bit, but it started out life with so much runtime that losing a few hours doesn't seem to matter.

The hardware looks amazing! Too bad they will ship with Tahoe installed. I’m not upgrading until I see in which direction the next Mac OS release goes

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.

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

Also, the mix of cores have changed drastically.

- 6 "Super cores"

- 12 "Performance cores"

I'm guessing these are just renamed performance and efficiency cores from previous generations.

This is a massive change from the M4 Max:

- 12 performance cores

- 4 efficiency cores

This seems like a downgrade (in core config but may not be in actual MT) assuming super = performance and performance = efficiency cores.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is M5 Pro now supporting 64GB ram . I believe prior gens you had to go Max to get 64. m5 Pro 64GB is $3000 meanwhile to upgrade ram on the max you need the 40 gpu core variant with 64GB is $4300. $1300 dollar mark up for twice the gpu compute and 50% higher mem bandwidth isn't great value imo.

The most interesting change for the M5 Pro and Max is Apple moving to a bonded chiplet strategy from a single monolithic die.

> The tech giant says the chips are engineered around its new Fusion Architecture, an advanced design that merges two dies into a single, high-performance system on a chip (SoC), which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, Media Engine, unified memory controller, Neural Engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/03/apple-unveils-m5-pro-and-m...

They also replaced the efficiency cores on the CPU chiplet with a new higher performance design.

> The CPU now features six “super cores,” which is Apple’s term for its highest-performance cores, alongside 12 all-new performance cores. Collectively, the CPU boosts performance by up to 30% for pro workloads.

I have a fairly maxed out M2 Ultra (24 cores, 192GB RAM), and still cannot get this machine to choke on anything.

I have not once felt the need to upgrade in years, and that’s with doing pretty demanding 3D and LLM work.

"The new MacBook Pro gets up to 24 hours of battery life, giving Intel-based upgraders up to 13 additional hours"

I have a Intel-based 2019 Macbook Pro still and I have NEVER in its lifetime gotten even half of what they are claiming here. These days if I run it from battery I might get 90 mins.

That said I had a maxed out Macbook Pro M4 Max on order but just cancelled it right now and will get this new M5 Max one for basically the same price. Once I saw that they didn't up the price of memory (I don't know how it doesn't affect them) I canceled my order.

Honest question. Is it possible to install an earlier version of macOS on these machines? Liquid glass looks so.. unprofessional to my eyes. And I hear it's also unstable.

Interesting that they're showing VFX/CG software (Autodesk MAYA and Foundry Nuke) so prominently - obviously people using "Pro" machines are the target audience for this, but both of those apps (any many others in the industry) use Qt for the interface, rather than being totally platform-native.

$200 price bump across the board. The cheapest 16" is now $2699 and 14" Pro $2199. I think it's a fair price considering M2Pro 14" was $1999 (though it was discounted) only had 512GB and 16GB RAM.

I checked the fine print on the product website: by “up to 4x faster LLM prompt processing,” they’re specifically referring to time to first token. So it’s not about token generation rate (tokens per second).

Hot take - Local LLM computing will move to stationary, always on devices (Mac mini & studio). Developers and users will move to lighter, portable devices to interface with their long running agent workers (MacBook Airs & iPads).

Ugh, more "AI" hype. How useful are the cited hardware features for NON-"AI" processing?

Nano-texture is worth the upgrade if you are on a macbookpro whatever M<cpu> and dont have it.

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

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.

> M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth.

This is the important statement. 614GB/s is quite decent, however a NVIDIA RTX 5090 already offers 1,792 GB/s (roughly 3x) of memory bandwidth, for comparison.

I don't see it mentioned much, but the most exciting thing to me is that they're shipping their own WiFi chip in it, which leads me to be hopeful that they'll eventually get around to shipping a cell modem so I don't have to tether to my phone constantly. Still no new colours unfortunately. I think those are the two things that would/will be exciting in the future. Give me a green 5g+ capable MBP and I'll be happy. I'm so deeply bored of the drab grey and darker grey versions; we can have tattoos at work now, give me a different colour laptop for christ's sake

Was hoping to see Apple break the 128GB barrier in a laptop that they previously set, though 128GB is still pretty sweet for local LLM inference on consumer hardware. My 128GB M3 Max is still shredding tokens pretty well (with that annoying slow initial prompt processing), so no major complaints there. I guess the question is, given access to the same amount of RAM, does the M5 really do an order-of-magnitude better than 128GB on a M3 or M4?

Why doesn't this excite me anymore?

