This is only the base model, no upgrades yet for the Pro/Max version. The memory bandwidth is 153GB/s which is not enough to run viable open source LLM models properly.
As a FW engineer, i can say i have been in both sides. The thing is, many time software has to do some nasty hacking just to work around hardware bug. But i've never seen hardware does the same thing.
And here I am, selling my Macbook M4 Pro to buy a Macbook Air and a dedicated gaming machine. I've tried gaming on the Macbook with Heroic, GPTK, Whiskey, RPCS3 emu and some native. When a game runs, the performance is stunning for a Laptop - but there is always glitches, bugs and annoyances that take out the joy. Needles to mention lack of support from any sort of online multiplayer, due to the lack of anticheat support.
I wish Apple would take gaming more seriously and make GPTK a first class citizen such as Proton on Linux.
With the same number and types (P/E) of cores, the M5 seems more like a feature refinement over M4. I wonder if this is a CPU that Apple released primarily for AI marketing purposes and perception, rather than to push the envelope.
I appreciate Apple propping up the GPU performance of their SoC but it feels a bit pointless when all the libraries they provide are so insular and disconnected from the rest of the industry.
I personally wish they would learn from the failure of Metal.
Also unleashes? Really? The marketing madness has to stop at some point.
No "max" or "pro" equivalent? I wanted to get a new Macbook Pro, but there's no obvious successor to the M4 Max available, M5 looks like a step down in performance if anything.
The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet).
All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware.
Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same tasks ive been last couple of years. I really hope this is not intentional from Apple to make me upgrade. That would be a big let down.
Before the whole "batterygate" thing[1], there were forums and discussions on macrumors and similar inquiring about the feasibility of inserting no-op codes deep below the kernel that would kick in under certain conditions. Post-batterygate, you can't find anything NOT about batterygate when searching.
1] Which I still firmly believe WAS indeed a power-supply design failure that would have forced a massive hardware recall had they not done something (slowing down the os). I believe it encompassed everything from inaccurate CPU power estimates to something actually incorrect with the PCB design, causing brown outs - and not merely a battery-aging red herring as is the reported scandalous reason they were "caught". In fact, I think Apple is GLAD that all it amounted to was some philosophical hullabaloo about protecting your poor aging battery.
To clarify, I suspect the "aging battery" merely exposed the real issue - the incorrect PS design - which Apple successfully covered up.
Do you have any links to these discussion posts? This sounds very interesting, and I'm intrigued to learn more about the hardware explanation for this phenomenon.
I think Tahoe is great on my m1 studio. It’s the first os update in a long time that I actually like. The new design feels very futuristic. And I think I’ll get an m5 MacBook Air. There no better computer deal . Even my m1 computer 5 year old still never has any issue with video or render. It’s insane.
> Software teams at apple really need to get their act together.
WatchOS 26 has rendered my Apple Watch almost useless. It's gone from lasting a whole day including 2 cycling 'workouts' for my commute and the occasional lunch time run (or gym session before work) to now being at 40% battery by the time I make my mid-morning coffee and dead before I get home.
I don't use most of the 'smart' features anyway - I'm mostly using the fitness features - so I'll probably switch to a Garmin at some point.
If you want to try something cheap, try the Amazfit BIP 6 watch. It costs around 1/4 of Apple watch, has most but not all of the same sensors (can't do ECG). It has far too many configuration options for my taste, but it does mean you can make it look like Apple like with Apple watch like battery life or configure it to last well over 3 weeks on a single charge. TL;DR: software is kinda clunky, but the hardware works well, and it's focus is on fitness.
I'll echo this, I've been buying these for my wife since the original Bip, and the battery life alone is more than worth it. She wears hers nearly daily.
Have you tried restarting your watch? I noticed heavily increased battery drain after the update too, until I restarted the watch and everything turned normal again.
I've seen every new OS update leading to M1 Air performance degrade, at this point I'm pretty convinced Apple is doing this intentionally.
Edit: Same experience with iPhone X
Edit2: I still remember the feeling when I got them initially - that Apple is on customer's side, but now I feel totally helpless and i'm being forced to upgrade
> I really hope this is not intentional from Apple to make me upgrade. That would be a big let down.
