Boring is what we wanted

https://512pixels.net/2025/10/boring-is-what-we-wanted/

by Amorymeltzer • 9 months ago

440 265 9 months ago

512pixels.net

bryanlarsen3• 9 months ago

M1 had performance/watt way ahead of x86.

M5 has performance/watt below Panther Lake.

Is that really what you want?

mcphage3• 9 months ago

No, you're right, that's not—let me go buy a Panther Lake laptop right now. What site would you recommend?

bryanlarsen3• 9 months ago

M5 and Panther Lake are both late 2025 releases. They're fair comparisons.

supportengineer• 9 months ago

I don't want Panther Lake, whatever that is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

Spivak• 9 months ago

This is just how Intel names their CPU generations. It's far more boring than you're imagining. It's presumably named after https://snohomishcountywa.gov/5383/Panther

Comet Lake, Elkhart Lake, Cooper Lake, Rocket Lake, Adler Lake, Raptor Lake, Meteor Lake.

anon7000• 9 months ago

Yes, I really want an M5, a CPU I can buy today, more than Panther Lake, which isn’t on the market yet and hasn’t been reviewed by 3rd parties.

I want a laptop that gives me amazing performance, thermals, build quality, and battery life. It’s gonna take a while to see what manufacturers will do with panther lake.

ToucanLoucan4• 9 months ago

These arguments constantly devolve into "why would you want an APPLE product that's less good than $_new_shiny_PC_thing" and it's always currently available products being pitched against conceptual products in the heads of Intel's fanboys that may come to market in a year. It's a ridiculous comparison.

I got an M3 Pro Macbook Pro on clearance recently for $1,600, 16 inch screen brighter than any PC laptop's I've ever seen, that's the fastest computer I have ever used, hands down and it's 2 generations out of date already. OR I can have a PC gaming laptop where the fit and finish isn't as nice, where the screen is blurrier, the battery life maxes out at 4 hours if I do absolutely nothing with it, and any time I do anything of remote consequence the fans kick up and make it sound like it's trying to take off.

And that's without even taking into account the awful mess Windows is lately, especially around power management. It makes every laptop experience frustrating, with the same issues that were there when I was in fucking high school.

Like if you just hate Mac, fine, obviously a Mac is a bad fit for you then and I wouldn't try and tell you otherwise. But I absolutely reserve the right to giggle when those same people are turning their logical brains into pretzels to justify hating a Mac when it has utterly left the PC behind in all things apart from gaming.

AndrewDucker• 9 months ago

Leaving aside the availability of various Intel processors, exactly what I want is for the various manufacturers to compete as hard as they possibly can.

I want Intel to catch up this month. And then next month I want AMD to overtake them. And then ARM to make them all look slow. And then Apple to show them how it's done.

The absolute last thing I'd want is for Apple to have special magic chips that nobody else even comes close to.

doomroot132• 9 months ago

I am excited about Panther Lake myself but where are you reading that it has higher performance/watt than M5? The chips aren't even out yet. All we have are Intel marketing materials with vague lines on charts. No one could have possibly done a performance/watt test on Panther Lake yet. I'm hoping they beat M5 but if I had to, I'd put my money on M5.

BirAdam• 9 months ago

From what I’ve read, single thread for panther lake is roughly the same as last gen. The gains are in efficiency, multi thread, and GPU. The most optimistic reading I’ve seen suggested 50% gains in GPU performance and in multithread. I’ll wait for independent testing before making any judgements, but Intel has a way to go to rebuild trust.

tacticus• 9 months ago

so slower compared to the 14th gens.

Though it sounds like it won't be a 400W desktop part at least.

rsynnott2• 9 months ago

... I mean, given Intel's history in this department, you'd probably want to wait until Panther Lake is available before getting too excited.

bigyabai2• 9 months ago

We want Apple to compete. When they stopped signing CUDA drivers, I thought it was because Apple had a competitive GPGPU solution that wasn't SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. Here we are 10 years later with SPIR-V in a trenchcoat. The lack of vision is pathetic and has undoubtedly cost Apple trillions in the past half-decade alone.

If you think this is a boring architecture, more power to you. It's not boring enough for me.

tel• 9 months ago

Genuine question, how does SPIR-V compare with CUDA? Why is SPIR-V in a trench coat less desirable? What is it about Metal that makes it SPIR-V in a trench coat (assuming that's what you meant)?

XorNot• 9 months ago

At this stage of the game what people want is CUDA. I just bought a new GPU and the only requirement I had was "must run reasonably modern CUDA".

davedx2• 9 months ago

Not me: I wanted Apple’s software division to innovate like its hardware division. Extra power with nothing to use it on except more and more docker containers isn’t compelling to me. I’ve not upgraded my M1 Macbook Pro and don’t plan to

Herring2• 9 months ago

Honestly I'd be happy if they just made it stop lagging when I switch between multiple desktops in mission control. I spend most of my time in 3d party apps anyway. They recently added that lag I think with the liquid glass.

hexbin010• 9 months ago

They recently added that lag

They tend to add lag in major OS releases. Gets people to consider refreshing their hardware. Just by sheer coincidence, they have a new model out this year! :-)

tonypapousek• 9 months ago

I think Final Cut and maybe Logic make good use of the new silicon features.