So is this a minimal upgrade before the M6 Macbook Pros w/ OLED & a redesign later this year?

It doesn't even look like they added cellular as an option with their own C1X chip (getting around the licensing / cost issues since it's their own chip now).

I bought an M4 and don't think I can justify upgrading so soon. Certainly has some great improvements.

Note: no power adapter included.

The question is when Apple Laptops are going to be able to run LLMs with a performance comparable to what the AI companies are offering?

For those who don't already know, you can get a lot of PC gaming performance out of these machines using Sikarugir. You can install all of Steam via winetricks and go from there, or launch DRM-free games directly.

https://github.com/Sikarugir-App/Sikarugir

Can someone comment on the new dual die thing they’re promoting for how they make the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips?

How is that different from the silicon interposer they were using before?

The big change is the two dies don’t have to fabbed next to each other in a single wafer, which is fantastic for costs and yields. But would this affect the interconnect speed somehow?

How would the two be wired together?

Could this mean the Ultra comes back in M6 since it would be easier to fab?

Does it still come with a measly 1 year warranty?

Shout out to LM Studio being featured in one of the product shots!

I just bought a M5 Macbook Pro 2 weeks ago. Thinking of returning it and getting a M5 Pro with the same configuration but only $200 more. How should I compare M5 vs M5 Pro?

I have an m4 pro MBP, 1tb storage and 24gb RAM. Not seeing any reason to consider an upgrade whatsoever.

It doesn't feel like much has changed from the previous gen? Just a new chip + memory?

I thought a Studio would be my local LLM machine 2026, but this is $2000+ for the 126gb option - not for me. I assume $6000 for that Studio machine but it looks now more like $8000.

I wonder how this compares to my M4 air with 10 GPU cores and 32 MB of RAM. My system can only run ~14B sized models at any reasonable speed. The accuracy of these sized models can be underwhelming. I am looking forward to a time when it would be nice to run models locally at a reasonable price, at a reasonable speed and with reasonable accuracy. I don't think we are there just yet.

I thought that new models were typically released in October. Have I misremembered or is this an unusual timing vs previous years? If so, I wonder why the earlier release?

My M3 Pro with 18gb of ram still feels like a beast. The only thing I can make it suffer with so far is generating meshes from 3D scanning, and even then I'm just patient. Apple is suffering from success with these older laptops, it's a tough sell to upgrade, even from the M1 Max folks.

Still only 8TB max storage. Ugh!

But is it powerful enough to run Liquid glass?

An ”unrivaled experience” with MacOS Tahoe…

What's a good value for a used MacBook pro these days? Any of the older models worth buying today?

will it run GLM-4.7 locally at any speed?

The screenshot of running LM Studio alongside Maya is a massive hardware flex.

Wish it was Blender though ;)

Considering these max out at 128GB of unified ram my guess is the hope of an M5 Ultra with 1TB of unified ram is unlikely to come true... Super disappointing.

Is the M5 Max the first laptop with significantly more memory bandwidth than the M1 Max? Looks like about a 20% jump… might finally be time to re-benchmark CFD workloads.

> M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth

Which roughly translates to 30B Q8 size LLM at 10t/s for the M5 Pro and 60B Q8 size LLM at 10t/s for the M5 Max

For reference, RTX 3090 24GB has a memory bandwidth of approx. 936.2 GB/s, DGX Spark 128GB features a unified memory bandwidth of up to 273 GB/s

I just bought a M5 Macbook Pro 2 weeks ago. Thinking of returning it and getting a M5 Pro with the same configuration but only $200 more. How should I compare M5 vs M5 Pro?

An ”unrivaled experience” with MacOS Tahoe…

The screenshot of running LM Studio alongside Maya is a massive hardware flex.

Wish it was Blender though ;)

Is the M5 Max the first laptop with significantly more memory bandwidth than the M1 Max? Looks like about a 20% jump… might finally be time to re-benchmark CFD workloads.

I chased down what the "4x faster at AI tasks" was measuring:

Seems very reasonable to me

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. Wondering if that will change with the overhaul of Siri this spring.

I love the following section of their copy:

> Even More Value for Upgraders

I read as "Whoops we made the M1 Macbook Pro too good, please upgrade!"

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

Apple: If you document the hardware enough for the Asahi team to deliver a polished Linux experiene, I'll buy one this year!

My 32gb m1 max was probably the best purchase I've made. Still plenty of headroom in performance left in this beast. Wonder what reason they'll use to end software support in the future. Bet it'll be some security hardware they make up for the sake of forcing upgrades.

