Isn't 170GB/s slow for bandwidth?
Compared to something like VRAM it's slow.
I’ll be selling my M4 MBA soon, I genuinely use the Neo more. Huge difference in typing experience.
Great repairability is a plus. It was super easy, and actually fun to open. Felt like unboxing an Apple product. Applied the thermal paste mod for $10 which works excellently; I’ve had it shortly after launch.
And I love the notchless display, even if I wished the color gamut was a bit better.
Not exactly "future proof" for >1T parameter models but good for targeting specific lower-parameter models, or if you can rely on pipeline parallelism and run a cluster.
Computers are never "future proof".
Upgradeable components however could go a loooong stretch towards that goal. It can't be that hard to follow a common form factor for at least the housing across two or three generations to allow a reuse of everything but the main PCB.
Personally, I can't justify dropping the dosh for a 512GB M5 Ultra, but I would be able to justify it to myself if I could get 1TB of memory, because it'd guarantee the flexibility with local models I currently am missing. Seems a huge miss to not offer this... for a price.
I have a bit of paranoia/anxiety about AI, but it's not what most people are concerned with. I understand the limits of these tools very well, and still find them extremely useful. What concerns me is that it's going to become difficult to impossible in the future to run local models which have near-SOTA capabilities in a way in which you can exercise full control of the model. I see the writing on the wall, and its more than worth it for me to invest early to ensure my own capabilities. I am very much not a fan of our "you'll own nothing and be happy" directionality for the world, and I am (at least currently) privileged to have the means to slow that decline for my own self.
Apple also launched the base M6 today with a 32GB RAM limit, suggesting 512GB may remain the maximum for Ultra chips for some time. Since these Ultra chips combine 16 base chips:
32GB × 16 = 512GB
I decided to get Mac Studio M4 Max, also all maxed out config and the cooling is so much better that I can run local LLMs like Gemma 3/4, gpt-oss 120b all day long without any heat issues or any audible fan noise. So for my use case it was the right decision. I subsequently added 15'' M5 Max MacBook Pro all maxed out to my collection and even though it is slightly faster on LLM inference (I get 100 tokens/s with Gemma 4 27b model), you just can't run LLMs longer than a few minutes. It starts overheating and gets really loud.
I'm waiting this out.
So a combination of a powerful desktop and a "cheap" laptop might indeed be attractive.
A NVIDIA RTX 6000, 96 GB at 1.7 TB/s, is 13 grand.
This 256 GB at 1.2 TB/s Mac is extremely competitive, it will be sold out everywhere.
meerita•53m ago
I am in Europe, and the Mac Studio M5 Ultra GPU 64 cores with 96GB RAM is up to 6.649,00 €. Ouch.
alfanick•46m ago
nine_k•42m ago
> A fully configured IBM Personal Computer AT (Model 5170) with expanded memory and storage cost around $5,795 to $6,000 at its launch in August 1984, which equals roughly $18,600 to $19,300 in 2026 USD.
mrala•19m ago