I’m rather happy I don’t have to upgrade from my M1. More performance is nice, but making it the baseline to run an OS would just be silly.

Forgeties79• 9 months ago

It’s actually very sad to see the state final cut is in. It’s a perfectly competent NLE for speed editing and has some solid features, but they had a real piece of software on their hands for years and just kind of sat around doing nothing from 2018 or so onward. I guess it just isn’t generating enough revenue to warrant the attention it deserves. It was my workhorse for a solid decade, I passionately defended FCPX because it was truly excellent after they got it to a good place 12-18mo in. Their native multicam and audio sync blew premiere/plural eyes out of the water for years. But now it’s just so…meh

I can’t imagine leaving Resolve to go back even though I still wayyyy prefer the FCPX UI.

KolibriFly5• 9 months ago

Yep, super optimized, super responsive, and they feel like they justify the hardware gains

didibus4• 9 months ago

How much innovation is there to do in the OS at this point? You can install applications and they can innovate.

Maybe you need AI, but maybe you just need some AI agent app that uses AppleScript under the hood.

I'd rather buttery smooth, secure, fast, no bugs, let me do my work.

bigyabai2• 9 months ago

How much innovation is there to do in the OS at this point?

1) Sign Nvidia's drivers again, at least for compute (there's no excuse)

2) Implement Vulkan 1.2 compliance (even Asahi did it, c'mon)

3) Stop using notifications to send me advertisements

3.1) Stop using native apps to display advertisement modals

4) Do not install subscription services on my machine by-default

5) Give macOS a "developer mode" that's at-least as good as WSL2 (if they won't ship GNU utils)

6) Document the APFS filesystem so the primary volume isn't inscrutable, akin to what M$ did for NTFS

If they're trying to get me to switch off Linux, those would be a nice start. I don't think any of that is too much to ask from a premium platform, but maybe my expectations are maligned.

binarymax• 9 months ago

Well, it’s 2025 and I still need to install a 3rd party toolbar calendar app, so there’s that.

I also can’t snap windows, and Cmd-tab still can’t tab between different windows of the same application.

There’s lots more usability that can be improved IMO

lynndotpy4• 9 months ago

As someone who was new to Mac and eager to use AppleScript for automation, I was disappointed to find that a number of things just don't work under AppleScript in Apple Silicon. It's pretty deprecated; Shortcuts seems supported though.

johnnyanmac3• 9 months ago

Tons of things from the gaming side. There's a reason people laud SteamOS over a full blown windows handheld as an OS.

But what's "marketable"... well, I guess we need to drizzle whatever we come up with in AI. or douse it.

trenchpilgrim5• 9 months ago

I still have to install third party apps like Rectangle, LinearMouse and Middle to get a fraction of the ease of navigation I get on my Linux machines.

I still have to install a third party terminal like Kitty or Ghostty for basic, modern rendering.

eviks2• 9 months ago

How much innovation is there to do in the OS at this point?

Infinite, just like in any complex UI. All the basic interaction primitives built into the OS are somewhat broken, from app/window management and text editing to keybindings and mouse gestures

Analemma_• 9 months ago

I don't think anyone should upgrade if they're happy, but I also think faster chips do have real-world benefits that tend not to be appreciated by people who aren't valuing their time enough. I replaced my M1 MBP with an M4 earlier this year, and it's had a couple real-world benefits:

- builds are noticeably faster on later chips as multicore performance has increased a lot. When I replaced my M1 MBP with an M4, builds in both Xcode, cargo and LaTeX (I'll switch to Typst one of these days, but haven't yet) took about 60% of the time they had previously. That adds up to real productivity gains

- when running e.g. qwen3 on LM Studio, I was getting 3-5 tok/s on the M1 and 10-15 on the M4, which to me at least crosses the fuzzy barrier between "interesting toy to tinker with sometimes" and "can actually use for real work"

makeitdouble5• 9 months ago

At this point does the hardware division really innovate that much ?

There is significant improvement from the M4 to the M5, but how much of it is comes from TSMC and how much from Apple ? They have exclusivity on the latest processes, so it's harder to compare with what Qualcomm or AMD is doing for instance, but right now Strix Halo is basically on par with the M3~4 developped on the same node density.

On the other hardware parts, form factor has mostly stagnated, and the last big jump was the Vision Pro...

gsibble3• 9 months ago

I still think the future for the Vision Pro is very bright. I think this version is more to get developers working on applications for it. Spatial computing is a fascinating idea.

al_borland4• 9 months ago

The Vision Pro was still pretty recent. They also refreshed the hardware designs of everything when moving to the M-series chips.