I've got a reference macbook air from 2015, which is almost clean, only zoom, teams and chrome for meets are installed and used for calls. And boy, how do I regret making macOS updates.. I can believe teams and zoom are shitbags of modern software slop, and thus started to fail running simple video calls. But even native macOS apps that are barely updated for years like notes and calendar are freezing now. So I can conclude that these anti-backward compatibility updates are highly intentional, because hardware is absolutely fine for decade, i even used this ultra-tiny air for travel work once back in 2022, it was still capable to do all office things and thin client. But last year it just turned into pumpkin.
My question is - maybe installing linux can help bring it back to life.
That’s a bit silly though, that implies that the MacBook Pro M5 will not be compatible with Apple’s lossless wireless codec introduced in the iPhone 17 and AirPods Pro 3?
That really is a reason for me to skip this upgrade and wait for the next release.
The fix is to disable Glass.
In a terminal:
defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES
This gets rid of the slow animations, inconsistent window cornering, and other annoyances.
Then (so menus aren't transparent and unreadable):
System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce Transparency
If you do those two things your machine should look and feel normal again. I've been running an M1 Max since 2021 and Tahoe was simply a disaster. Removing the glass layer made everything feel good again.
If for some reason you ever want the bad performance and glass back, you change the YES to NO in the Terminal command. Maybe someday it won't suck.
I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to say that I agree with you. I also think that Apple's hardware is fantastic, but it's the software that's holding them back.
It seems this generation focuses more on GPU and AI acceleration rather than CPU. The M5 chip allows Apple Vision Pro to render 10% more pixels and operate at up to 120 Hz. It delivers up to four times the peak GPU compute performance compared with M4, provides 30% higher graphics performance, and offers 15% faster multithreaded CPU performance.
I am wondering if Apple's focus is off lately with this drive for AI. So far all they are showing in that presentation is that I can have
"the ability to transform 2D photos into spatial scenes in the Photos app, or generating a Persona — operate with greater speed and efficiency."
And by making Apple AI (which is something I do not use for many reasons, but mainly because of Climate Change) their focus, I am afraid they are losing and making their operating Systems worse.
For instance, Liquid Glass, the mess I was lucky enough to uninstall before they put in the embargo against doing so, is, well, a mess. An Aplha release in my opinion which I feel was a distraction from their lack of a robust AI release.
So by blowing money on the AI gold rush that they were too late for, will they ultimately ruin their products across the board?
I am currently attempting to sell my iPhone 16E and my M1 Macbook Air to move back to Linux because of all of this.
Running AI on the macbook or phone is probably really energy efficient compared to data centers. I think AI hardware makes sense. Dunno about recent software though - glass and apple intelligence both seem useless.
At the end of the day, they're building silicon that can do this to be ready for when the software side of the house actually figures this stuff out. Of course, it doesn't seem like the software side is close to this, and a very real risk for Apple is a world where the local AI use-cases don't really grow to justify this level of silicon investment. More specifically: Personal context is a big thing that Apple is uniquely positioned to capitalize on; but will a mobile-sized LLM and mobile-sized memory ever be able to coherently handle the volume of contextual data that might be necessary to be truly great? I have 400gb in iCloud, I don't want to get into the weeds of most of that being images and such; you don't need to in order to recognize that modern data center-scale LLMs can handle, like, less than a megabyte of context.
There will always be local-first use-cases, but its also possible that, you know, we're already near the global maxima of those use-cases, and the local AI coprocessors we've had can do it fine. This would be a severe shock to my perceived value of Apple right now, because my view is: their hardware division is firing on all cylinders and totally killing it. But when you're putting supercomputers into the iPad... maybe that doesn't actually matter. Meanwhile, their software is getting worse every year that goes by.
I keep seeing all those crazy screenshots from games on Mac, and yet there are barely any big releases for this platform. I guess it benefits a whole range of software, not just games, but still that's a pity.
161 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadSo give the software some slack.