I've been on a Macbook M1 Pro since 2022 (bought refurbished on Amazon for cheap) and it's still such a powerhouse. It doesn't struggle at all with anything that I throw at it. Kind of amazing.

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.

Same, in fact the only reason right now that I would upgrade my m1 pro is if they threaten to change the design by getting rid of the hdmi or sd card slot, or doing something stupid like when they added the touch bar. I was locked into my old intel pro for so long because of all the bad hardware choices they were making.

I read it the same way. I should've gotten way more RAM back when I got my M1 and RAM was still cheap although this was of course before the LLM boom so there was no way to really know.

Well, I just upgraded from Intel late last year. There are lots of users still on Intel :)

Same. It looks like battery replacement from ifixit is not too difficult, so I plan to do that when the time comes.

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

I just bought this model in the past year for $600 and it still feels like a great bargain.

I wish this sort of thing was encouraged in the modern capitalist technology space.

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

The hardware looks amazing! Too bad they will ship with Tahoe installed. I’m not upgrading until I see in which direction the next Mac OS release goes

This. I have been a big (and loud) fan of M-series hardware from the beginning, but if Apple is going to keep making their software worse, I will find myself lingering on older generations that run Asahi Linux or going back to a traditional x86_64 laptop instead of buying into new generations.

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.

I moved away from mac because of the OS and couldn't be happier. The hardware may be great but non-Apple hardware is fine too, and Linux is significantly better experience than MacOS these days.

The next macOS will be touch screen centric with elements getting bigger when you're close to touching them, rumors say. That being said, I run Tahoe and it works perfectly fine to me, I am not sure what issues people have with it. Sure, some corner radii aren't exactly the same but I honestly couldn't give less of a shit as long as it runs the programs I need.

Just yesterday, my colleague's mac Time Machine couldn't recover backup and they had to reinstall everything.

But I think this predates Tahoe.

Yeah this is a real issue with these new Macs. I would wait until macOS 27 to see the direction Apple takes.

The memory bandwith on M4 Max is 546 GB/s, M5 Max is 614GB/s, so not a huge jump.

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.

The marketing subterfugue might be about this exactly, technically prompt processing means the prefill phase of inference. So prompt goes in 4x as fast but generates tokens slower.

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).

What about real workloads? Because as context gets larger, these local LLMs aproxiate the useless end of the spectrum with regards to t/s.

4x faster is about token prefill, i.e. the time to first token. It should be on par with DGX Spark there while being slightly faster than M4 for token generation. I.e. when you have long context, you don't need to wait 15 minutes, only 4 minutes.

100 tok/s sounds pretty good. What do you get with 70B? With 128GB, you need quantization to fit 70B model, right?

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

I find time to first token more important then tok/s generally as these models wait an ungodly amount of time before streaming results. It looks like the claims are true based on M5: https://www.macstories.net/stories/ipad-pro-m5-neural-benchm... so this might work great.

>On M4 Max 128GB we're seeing ~100 tok/s generation

You mean on your first token. Whats the performance after 500 and 3000 tokens?

I genuinely don't understand why people post stuff like this. People are not informed enough to know you mean first tokens. They are going to make a mistake and buy one thinking they will get 100tk/s.

Are you working for Apple marketing? Do you have post purchase regret? I cannot imagine deliberately misleading people. Maybe you are hoping more buyers build up your ecosystem?

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

Also, the mix of cores have changed drastically.

- 6 "Super cores"

- 12 "Performance cores"

I'm guessing these are just renamed performance and efficiency cores from previous generations.

This is a massive change from the M4 Max:

- 12 performance cores

- 4 efficiency cores

This seems like a downgrade (in core config but may not be in actual MT) assuming super = performance and performance = efficiency cores.

I don't think the "new" Performance cores are just "renamed" "E" / "Efficiency" cores; Apple has retroactively renamed the baseline M5 nomenclature to say it has "10-core CPU with 4 super cores and 6 efficiency cores"; so they're clearly keeping the "efficiency cores" nomenclature around.

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 think super cores are a new type/tier of core, not a rename of performance.

The base M5 has super/efficiency cores.

The Pro and Max have super/performance cores.

I was looking into this. The M5 performance cores can be scaled down to match efficiency cores in performance and power usage.

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.

So they renamed performance to mean efficiency and are now using super in place of performance?

I have a fairly maxed out M2 Ultra (24 cores, 192GB RAM), and still cannot get this machine to choke on anything.

I have not once felt the need to upgrade in years, and that’s with doing pretty demanding 3D and LLM work.