They also made that new wireless chip recently, the chips for the headphones, and some for the Vision Pro. The camera in the iPhone also gets a lot of attention, which takes a lot of hardware engineering. In the iPhone more generally we saw fairly big changes just a month or so ago with the new Pro phone and the Air. The Pro models on the MacBook and iPad are almost as thin, if not more thin than the Air line, which I’m sure took a considerable amount of work, to the point of making the Air branding a little silly.

jltsiren2• 9 months ago

They are already innovating more than they can deliver. While Apple's hardware quality is usually good, their quality standards are much lower on the software side.

Liftyee3• 9 months ago

This is surprising to me. I always thought Apple was ahead on the UX side of software with their attention to detail. Though it's been a while since their hardware design flaws, and their software has had new issues. Even Louis Rossmann has mostly stopped talking about Apple since their repairability changes (or due to having bigger fish to fry).

gsibble3• 9 months ago

How about:

- 5G connectivity - WiFi 7 - Tandem OLED Screen - Better webcam - FaceID - Cheaper RAM (RAM is more important to me these days than CPU speed) - More ports - Better/cheaper monitors - Make a proper tablet OS - Maybe a touchscreen but I really don't want one

just to get started

lynndotpy4• 9 months ago

As someone who hates Apple's facial recognition implementation, I'm eagerly awaiting the day they ditch TouchID for FaceID. That'll be the year for me to upgrade to a high-spec laptop on the last generation with TouchID.

the_pwner2243• 9 months ago

Price gouging on RAM is a very intentional decision by Apple to charge 8x market rate for it. Same for storage, you can get a blazing fast 4 TB NVMe SSD for just a few hundred bucks vs $2k or whatever Apple extorts from you.

fragmede• 9 months ago

I upgraded to the M4 for more ram and more GPU for local LLMs so I'm not sending all my shit to OpenAI, but it's not for everybody.

Sharlin• 9 months ago

I'd much prefer they focus on fixing their existing software quality problems. No innovation needed, just boring old software maintenance and design work.

varenc2• 9 months ago

They need a "Snow Leopard-style" release. This was the macOS version that came after Leopard and it was explicitly a release with no new features. It just focused on performance, efficiency, and reducing overall memory usage. Famously Apple even advertised it as having "zero new features". Recent macOS releases feel like they're going in the opposite direction. Really wish their next release would be more like Snow Leopard.

adamthegoalie• 9 months ago

Now you can run LLMs beside your Docker containers!

jdgoesmarching• 9 months ago

You want Apple to invent reasons for you to need a more powerful computer? I could understand this argument for the iPad, but this is a weird complaint for Macs. Play a video game, use local LLMs, or get into video editing?

johnnyanmac3• 9 months ago

Never owned an apple device myself, but honestly I just want the existing tech to start coming down in cost. I grabbed a fordable this year and it's great. It was very much not worth $2200 though (and that was before tarriffs), so I grabbed a used 2YO model for $800 or so.

I'm already salavating at the thought of a fordable tablet in any form. But not at the thought of paying $3000 for one with current pricing.

davedx2• 9 months ago

I'm just saying I need a real reason to upgrade beyond "benchmarks make me feel good".

I can run local LLM's fine on my M1 Pro from 2021. I play games on it too. Why would I spend multiple thousands on a M(N) Macbook if there's no real reason to? It's not like when I upgraded from a 386DX to a Pentium.

I have a similar argument for phones right now. There are some AI-related reasons to upgrade, but there's not really a clear killer app yet besides frontier model chat apps. Why should I spend thousands of euros on an upgrade when I don't get anything significantly different for it?

pjmlp• 9 months ago

I rather that they stop inovating beyond the team skills budget.

KolibriFly5• 9 months ago

There's so much untapped potential with these chips

TheCapeGreek• 9 months ago

I don't even want more docker containers - I want to be able to run the same containers with much less overhead on the system. Hoping their new native containerisation plays that out soon.

al_borland4• 9 months ago

I always get a little bothered when I see negative reviews from a CPU update in Apple laptops. While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come. I’ve been in this situation many times with Apple and it has been very frustrating. I’m glad they are back on a yearly refresh schedule.

I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things, like leaving old chips out there too long, or adding pointless features just so there is something new to talk about.

ebbi2• 9 months ago

Agree. So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design. I remember the time people were (rightfully) complaining that the update schedules were slow for Macs, mainly because of Intel's limitations. Now we get yearly refresh, they complain that it looks the same.

I don't think they appreciate the cost of redesigning and retooling. Echo your thoughts and hope Apple doesn't listen to this feedback. Imagine more expensive laptops because some people want more frequent design changes!

wmf2• 9 months ago

Intel released new CPUs every year; they shouldn't be blamed when Apple refused to update.

tpmoney2• 9 months ago

Apple is the company where every new iPhone release is both simultaneously boring, not worth it and a sure sign of their impending collapse and also somehow a vicious treadmill which forces people to upgrade every year, throwing out their old phone and contributing to e-waste. They could announce a cure for cancer tomorrow and within a month people would be back to asking what have they innovated recently. People just like to complain.

