Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago.
So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience not able to keep up with benchmarks and marketing?
>Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago. So, where is the disconnect here?
They wrote:
> Together, they deliver up to 15 percent faster multithreaded performance over M4
The problem is comprehension, not marketing.
“M5 delivers over 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI”
In this situation, at least, it’s just referring to AI compute power.
However the marketing claims did not state an across the board weighted performance increase over M4 and certainly by reading the claims one would not assume one that large. Instead the claims state performance gains in specific benchmarks, which is relevant to common modern workflows such as inference. The closest benchmark stated to general purpose computing is the multicore CPU performance increase, which the marketing puts at 15% over M4.
As for that large leap in GPU-driven AI performance, this is on account of the inclusion of a "Neural Accelerator" in each GPU core, which is an M5 specific addition and is similar to changes introduced in the A19 SoC.
Did they claim 4x peak GPU compute going from the M3 to M4? Or M2 to M3? Can you link to these claims? Are you sure they weren't boasting about other metrics being improved by some multiplier? Not every metric is the same, and different metrics don't necessarily stack with each other.
First line on their website:
> M5 delivers over 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI compared to M4
It's the GPU not the CPU (which you compare with your old Intel) and it's an AI workload, not your regular workload (which again is what you compare)
Hardware has improved significantly, but it needs software to enable me to enjoy using it.
Apple is not the only major company that has completely abandoned the users.
The fastest CPUs and GPUs with the most RAM will not make me happier being targeted by commercial surveillance mechanisms, social-media applications, and hallucinating LLM systems.
No. You exit the mail app -> Go to settings -> apps -> scroll through a massive list (that you usually just use for notification settings btw) to go to mail -> mail accounts -> add new account.
Just a simple six-step process after you’ve already hunted for it in the mail app.
You can also click the “+” button at the bottom of the list of accounts in the “Accounts” panel in Mail's settings window.
At our company we used to buy everyone MacBook Pros by default.
After the M-series chip, the MBPs are just too powerful and no longer necessary for the average white collar worker (they seem like “actual” pro machines, now) to the point where we now order MacBook Airs for new employees.
I feel like until recently, you really needed a MBP to get a decent UX (even just using chrome). But now there doesn’t seem to be a major compromise when buying an Air for half the price, at least compared to 3-5 years ago.
“ARM architecture” in the sense it’s used by Apple is just an ISA. The ISA obviously has some effect on power consumption (e.g. avoiding complex CISC decode). But in reality, by far the most significant driver of CPU efficiency and power consumption is process node.
I’ve had zero problems with lag or compile time (prior to macOS 26 anyway)
The only thing it can’t do is run Ableton in a low latency way without strongly changing the defaults
You press a key on the keyboard to play a note and half a second later you hear it
Other than that, zero regrets
something’s off with your setup.
Regular MBs are not really a thing anymore. You mean Airs?
> I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster
The numbers you provided do not come to 4000x faster (closer to 2400x)
> Why is actual user experience not able to keep up with benchmarks and marketing?
Benchmarks and marketing are very different things, but you seem to be holding them up as similar here.
The 5x 6x 4x numbers you describe across marketing across many years don't even refer to the same thing. You're giving numbers with no context, which implies you're mixing them and the marketing worked because the only thing you're recalling is the big number.
Often, every M-series chip is a HUGE advancement over the past in GPU. Most of the "5x" performance jumps you describe are in graphics processing, and the "Intel" they're comparing it to is often an Intel iGPU like the Iris Xe or UHD series. These were low end trash iGPUs even when Apple launched those Intel devices, so being impressed by 5x performance when the M1 came out was in part because the Intel Macs had such terrible integrated graphics.
The M1 was a giant jump in overall system responsiveness, and the M-series seems to be averaging about a 20% year over year meaningful speed increase. If you use AI/ML/GPU, the M-series yearly upgrade is even better. Otherwise, for most things it's a nice and noticeable bump but not a Intel-to-M1 jump even from M1-to-M4.
Spin up ollama and run some inference on your 5-year-old intel macbook. You won't see 4000x performance improvement (because performance is bottlenecked outside of the GPU), but you might be in the right order of magnitude.
[1] The memory bandwidth is fine for CPU workloads, but not for GPU / NN workloads.
"Look how many times faster our car is![1]"
[1] Compared to a paraplegic octogenarian in a broken wheelchair!"
In GPU performance (probably measured on a specific set of tasks).
The disconnect here is that you can't read. Sorry, no other way to say it.
I am deeply concerned all the performance benefits of the new chips will get eaten away.
This is 4-6x faster in AI for instance.
Unless you're looking at your MacBook running LM Studio you won't be seeing much improvement in this regard.
I use both an M1 max and an M3 max, and frankly I do not notice much difference if you control for the core count in most stuff. And for running LLMs they are almost the same performance. I think from M1-M3 there was no much performance increase in general.
Firstly, the M5 isn't 4-6x more powerful than M4 - the claim is only for GPU, only for one narrow workload, not overall performance uplift. Overall performance uplift looks like ~20% over M4, and probably +100% over M1 or so.
But there is absolutely a massive sea change in the MacBook since Intel 5 years ago: your peak workloads haven't changed much, but the hardware improvements give you radically different UX.
For one thing, the Intel laptops absolutely burned through the battery. Five years ago the notion of the all-day laptop was a fantasy. Even relatively light users were tethered to chargers most of the day. This is now almost fully a thing of the past. Unless your workloads are very heavy, it is now safe to charge the laptop once a day. I can go many hours in my workday without charging. I can go through a long flight without any battery anxiety. This is a massive change in how people use laptops.
Secondly is heat and comfort. The Intel Macs spun their fans up at even mild workloads, creating noise and heat - they were often very uncomfortably warm. Similar workloads are now completely silent with the device barely getting warmer than ambient temp.
Thirdly is allowing more advanced uses on lower-spec and less expensive machines. For example, the notion of rendering and editing video on a Intel MacBook Air was a total pipe dream. Now a base spec MacBook Air can do... a lot that once forced you into a much higher price point/size/weight.
A lot of these HN conversations feel like sports car fans complaining: "all this R&D and why doesn't my car go 500mph yet?" - there are other dimensions being optimized for!