Posted by beex 16 hours ago
Apple MacBook M5 Max has bandwidth up to 600GB/s, is 170GB/s for M6 the real limit? If so, wouldn't this slow down LLM processing?
Even then, 170GB/s is a bump up from 153GB/s of the M5. So we see a 11% uplift already.
Am I crazy, or are a lot more people using the term "uplift" in place of "increase" within the last year? Google Trends (for whatever it's worth) shows a significant increase (uplift?) since mid-late 2025. [0]
[0] https://trends.google.com/explore?q=uplift&date=today%205-y&...
See also: The use of "learnings" instead of "lessons."
Some people adopt stuff faster than others. I've lived in NZ for nearly 20 years and called someone bro for the first time just last week while playing a sport "should have left it for me bro". Slipped out natural as. Still having bad thoughts about it.
My M2 Pro does 200GB/s.
wtf are we even talking about here.
For a direct comparison to your processor, the M5 Pro is at 308GB/s.
What was the speed of the base M5?
So the theoretical Max would be 680GB/s.
Not that I blame Apple here, for once. Seems like they're trying to cope with the limited quantity of RAM they can procure. And with the paltry bandwidth (170GB/s) of these CPUs they're a bad choice for anything but tiny local models anyway.
They're not making those models for the M6 though; they rerouted their resources to making M7 faster at running local LLMs.
If you want more bandwidth, get an M5 Pro, Max, or Ultra. If you want a lower power base model, get the M6. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, wait for the M7, reportedly in the spring.
Yes, high-capacity LPDDR5X are made and do exist, but for all practical intents and purposes, you can't buy enough of them to deliver to customers at Apple scale.
https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Neo-A18...
The base model chip on the Air is binned too - 8 GPU cores on the Air vs 10 on the Pro.
Ok, plausible number for that use case. Striking how it seems like the M-series Macs are almost too good enough for most people.
It's almost desperate prose.
(The AI image processing in Pixelmator Pro saved me hours of work on a recent project. Two button clicks vs a day of tweaking. But even that was on my M1 MacBook Air.)
Is it easily possible to sidegrade/upgrade with a Timemachine backup?
Then do a fresh install on your new system and then use Migration Assistant. Use a USB-4 or a Thunderbolt cable to speed it up.
Just the standard chip without Pro/Max makes me assume this is that base one. If so, the price is way high for where that tends to sit, but welcome to buying a computer in 2026 I guess.
It's the same rollout they've used for a couple of generations now. First the base model chips in fall, then the pro/max versions in spring
the m2/m3 announcements were already kind of cringe to keep saying 'HEY IT'S BETTER THAN INTEL' but at this point it's just embarrassing?
So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.
Source for that fun fact?
Apple didn't fully stop selling Intel macs until June 2023. And they compare against the most recent previous model too.
Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.
They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.
probably because of its adjacency to "corpulent" lol
> Mrs. Krabappel: "Embiggens"? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
> Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
But now it has made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
As long as they're clear about the comparisons they're making ("X% more battery life than Y" as opposed to simply ("X% more battery life") I'm good with it.
IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)
Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.
Intel and now Qualcomm are really not far off on performance per watt. Mostly Apple maintains an advantage on single core performance.
The Panther Lake integrated GPU in the X7/X9 SKI is actually faster than the one you get in the base M5.