MacBook Pro with new M5 Pro and M5 Max

Yeah, this feels like the annual “nice, but do I actually need it?” refresh if you’re already on an M4 Pro.

I wonder if it is good to just get one and run Linux on a VM. Would that work better than an x64? Anybody knows?

$5000 laptop you have to pay to add a power adapter… gratuitous penny pinching from Tim Cook's Apple.

It's one of those things, yes if I'm spending that much on a laptop I can afford to spend $80 on the adapter too, but does it feel good as a customer to do that or are you souring the experience of buying from you just to earn a few more dollars.

So below 128gb is the sweet spot for local LLMs...

> M5 Max supports up to 128GB of unified memory with up to 614GB/s of memory bandwidth

for reference, the M1 Max has 400GB/s of memory bandwidth, half a decade ago

That's big hockey

Can Apple marketing please reduce the insane quantity of adjectives in its releases, it has been nauseating to read for decades and sickens me when visiting their sites. Early exit from me and ex-OSX dev for over a decade, wont be back until their core culture changes.

I am only interested in one thing: what's the best local AI model it can run?

I am very excited by this, but I am a bit dampened that the maximum memory available is 128GB. I was really hoping for 256GB, which would allow me to run frontier models locally. I think with 128GB it's still feasible to use this with something like Qwen3-Coder-Next and MiniMax-M2.5, but things like Kimi-K2.5 will require significant quantization to fit and model performance will really suffer.

I'm really wanting to build proper local-first AI workflows at home, and I think Apple has an opportunity to make that possible in a way other companies aren't really focused on, but we need significantly larger memory capabilities to do it, which I know is tough in the current memory market but should be available for a cost.

You have to pay separately for the charger now. £99, what a bargain.

I will wait for the new mac mini instead

And your native CLI tools will continue to be from 2011 with 0 attention paid to the dev experience until it’s Swift, and we’ll continue to lock you out of running programs from other human beings we didn’t approve without a 6 step ritual in the OS. Oh and all apps will continue to constantly phone home i.e. pay for the machine so Google Adobe and Microsoft can run updaters and telemetry on it all day.

I barely push my M2 Pro MBPs. Most of my wants aren't hardware-related, they're software-related. How it runs some games from 10-20 years ago very well, but only through hacky compatibility layers that shouldn't be necessary. How some parts of the OS have gotten "out of sync" with each other.

Actually, I can think of one hardware want: have they gotten it to where you can do external GPUs and the like more easily?

Would still buy one over any other laptop on the market today for what I use them for.

The performance numbers are impressive, but I do not get the on-board AI spin. What is it used for?

Well that's. Just. Great. I bought a 64GB M4 Max MBP last month. I'm past the 14-day return window. I figured the M5 was near, but assumed M5 Max would come a bit later. Not sure where I came up with that.

Imagine these with a functioning keyboard, ports, replaceable battery and a good operating system.

Only good apple product, most overvallued company ever.

They’re giving us extra storage… but they’ve put the price up by 200, which is as much as they charged for the storage anyway.

“An Unrivaled Experience with macOS Tahoe”

Only 128GB. I was hoping they'd do 256GB version. Disappointing.

> MacBook Pro and the Environment

LOL. is it repairable? probably not.

$5k machine for developers to just run claude code while they browse Reddit.

>unified memory

This is just marketing speak. Stop repeating marketing. It isnt a walled garden, its a walled prison.

Unified memory is just regular memory. There is nothing special about integrated GPUs.