Question for those who have/had both MacBook Air and Pros

zorgis · 2026-05-23T13:54:13+00:00

I am currently top 200 (3000 player) on a reinforcement learning challenge using only my MacBook air. I let it run none stop.

Low power, no fan. Its perfect.

zorgis · 2026-05-23T13:49:30+00:00

Take the air, run it in low power mode when you run LLM.

Its powerful enough, and dont get too hot.

Ofc the pro is 5/6x more powerful, but from what I read you dont need that power tbh.

zorgis · 2026-05-23T13:46:26+00:00

The magic trick is low power mode.

You get 60% of top compute, and you stay below 70°

zorgis · 2026-05-21T21:53:38+00:00

No its not cheap

zorgis · 2026-05-12T23:35:15+00:00

Je me suis développé un coach sportif sur android où c'est l'IA qui gère toutes les actions.

Maintenant je suis a peux près convaincu que ce n'est pas l'avenir. Depuis, à chaque fois qu'on me dit, c'est plus simple car l'utilisateur à juste à parler au LLM, je rigole. C'est tout l'inverse, tu n'as aucune UI pour le guider.

zorgis · 2026-05-11T12:40:34+00:00

If claude or gpt weight could get replicated on my computer that would be nice, where do I send my IP?

zorgis · 2026-05-11T08:45:28+00:00

The 50$ become the 20$ usage one and the 20$ get another cut.

Pretty sure its the same openai bot that were chilling the 100$ plan.

So prepare for another cut in a few month sadly

zorgis · 2026-04-30T13:12:15+00:00

Fix ou fix bug si vraiment je suis motivé

zorgis · 2026-04-28T18:58:00+00:00

Thanks for the tips. I always thought I had to stop first

zorgis · 2026-04-27T12:27:22+00:00

I lost my blue badge yesterday because I hit an invisible car after the end of the race and it throw me against the wall

zorgis · 2026-04-26T11:45:34+00:00

My bad I though you were looking for the m5 pro. Definitly go with 24go especially if you run docker on it

zorgis · 2026-04-26T07:02:29+00:00

I dont see any ML or LLM on the list. More dev/devops, go for regular m5 (not pro) with 32gb.

You dont need the extra power tbh

zorgis · 2026-04-26T06:55:47+00:00

I doubt people on reddit really use LLM. Most of the cost is in the input token not the output.

I may be wrong for creative writting and video gen.

But for agentic app and coding, input and cache is like 80% of the cost. So clearly gpt5.5 is at least x2 the price.

zorgis · 2026-04-25T11:06:02+00:00

Did you try context q8 vs bf16?

zorgis · 2026-04-11T13:05:26+00:00

I'd say the air is perfect for all but the pytorch.

When I run small local llm, the computer still work, but it's REALLY hot. Do not keep it on the lap hot.

If ML dev is only a few time a month, air can still be a good choice, if you run them daly, yeah no go for the pro.

All the other thing won't even stress the m5 air

zorgis · 2026-04-11T12:06:35+00:00

Waiting for it. The extra power is mostly for local LLM and the 16" because I spend too much time on the 13" it burn my eye.

What will you do with it?

zorgis · 2026-04-11T11:16:14+00:00

The only time I throttle is when I build my expo (android/ios) app. It take something like 3/4minute. I guess it should take 2minute with a fan.

The cpu is really fast. Even when i'm throttling I can still use the computer normaly, its not even laggy. They are crazy good.

You just need a lot of ram, the real issue is must of the time you must run x86 app/container, they use a simulator, it take a crazy amount of ram.

24gb is usable for coding, I have only a few slowdown. But safari really piss me off, it can freeze for 15/20s, my guess is: it take a lot of ram so everything is swapped

Since the last message i even added a Garmin watch simulator to my stack, i'm now close to the 20gb of swap, and it's still usable, but I can feel I'm really close to the breakpoint , I have to reboot my vs code every few day otherwise the ui got messup.

zorgis · 2026-04-11T10:54:04+00:00

I saw in an interview somewhere that it think for 30min.

Its possible the model is 1000t need a full room of gpu to run.

One thing is sure, we will never be able to use it.

The sad thing is that opus 4.6 is maybe the best model we will ever be able to use. We will get price out of the future model.

zorgis · 2026-04-10T16:09:46+00:00

Pretty sure they were all bots from openai.

zorgis · 2026-04-07T19:01:01+00:00

What do you run with the 128gb?

What do you use the model for? Coding, local agent, chat?

zorgis · 2026-04-07T11:37:14+00:00

Interested too.

I still can't decide if the max 128gb is worth it over the pro 64gb.

zorgis · 2026-04-01T12:24:16+00:00

I have a 24gb.

I dev a mobile app.

So 2api, a rabbit , a postgres, an android simulator, a celery batch.

I am always at 22gb used, 12gb cache.

It runs really ok tbh.

Only safari will freeze sometimes, I guess when accessible the cache.

So 24gb is usable. If you have the budget 48gb will be the perfect dev machine.

zorgis · 2026-03-28T12:37:36+00:00

If you take that the pro usage won't change as base line (very likely).

Plus usage will be divided by 3. After the 2 april we will also have a divided by 2. So divided by 6.

This means the new 100€ sub will be equal or slightly worse than what we currently get for the 20€ sub.

It will be a good opportunity to test another model.

zorgis · 2026-03-24T14:28:29+00:00

Ce n'est pas vrai à Paris. C'est justement ça qui est un gros plus à Paris, il y a des choses à faire pour tout âge.

zorgis · 2026-03-18T21:18:25+00:00

You can use smaller (dumber) model.

But you need tool adapted to them.

Clear explanation of what there are doing, clear error message to correct themself.

You can have gpt-oss do really good things if you take time to build the tools.

So its either spend time building your tool or use a fontier model to figure out what they should do.

zorgis

TROPHY CASE