If there’s anything this past three years has taught me, it’s that modern cpus can performantly do every task except for streaming text over the internet.

>LLM work.

Doubt

I imagine you basically use online models exclusively, and occasionally try out local stuff.

Source: My fortune 20 company tried with M whatever, and the local llms were unusable.

I have a powerful older Mac that doesn’t really “choke” on anything, but I could always use more speed.

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.

I've found current-generation Macs so capable that I've switched to using a Macbook Air. Would strongly recommend - it's still a powerful machine and it's significantly lighter and cheaper.

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

It definitely chokes with larger models that can fit the 192GB of RAM. Prompt processing is a big bottleneck before M5.

AI video generation can fairly easily choke anything that's not NVIDIA's flagship model. Even the latest local image gen models are so large that they can be frustratingly slow with non-optimal hardware even if they fit in the VRAM. IIRC when I had an M2, it was about 4x slower at running the venerable Stable Diffusion (and SDXL) than my meager RTX 3060.

Sounds pretty beefy. What kind of local LLM is that thing capable of running? Does it open up real alternatives to cloud providers like OpenAI and Claude, or are the local models this hardware is capable of running still pretty far behind?

Honest question. Is it possible to install an earlier version of macOS on these machines? Liquid glass looks so.. unprofessional to my eyes. And I hear it's also unstable.

You barely see any liquid glass on Tahoe. I keep my dock hidden and it's just the icons mostly which aren't that different than before.

That's a big part of what's keeping me from upgrading. Every time I look at my wife's iPhone I'm dumbfounded by just how bad the liquid glass looks.

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

I have a base M5 since last year. You cannot, no. It is literally impossible. Do with that what you will.

accessibility settings can turn off some (but not all) of the garish animations, transparencies, etc.

It does look terrible, but I haven't found it to be unstable, personally

Contrary to HN popular belief, there are neither incentives nor benefits to building native ui apps, for neither consumer nor professional apps. The exception is apps that only make sense on a single platform, such as window management and other deep integration. On iOS/macos you have a segment of indie/smaller apps that capture a niche market of powerusers for things like productivity apps. But the point is it makes no sense for anything from Slack, VSCode, Maya, DaVinci Resolve, and so on, to build native UIs. Even if they wanted to build and maintained 3 versions, advanced features aren’t always available in these frameworks. In the case of Windows, even MS has given up on their own tech, and have opted to launch webview based apps. Apple is slightly more principled.

Similar thoughts with first image of Capture One, when apple bought Pixelmator/Photomator a year ago.

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.

$200 price bump across the board. The cheapest 16" is now $2699 and 14" Pro $2199. I think it's a fair price considering M2Pro 14" was $1999 (though it was discounted) only had 512GB and 16GB RAM.

It's not $200 across the board. M4 MacBook Pro and M5 MacBook Pro started at $1599 with 512GB SSD.

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.

Yes. This is known. They added neural accelerators, aka Tensor core equivalent, in the GPU. This will make prompt processing competitive vs similar class GPUs.

It would probably be worth finding a more friendly way to market this, but it's a reasonable / accurate way to say it.

The prompt processing sped up.

Not the output generation.

M4 was notoriously slow at this compared to DGX etc.

Nano-texture is worth the upgrade if you are on a macbookpro whatever M<cpu> and dont have it.

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

I was considering it but got cold feet when I've been told that you could damage it when cleaning it. When I open/close my laptop I leave a ton of finger prints. I'm not too good with delicate hardware stuff.

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.

> M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth.

This is the important statement. 614GB/s is quite decent, however a NVIDIA RTX 5090 already offers 1,792 GB/s (roughly 3x) of memory bandwidth, for comparison.

You're right a $3600 graphics card is worse than a $2600 laptop; but from my perspectives they're very different products. Not least of all because even at $3600 for a RTX 5090 you still have the whole rest of the computer left to purchase.

The RTX 5090 only has 32gb of VRAM. So the tradeoff is NVIDIA is for blazing speed in a tiny memory pool, but Apple Silicon has a larger memory pool at moderate speed.

> NVIDIA RTX 5090 already offers 1,792 GB/s

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

I imagine the upcoming M5 Ultra will be competitive in this regard. The M3 Ultra already has 819GB/s and it's two generations behind.

Why doesn't this excite me anymore?

It excites me, since I am finally going to replace my 2019 Intel MacBook Pro!

Because the M1 was too good, a qualitative leap over previous Macs and really every other laptop and even some desktops back in 2020. Now, Apple Silicon is just iterative.