KolibriFly5• 9 months ago

I'd much rather Apple put their energy into performance, battery life, and long-term reliability than chasing novelty for novelty's sake

tolien• 9 months ago

So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design.

If ever there was a case of "be careful what you wish for" - whether it's the Touch Bar, deleting ports or the butterfly keyboard, a redesign isn't necessarily a positive.

makeitdouble5• 9 months ago

Yes.

The review ecosystem is really toxic in that regard, as makers will court to it.

We had the silly unboxing videos fade, and it meant gorgeous packaging flying in the face of recyclability and cost reduction.

I wonder if the glass backs and utterly shiny but heavy and PITA to repair design is also part from there. A reviewer doesn't care that much if it costs half the phone to repair the back panel.

thenthenthen• 9 months ago

Makers? Could you expand on this?

throw0101c• 9 months ago

While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come.

Also: incremental updates add up.

A (e.g.) 7% increase from one year to the next isn't a big deal, but +7%, +7%, +7%, …, adds up when you finally come up for a tech refresh after 3-5 years.

ecshafer• 9 months ago

Its 2025, the fact that Apple is delivering CPUs with actual, noticeable annual performance improvements is pretty astounding in itself. Sure its not 1990s levels, but its still pretty great.

cheschire2• 9 months ago

adds up to 22.5%

wanderingmind• 9 months ago

Sorry for the nit, but it's compounding improvement, not additive. Its 25% after 3 years and 45% after 5

immibis• 9 months ago

Also: we shouldn't make a big deal out of every update then. Celebrating M1: alright, but then M2-M500 are boring and not even worth noting, because you know there's a new one every year.

staplers• 9 months ago

  it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things

One could argue our entire society is tainted by this effect (news, politics, etc)

appreciatorBus• 9 months ago

It's so tiresome.

Every car company in the world realized that yearly product updates was the way to go, and no one whines that this year's model isn't good enough to justify upgrading from the previous year.

nradov• 9 months ago

The auto market doesn't really work that way any more. Each new model is now expected to last about 8 years (plus or minus depending on the manufacturer) with only one minor mid-cycle refresh.

NeoA3on• 9 months ago

I don’t think most people are upset about the update itself. They’re just reacting to the mismatch between the scale of the improvements and the scale of the marketing.

haritha-j• 9 months ago

To be fair apple didn't even market this launch, it was a very quiet release, but the reviewers needed to make content, so here we are. That's not to say that they generally aren't guilty of making massive fanfare about ridiculously incremental phone updates and swapping the location of the camera bump just to make it look different.

adastra2220• 9 months ago

Yeah, I literally just bought an M4 device mere weeks before the M5 came out. The performance jump is nontrivial for my use case. Am I worried about it? Nah. In another year there will be another jump, and then the year after. I’m just on a different upgrade cadence, that’s all.

Meanwhile back in the pre-M1 days I remember stalking Mac rumors for moths trying to make sure I wasn’t going to buy right before their once-in-blue-moon product refresh. You could buy a Mac and get most of its useful life before they upgrade the chip, if you timed it right, so an upgrade right after you bought was a real kick in the pants.

troupo• 9 months ago

My worry is that all their hardware teams are now on the same "must release yearly with insane marketing" cycle as software.

drcongo• 9 months ago

Nobody realy talks about the knock on effects of the attention economy. I opted out of it a long time ago, I despise YouTubers, TikTokers etc. because of the world they're shaping, and it's not just the injection of mindless rubbish into people's brains, it's real world effects like you outline in your second paragraph. It amazes me when I see seemingly smart people on HN talking about how they're addicted to YouTube "Shorts", it's like being addicted to labotomies.

benjiro• 9 months ago

I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views.

The problem is that our hardware as we know it, has lost a lot of its stretch. Used to be that we got 100% performance gains on a generation to generation update. Then it became 50%, 30% ... Like in the GPU market, the last generation that actually got me exited was the 1000 series (1070 specific).

Now its "boring" 10 a 15% upgrades for the same generation (if we do not count naming / pricing rearrangements).

When was the last time any of use was "hey, i am exited to potentially buy this tech, really". Apple M1 comes to mind, and that is 5 years ago.

Nvidia tried to push the whole ray tracing (a bit too early), but again, its just a incremental update to graphics (as we had a lot of tricks to simulate lighting effects that had good performance). So again, kind of a boring gain if we look back.

Mobile gaming handhelds was trilling, steam deck... Then we got competitors but with high price tags = excitement became less. And now, nobody blinks with a new generation gets released because the CPU/iGPU gains are the same boring 15 a 20%... So who wants to put down 700, 900 Euro for a 15% gain.