I wish Apple would take gaming more seriously and make GPTK a first class citizen such as Proton on Linux.
I personally wish they would learn from the failure of Metal.
Also unleashes? Really? The marketing madness has to stop at some point.
All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware.
Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same tasks ive been last couple of years. I really hope this is not intentional from Apple to make me upgrade. That would be a big let down.
1] Which I still firmly believe WAS indeed a power-supply design failure that would have forced a massive hardware recall had they not done something (slowing down the os). I believe it encompassed everything from inaccurate CPU power estimates to something actually incorrect with the PCB design, causing brown outs - and not merely a battery-aging red herring as is the reported scandalous reason they were "caught". In fact, I think Apple is GLAD that all it amounted to was some philosophical hullabaloo about protecting your poor aging battery.
To clarify, I suspect the "aging battery" merely exposed the real issue - the incorrect PS design - which Apple successfully covered up.
Quit the Dropbox app, it’s electron, and it’s brand spanking new
WatchOS 26 has rendered my Apple Watch almost useless. It's gone from lasting a whole day including 2 cycling 'workouts' for my commute and the occasional lunch time run (or gym session before work) to now being at 40% battery by the time I make my mid-morning coffee and dead before I get home.
I don't use most of the 'smart' features anyway - I'm mostly using the fitness features - so I'll probably switch to a Garmin at some point.
Edit: Same experience with iPhone X
Edit2: I still remember the feeling when I got them initially - that Apple is on customer's side, but now I feel totally helpless and i'm being forced to upgrade
I've got a reference macbook air from 2015, which is almost clean, only zoom, teams and chrome for meets are installed and used for calls. And boy, how do I regret making macOS updates.. I can believe teams and zoom are shitbags of modern software slop, and thus started to fail running simple video calls. But even native macOS apps that are barely updated for years like notes and calendar are freezing now. So I can conclude that these anti-backward compatibility updates are highly intentional, because hardware is absolutely fine for decade, i even used this ultra-tiny air for travel work once back in 2022, it was still capable to do all office things and thin client. But last year it just turned into pumpkin.
My question is - maybe installing linux can help bring it back to life.
That really is a reason for me to skip this upgrade and wait for the next release.
They are so scared about cannibalizing mac/ipad sales - they really really want people to own both.
This gets rid of the slow animations, inconsistent window cornering, and other annoyances.
Then (so menus aren't transparent and unreadable): System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce Transparency
If you do those two things your machine should look and feel normal again. I've been running an M1 Max since 2021 and Tahoe was simply a disaster. Removing the glass layer made everything feel good again.
If for some reason you ever want the bad performance and glass back, you change the YES to NO in the Terminal command. Maybe someday it won't suck.
I really don't like what it does to certain transparent drop downs for certain apps as well as the control center.
But It does seem nice to do it on a per app basis (ie "defaults write com.apple.finder com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES")
https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into...
I personally have no idea but I seem to recall the golden age of open source/unix embrace was under Serlet
"the ability to transform 2D photos into spatial scenes in the Photos app, or generating a Persona — operate with greater speed and efficiency."
And by making Apple AI (which is something I do not use for many reasons, but mainly because of Climate Change) their focus, I am afraid they are losing and making their operating Systems worse.
For instance, Liquid Glass, the mess I was lucky enough to uninstall before they put in the embargo against doing so, is, well, a mess. An Aplha release in my opinion which I feel was a distraction from their lack of a robust AI release.
So by blowing money on the AI gold rush that they were too late for, will they ultimately ruin their products across the board?
I am currently attempting to sell my iPhone 16E and my M1 Macbook Air to move back to Linux because of all of this.
There will always be local-first use-cases, but its also possible that, you know, we're already near the global maxima of those use-cases, and the local AI coprocessors we've had can do it fine. This would be a severe shock to my perceived value of Apple right now, because my view is: their hardware division is firing on all cylinders and totally killing it. But when you're putting supercomputers into the iPad... maybe that doesn't actually matter. Meanwhile, their software is getting worse every year that goes by.
"The neural engine features a graphic accelerator" probably M6