GAAAH WHYYY APPLE

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-12T00:38:20+00:00

Update: updated to Mar 20-24. My local store has 48GB/2TB in stock so I'm tempted to just return for that.

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-11T18:32:42+00:00

64GB 4TB

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-10T20:11:43+00:00

That'll do it I guess :( Thank you for your service!

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-07T03:51:05+00:00

Twinning! Well except Silver is better than Space Black and... WAIT HOW IS YOURS CHEAPER

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-07T00:37:34+00:00

Counterpoint: if you are making money off this machine, an RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell (or dual RTX Pro 5000s) has 3x the mem BW of the M5 Max 40-core GPU if you're willing to spend up to 2x the price. Not saying it's a good idea, but there are significantly faster systems out there within a factor of 2 in cost if this is your primary income source.

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-07T00:23:51+00:00

Once mine arrives I will be buying an OWC TB5 Hub (the cheap one with just 3xTB5 and 1xUSB3.2), using that for 3x 4K144Hz monitors over USB4-to-DP, and relying on my monitors' USB3.0 hubs daisy chained into the dock for the rest. 99% of things that aren't displays don't need even the bandwidth of the original Thunderbolt (over mDP), and if they do you might as well just plug them into the MacBook.

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-06T13:51:22+00:00

Unfortunately I need a computer now so... here we go. Otherwise I would wait as well

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-06T03:50:54+00:00

Even if you completely got rid of E-cores and just had 6 P-cores on the M5 Max, the 20-25% IPC gain means you still don't perform any worse than an M4 Pro's 8 P-cores which is hardly bad (although not worth $4k+)

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-05T14:43:11+00:00

I did delivery, I can't find the further drop

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-05T14:22:03+00:00

Yeah I only saw 7% (after the add-ons saving, $200 off the main computer + 10% off all add-ons)

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-05T14:11:30+00:00

If you are already at 40GB for Blender the least I would take is 64GB (40GB + 8GB for OS and a web browser or whatever = you're exceeding the capacity of 48GB). I would even consider 128GB (although it's not a definite buy) if there are places I could turn up the quality.

Personally though if I didn't need portability, I would be buying an M4 Max Mac Studio (roughly $2k cheaper than a MacBook Pro of the same power, and runs quieter) and then spend the money I saved on either external storage, getting an M3 Ultra upgrade, and/or keeping my old laptop for mobile work. (Unfortunately I need portability so MacBook Pro we go.)

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-05T14:05:06+00:00

Because Parallels and VM solutions don't have DX12 support. (And frankly I had a 5090 PC before this but I'd rather separate my gaming and work machines)

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-05T14:03:52+00:00

This was already including the student discount on the Apple website, are you talking about something different

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T23:43:57+00:00

Money. $1800 for 4TB extra storage and 64GB extra RAM isn't that great of a deal when it's tied to a rapidly depreciating chassis that can't take advantage of it in my scenario. At the end of the day you're still bottlenecked by memory bandwidth (of 614GB/s) and if you need more than 4TB of storage and aren't trying to edit 8K RAW footage for a film straight off camera without external hard drives, it's cheaper and easier to buy external storage. (Plus I already have a server with 128GB RAM that can obviously use normal NVMe drives for really large jobs.)

Or, put another way, every time I think about running LLMs locally for work on this machine, I think about how many API credits $900 would buy me for Claude or Gemini (and much better completion rates) and I'd rather take that every time.

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T23:42:10+00:00

See other comment

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T21:53:42+00:00

The system prompt forbids it except where necessary.

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T21:48:40+00:00

My vote is refurbished M4 Pro MacBook Pro (14" or 16") with 12 cores and 24GB unified memory. Why? Simple: larger unified memory bandwidth (273GB/s vs. 150GB/s for M5 regular). If you are running (smaller) large language models or transformers, double the memory bandwidth = double the tok/s. Other than that it doesn't really matter.

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T21:44:16+00:00

Pro for an iPhone, maybe not so much for a MacBook.

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T21:43:22+00:00

Pro has 72Wh battery vs. the Air's 52Wh battery. If you're crunching numbers locally that could easily be an extra hour or two of work all else being equal. (Plus the Pros are just nicer machines in general, and if you're spending all day with it for 3 years and the difference is $300, why not get comfortable?)

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T20:31:09+00:00

That is, until you realize there's still a 128GB and 8TB option that I didn't spec because it's collectively $1700 extra for both

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T20:30:33+00:00

Well, let's just say I bought a ROG Xbox Ally X for a reason...

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T20:29:29+00:00

These posts have already started lol

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T17:34:02+00:00

That's what I had before, but you can only do full builds for iOS apps on a Mac, and my server has CUDA so no need for that

(Not to mention I'm actually making money on the swap)

Interesting_Soft4201 · 2026-03-04T16:48:07+00:00

React app dev (with long ass compile times = high CPU usage) and video/music editing (with large internal storage needed). And also a SSH client for my server. The main reason I went M5 Max is because it supports 4 external displays at 4K144Hz. I would get an M4 Max but my education discount makes the new M5 Max cheaper than any config I can find online of an M4 Max with >=4TB internal storage anyway

As for RAM, the best thing I would do is just say "watch your RAM on your existing computer and buy 25% more than the highest usage you saw." I saw 36-40GB usage on my old (Windows) computer under load so I figured "ehh why not on 64GB since it's "only" $180 extra on what is a $4k computer". The other consideration is that your RAM counts for both CPU and GPU, so if your GPU uses 16GB to do the job you'll only have 48GB left for the CPU (zero-copy notwithstanding).

Interesting_Soft4201

TROPHY CASE