What has really gotten you exited? Where your just willing to throw money at something? AI? And we see the same issue with LLMs ... what used to be big step/gain, in barely a years has gone from massive gains, to incremental gains. 10% better on this benchmark, 5% better there, ... So it becomes boring (GPT5 launch and reaction, Sora 2 launch and reaction).

When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video.

If you think about it, there is a reason why tech channels have issues and are even more clickbait then ever. Those people live on views, so when the tech they follow/review is boring to the audience, they start pushing more and more clickbait. But that eventually burning the channels.

Unfortunately, we have a entire industry that is designed around making parts smaller and smaller every generation, to make those gains. As we lost the ability to make large gains on making those smaller making parts ...

Its ironic, as we knew this was coming and yet, it seems nobody made any breakthrough at all. Quantum computing was a field that everybody knew had no road to general computing at home (materials issues).

So what is left is the same old, lets may the die a bit smaller, gain a bit, do some optimizing left and right, and call it a new product. But for customers, getting product 2.1, being named "this is our product 3.0!!!! Buy buy" ... when customers see its just 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 ...

We are in a boring time because companies sat too darn long on their behinds, milking their exiting products but never really figured how to make new products. I think the only one that took a risk was Intel years ago, and it blew up in their face.

So yes, unless some smart cookie makes a new invention, that can revolutionize how we make chips (and that can be mass produced), boring is the standard now. No matter how companies try to repackage it.

KolibriFly5• 9 months ago

Agree... regular, even if "boring," updates are a feature, not a bug

ndiddy• 9 months ago

One thing that bothers me about the lack of a redesign is that it means there's been no progress on minimizing or getting rid of the notch. Apple is clearly able to do this, they made the notch smaller on iPhones a few years ago, but on Macs it's just as big and intrusive as it was when they introduced it 4 years ago. To me, this indicates that Apple either doesn't care about how intrusive having a big gap in the middle of the menu bar is, or worse, considers it a part of the Mac's "brand identity" now, something that indicates at a glance that someone's using a Mac.

MattTheRealOne• 9 months ago

I agree. Apple needs to either shrink the notch or add Face ID. I was surprised Face ID was not included initially with the notch, but figured there was a last minute problem or something. But here we are several revisions later, and still no change.

bittercynic2• 9 months ago

They say no downside, but if you need to run windows 7 in virtualbox, you still need an intel mac (or other non-arm computer).

pavlov2• 9 months ago

Windows 7 is sixteen years old. There are full x86 emulators available. Seems like a niche pursuit.

bittercynic2• 9 months ago

I have an old card printer that I only use occasionally, and firing up a windows 7 virtual machine is (was?) the most convenient way to do it. I think it's not so uncommon to have old devices around that don't work with newer versions of windows.

Apocryphon• 9 months ago

I have an old 2019 MBP running Windows 10 for old gaming

tiagod• 9 months ago

Today I was testing an x64 msi installer and app in a Windows ARM VM on UTM and it worked just fine with the Windows built-in emulation.

iberator• 9 months ago

Windows ARM?! Make article about it

trinix9122• 9 months ago

So it was with PowerPC, Sparc, SGI CPUs, and a bunch of older now obsolete architectures. I don't think we should be limiting the technological potential to keep old Windows drivers afloat, and they weren't native to the platform to begin with. You can always get a PC and virtualize Windows 7 just fine.

kentm• 9 months ago

Frankly I’d be incredibly exited if the next Apple OS update was “No new major featurs. Bug fixes, perf optimization, and minor ergonomic improvements only”.

pavlov2• 9 months ago

The Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard approach. It was good.

noitpmeder• 9 months ago

Sadly this approach is less likely to get the exec a bonus

al_borland4• 9 months ago

The important work isn’t always glamorous. This is a problem that has tainted the entire industry.

The new pretty stuff feels a lot less magical when it lags or the UI glitches out. Apple sells fluidity and a seamless user experience. They need those bug fixes and an obsessive attention to detail to deliver on what is expected of their products.

yodsanklai• 9 months ago

The exec, but also the SWEs. In my company, if all you have to show is minor improvements and bug fixes, you're at risk of being fired.

hansvm3• 9 months ago

A few ergonomics improvements and a wifi stack that doesn't periodically crash could be enough to pull me to the dark side. I like my setup, but I'm lazy and don't really like the process of upgrading computers. Apple taking that load off could buy me as a customer for a decade. The amazing battery life is nothing to sneeze at either.

fullofdev• 9 months ago

Agree! very happy with the M4 performance.

amelius• 9 months ago

General purpose computing is what we wanted.

Normal_gaussian• 9 months ago

I've heard that the M-series chips with metal do great on the whole small model with low latency front; but I have no practical experience doing this yet. I'm hoping to add some local LLM/STT function to my office without heating my house.

I'm uncertain as to whether any M series mac will be performant enough and the M1/M2 mac mini's specifically, or whether there are features in the M3/M4/M5 architecture that make it worth my while to buy new.