Me either. I guess it's just fatigue, at least for me. I also don't really get that excited by new LLM releases either. Not to say the tech isn't impressive, but I guess all the hype has me inured.

For me going way back, it was exciting when I had to save a bit (but not too much!) for a new 512 DIMM, and when I opened the box and smelled the chip smell, put it in always worried I was going to fuck it up, and then computer literally felt faster that next boot...that was pretty fun!! Now it's like oh great $5k for a slab of stone that can do pretty much anything, neat. I still think computers are cool, just not particularly exciting.

Because it's the same shit every year for the past 5 years with the M line. 2010 to 2015 was a major improvement, 2015 to 2020 was a major improvement, now they pretty much solved the computer/laptop problem for 99% of people. I'm on a 16gb m1 air, I see absolutely no reason to update.

Because it was always a vapid distraction from life.

Note: no power adapter included.

Not true everywhere. Only where required by law, so complain to your government.

Can someone comment on the new dual die thing they’re promoting for how they make the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips?

How is that different from the silicon interposer they were using before?

The big change is the two dies don’t have to fabbed next to each other in a single wafer, which is fantastic for costs and yields. But would this affect the interconnect speed somehow?

How would the two be wired together?

Could this mean the Ultra comes back in M6 since it would be easier to fab?

Curious about that as well.

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?

I thought that new models were typically released in October. Have I misremembered or is this an unusual timing vs previous years? If so, I wonder why the earlier release?

They didn't update them last October is why.

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.

Increasing component prices perhaps? Get some sales in before you have to jack up the sale price.

You remember well, they didn’t update these last fall.

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).

Maybe they want people to have more money available for the new phones later this year, since that market is in decline.

M6 is rumored to be released in Q4.

But is it powerful enough to run Liquid glass?

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.

We had a workshop 6 months ago and while I've always been sceptical of OpenAI,etc's silly AGI/ASI claims, the investments have shown the way to a lot of new technology and has opened up a genie that won't be put back into the bottle.

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).

> Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?

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.

> Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?

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.

have you seen that github repo where they unlock the true power of NE?

There already are a bunch of task-specific models running on their devices, it makes sense to maintain and build capacity in that area.

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 still think Apple has a huge opportunity in privacy first LLMs

This correlation of Apple and privacy needs to rest. They have consistently proven to be otherwise - despite heavily marketing themselves as "privacy-first"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...

  Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?

Neural Accelerator was present in iPhone 17 and M5 chip already. This is not new for M5 Pro/Max.

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.

"Apple Intelligence is even more capable while protecting users’ privacy at every step."

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

The hardware capabilities that make local LLMs fast are useful for a lot of different AI workloads. Local LLMs are a hot topic right now so that’s what the marketing team is using as an example to make it relatable.

> It’s $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB.

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.

I know RAM is scarce and everything, but doubling down on LLM local acceleration with all of that dedicated silicon while at the same time sticking with Apple's traditional lack of RAM availability makes for a very weird product proposition to me.

> M5 Pro supports up to 64GB of unified memory with up to 307GB/s of memory bandwidth, while M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth

Isn't this it?

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.

Preorders open tomorrow according to the store page. You can’t order the base RAM model today, either.

Apple doesn't tend to use "RAM" in their marketing materials, they usually use "memory", which appears 9 times in the press release.

>Anyway, it starts with 16GB of RAM. $400 to go from 16GB to 32GB

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

It starts at 16GB for the base M5 and 24GB for the Pro/Max. It's been like this.

on Silicon Mac's it's never called RAM, it "unified memory"

Insane for the "Pro" to have only 16GB of memory. My 11 year old Intel i3 laptop has 16GB of memory.

> Are they doubling down on local LLMs then?

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.

If there’s anything this past three years has taught me, it’s that modern cpus can performantly do every task except for streaming text over the internet.

>LLM work.

Doubt

I imagine you basically use online models exclusively, and occasionally try out local stuff.

Source: My fortune 20 company tried with M whatever, and the local llms were unusable.

I have a powerful older Mac that doesn’t really “choke” on anything, but I could always use more speed.

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.

I've found current-generation Macs so capable that I've switched to using a Macbook Air. Would strongly recommend - it's still a powerful machine and it's significantly lighter and cheaper.

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

It definitely chokes with larger models that can fit the 192GB of RAM. Prompt processing is a big bottleneck before M5.

Yeah I have an M1 Max, and I really want to upgrade, but there’s no reason to.

You might have confused Hacker News with your e-mail inbox again. This is an Apple press release, directed to everybody in the world who might be interested in a new computer or their first computer.