Are these incremental updates actually massive in the model performance and latency space, or are they just as small or smaller?

trailbits• 9 months ago

As someone who purchased their first M-series Mac this year (M4 pro), I've been thrilled to discover how well it does with local genAI tasks to produce text, code and images. For example openai/gpt-oss-20b runs locally quite well with 24GB memory. If I knew beforehand how performant the Mac would be for these kinds of tasks, I probably would have purchased more RAM in order to load larger models. Performance for genAI is a function of GPU, # of GPU cores, and memory bandwidth. I think your biggest gains are going from a base chip to a pro/max/ultra version with the greater gpu cores and greater bandwidth.

adastra2220• 9 months ago

The M5 is a huge upgrade over the M4 for local inference. They advertise 400% and there is reason to believe this isn’t a totally BS number. They redo the GPU cores to avoid having to emulate certain operations at the core inner loop of LLM inference.

I have an M4 and it is plenty fast enough. But honestly the local models are just not anywhere near the hosted models in quality, due to the lower parameter count, so I haven’t had much success yet.

gsibble3• 9 months ago

Mac hardware has so significantly outpaced software needs I think there are diminishing returns. I'm a software developer who uses all sorts of advanced stuff and I only bought an M4 Pro, not a Max, because it wasn't worth the extra money. There are so few applications that max out a CPU for any meaningful amount of time these days like rendering videos or 3D.

My M4 iPad Pro is amazing but feels totally overpowered for what it's capable of.

I guess what I'm saying is.......I don't need faster CPUs. I want longer battery life, 5G connectivity, WiFI 7, lighter weight, a better screen, a better keyboard, etc..

I guess it's odd that Apple spends so much time making faster computers when that is practically an already solved problem.

pohl• 9 months ago

They aren’t just making computers, though. Today’s CPU improvements go into tomorrow’s Vision Pro. Today’s improved E cores become tomorrow’s watch cores. Or something like that.

philipwhiuk• 9 months ago

What happened to the M3 GPU to give it a drop in score?

wmf2• 9 months ago

When you make a major architecture change (e.g. dynamic caching) there's always one or two workloads that get slower.

adastra2220• 9 months ago

Same reason Asahi Linux only supports up to the M2. They completely re-did the system architecture.

nchmy• 9 months ago

I thought this was going to be about Apple's various recent catastrophic software innovations, saying "why did you have to mess with a good thing? We just wanted it to stay as-is, even if that's considered 'boring'"

anArbitraryOne3• 9 months ago

I wouldn't call the old software good either

avmich• 9 months ago

The difference is that with Apple silicon, Apple owns and controls the primary technologies behind the products it makes, as Tim Cook has always wanted.

But did customers want it?

I'll leave it here, as the point is made.

tpmoney2• 9 months ago

Long time Apple customers? Almost certainly. Apple has a history of having conflict with their chip makers and other component vendors. For the longest time, Apple wasn't big enough for those vendors to bother with doing anything Apple wanted them to do. Or even when Apple was big, still wasn't big enough to make a dent in their vendor's pipelines (see also Intel and low power chips)

stetrain4• 9 months ago

Customers seem pretty happy with the changes and sales are up since the transition.

A Macbook with some of the best processors available in a laptop with the battery life and thermal characteristics of an iPhone or iPad is a pretty compelling product for many people.

adastra2220• 9 months ago

You didn’t make any point.

0xbadcafebee2• 9 months ago

I hate that computers get faster, because it means I'll be forced to buy another laptop. It goes like this:

  - Some developer buys a new laptop
  - Developer writes software (a browser)
  - When the software works "fast enough" on their new laptop, they ship it
  - The software was designed to work on the dev's new laptop, not my old laptop
  - Soon the software is too bloated to work on my old laptop
  - So I have to buy a new laptop to run the software

Before I'd buy a laptop because it had cool new features. But now the only reason I buy a new one is the new software crashes from too little RAM, or runs too slowly. My old laptops work just fine. All the old apps they come with work just fine. Even new native apps work just fine. But they can't run a recent browser. And you can't do anything without a recent browser.

If our computers never got faster, we would still be able to do everything the same that we can do today. But we wouldn't have to put down a grand every couple years to replace a perfectly good machine.

jen729w• 9 months ago

What nonsense.

Name a software that won’t run comfortably on my M1 MacBook Air, now 5 years old.

vachina• 9 months ago

Mac is not the lowest common denominator

drob518• 9 months ago

I agree. My M1 Air is the best laptop I’ve ever owned (and that goes back 30 years). While I’m finally getting tempted to upgrade by M5, the reality is my M1 is still quite usable. I’m thinking I might use it until it either fails or Apple finally cuts support for it.

Mashimo• 9 months ago

Well if you bought the 8GB ram version there might be some apps that won't work that well ;-)

Liftyee3• 9 months ago

I think what you want is for software developers not to write bloated code, instead of computers not getting faster. The bloated code is a result of undisciplined programming and not paying attention to users' devices.

If our computers never got faster, we would never get faster computers (obviously...) to run efficient code even faster. 3D rendering and physics simulation come to mind.

I have noticed what you mention over longer timescales (e.g. a decade). But it's mostly "flashy" software - games, trendy things... Which also includes many websites sadly - the minimum RAM usage for a mainstream website tab these days seems to be around 200MB.

Anecdata: My 12 year old desktop still runs Ubuntu+latest Firefox fine (granted, it probably wouldn't be happy with Windows, and laptops are generally weaker). Counter-anecdata: A friend's Mac Pro from many years ago can't run latest Safari and many other apps, so is quite useless.

0xbadcafebee2• 9 months ago

If our computers never got faster, we would never get faster computers (obviously...) to run efficient code even faster. 3D rendering and physics simulation come to mind.

The solution to that is a few decades old: plug-in a 3D rendering card. (Of course there's the whole system bus issue, but that's largely solved by a bigger bus, rather than a faster CPU and more system memory. 3d programs requiring more cpu/memory is largely software bloat)

A few decades ago there was a lot of research into system-level parallel processing. The idea was to just add more machines to scale up processing power (if needed). But because machines got faster, there was less need for it, so the research was mostly abandoned. We would all be using distributed OSes today if it weren't for faster machines.

LogicHound• 9 months ago

I think what you want is for software developers not to write bloated code, instead of computers not getting faster. The bloated code is a result of undisciplined programming and not paying attention to users' devices.

I am so fed up of hearing this. I would love to optimise my code, but management will always prioritise features over optimisations because that is what drives sales. This happens at almost every company I've worked at.

Also more often than not, I have a huge problem even getting stuff working and having to wrangle co-workers who I have to suffer with that cannot do basic jobs, do not write test and in some cases I've found don't even run the code before submitting PRs. That code then get merged because "it looks good" when there is obvious problems that I can spot in some cases from literally the other side of the room.

telchior• 9 months ago

I don't know if that's accurate to software developers, but it makes me cringe a bit as a game developer. I upgraded from a 1060 to 4060 and suddenly did waaaay less optimization; it just wasn't top of mind anymore. Of course, that bill still comes due eventually..

snvzz• 9 months ago

For Exciting, look into RISC-V.

That's gonna be wild starting 2026, with the first implementations of RVA23, such as Tenstorrent Ascalon devboards TBA Q2.

noname1202• 9 months ago

Can you elaborate on why exactly we should be specifically excited by RISC-V rather than other open architectures?

LarsDu88• 9 months ago

Reading this on my brand new M5 Mac :)

jmspring• 9 months ago

I'm still typing this from an M1 MAX MBP w/ 64 gig of ram. I ended up needing more memory so, I swapped to this machine instead of my M1 air w/ 16gig. Both machines are completely capable for most tasks I deal with as a developer. Do I like my work m3? Sure. I wish I had the old m3 air I had to give back. But I'm happy with my machines.

It's funny that my ipad has a more current CPU than my two laptops.

827a• 9 months ago

Personally: I am extremely excited for a world where we have silicon that's capable of driving triple-A level gaming in the ~20w TDP envelope. M5 might actually be the first real glimpse we've had into this level of efficiency.

naruhodo• 9 months ago

Apple could have my money in exchange for their hardware. I won't even ask for support. They just need to provide the hardware specifications to Linux developers.

anArbitraryOne3• 9 months ago

Exactly. I might even pay them for the opportunity cost of not harvesting my data

topspin2• 9 months ago

That would immediately induce my first ever significant Apple purchase.

IshKebab2• 9 months ago

Woo they'll have 2 extra customers!

It totally sucks but you can see why they wouldn't ever bother with this.

dur-randir• 9 months ago

Nah. I want fixes in macos, not "boring" nor "shiny updates".

Huxley1• 9 months ago

I can relate. Most users just want stable, quiet performance improvements, not a revolution every update. Do you care more about performance improvements or new features?

nl3• 9 months ago

I have a M1 Max MPB from 2022 with 32G RAM (which I'm grateful for).

More performance (especially for local AI models) is always great, but I'm trying to imagine what I'd want out of a design change!

I think slightly thinner would be nice, but not if it runs hotter or throttles.

Smaller bezels on the screen maybe?

I'm one of those who liked the touchbar (because I think that applications which labelled its shortcuts in the touchbar are awesome) so I think some innovation around things like that would be nice. But not if it compromises the perfect keyboard.

I do think MacOS would be improved with touchscreen support.

trinix9122• 9 months ago

I do think MacOS would be improved with touchscreen support.

On the contrary, I appreciate the Mac UI not being forced into touch friendliness. The whitespace increase in Big Sur is already bad enough, at least to me.

kristianp• 9 months ago

This seems like a straw man. Are reviewers really calling the M5 boring?

Sweepi• 9 months ago

Back in the PowerPC and Intel days, Macs would sometimes go years between meaningful spec bumps, as Apple waited on its partners to deliver appropriate hardware for various machines.

Yes and no. Sometimes Intel did not move as fast as Apple wanted, and sometimes Apple didnt feel like it. Especially the MacPro (trash can and old cheese-grate) and the MacMini (2012-2018) were neglected.

Today, the MacPro ships with M2 Ultra, the MacStudio ships with M3 Ultra, and its not certain that the MacMini and the iMac will get the M5 or will continue shipping with the M4 for the foreseeable future.

JodieBenitez• 9 months ago

Still no need to upgrade my M1 MBA... life is good.

jammo• 9 months ago

I have a 2020 intel 10nm quad core MBP and my god even the M2 is so much faster. They are doing absolutely incredible work to be getting >10% improvement every single year without fail starting from that point.

linhns2• 9 months ago

Yep, one of the biggest success for Apple in recent years is to hire a team of chip designers for these M chips.

gotschi_• 9 months ago

I just want the old Macbook Air M1 design back :(

DeltaCoast• 9 months ago

That’s what I am holding on to.

noname1202• 9 months ago

What don’t you like about the new design?

willtemperley3• 9 months ago

We want cheaper storage, now. 1TB costs around $400 based on speccing a 2TB M5 Macbook pro.

That's probably a 4x markup, and the $200 to go from 256 to 512 is even worse.

Every time a user considers jumping from Windows but balks at the storage costs, that's leaving many thousands of potential revenue on the table. I just can't believe it really makes economic sense for them, except in short-term cashflow terms.

SSLy2• 9 months ago

1TB of good NAND costs 30€ or so.

psyklic• 9 months ago

RAM too. They want +$1K to go from 64GB to 128GB, with no other spec changes. It's a way of segmenting the market -- those who actually need it are willing to pay a lot more (e.g. for AI / 4K videos).

willtemperley3• 9 months ago

There is at least scarcity in that there are probably few M chips in the 128GB bin. NAND is commodity by comparison. You’re probably right though about market segmentation. Some people will pay that happily. Or perhaps it’s to push people to iCloud storage.

KolibriFly5• 9 months ago

Soo we can't demand both stability and constant reinvention

stego-tech• 9 months ago

For those of us immersed in hardware fandom, the cycle is neither new or disappointing - if anything, a lot of us relish the “boring” times, because it means we can finally squeeze performance out of our investment without fretting about arbitrary replacement timelines or major improvements in technology leading to gargantuan gains. It’s nice, quiet, and let’s us enjoy the fruits of our labors and hobbies.

That being said, I do kind of head-tilt at the folks screaming that this sort of “boring” cycle of hardware isn’t sustainable, that somehow, someone must create the next major improvement to justify all new spend or otherwise this is a worthless exercise. In reality, it’s always been the opposite: Moore’s Law wasn’t infinitely scalable, and anyone who suffered through the Pentium 4 era was painfully aware of its limitations. Sure, we can find other areas to scale (like going from clock speed to core counts, and core counts to core types), but Moore’s Law is not infallible or infinite; eventually, a plateau will be reached that cannot be overcome without serious R&D or a fundamental sea-change in the marketplace (like moving from x86 to ARM), often a combination of both.

Apple, at least, has the unenviable position of being among the first in addressing this challenge: how do you sell more products when power or efficiency gains are increasingly thin, year over year? Their approach has been to leverage services for recurring revenue and gradually slowing down product refreshes over time, while tempering expectations of massive gains for those product lines seeing yearly refreshes. I suspect that will be the norm for a lot of companies going forward, hence the drive to close walled gardens everywhere and lock-in customers (see also the Android sideloading discourse).

The hardware cycle at present is fairly boring, and I quite like it. My M1 iPad Pro and M1 Pro Macbook Pro dutifully serve me well, and I have no need to replace either until they break.

neo_cs193p2• 9 months ago

Boring is what I wanted on the software side too. I've really tried to like/tolerate Tahoe, but the UI is close to unusable in some places (like System Settings, some icons), plain ugly in other places (like menu bar fonts, window corners, dock etc.), or both (the contrast in most places where liquid glass and text interact). It was messing with my workflow so bad, to the point I've given up. All my Macs are on Sequoia today. One of the main reasons I've been using Macs is because the OS was functional and beautiful. This is becoming less and less true. And it's not just resistance to change. I've also been skeptical about the UI transition from Catalina to Big Sur, but the usability issues were much smaller and I could was able to get used to the new look very quickly.

With Tahoe it's different: its ugliness is uncanny. I've just given up on it.

neo_cs193p2• 9 months ago

I really hope it's just a [short] phase, like the butterfly keyboard. I can't stay on Sequoia forever, and I'd like a beautiful MacOS in the future.

Boring is what we wanted

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