If there’s anything this past three years has taught me, it’s that modern cpus can performantly do every task except for streaming text over the internet.
replyI had to upgrade the CPU in a 10-year old machine (from i5 to i7) to have decently -working javascript on websites. Every other piece of software worked fine, though.
replyI'm pretty sure that's just LLMs tendency to replicate bad React patterns.
replyI've found current-generation Macs so capable that I've switched to using a Macbook Air. Would strongly recommend - it's still a powerful machine and it's significantly lighter and cheaper.
replyI have a powerful older Mac that doesn’t really “choke” on anything, but I could always use more speed.
replyThe high memory Macs have been great for being able to run LLMs, but the prompt processing has always been on the slow side. The new AI acceleration in these should help with that.
There are also workloads like compiling code where I’ll take all the extra speed I can get. Every little bit of reduced cycle time helps me finish earlier in the day.
And then there’s gaming. I don’t game much, but the M1 and M2 era Apple Silicon feels sluggish relative to what I have on the nVidia side.
and that’s with doing pretty demanding 3D and LLM work.
> It definitely chokes with larger models that can fit the 192GB of RAM
replyM5 Max maxes out at 128GB, so that will have to wait for the eventual M5 Ultra anyways.
AI video generation can fairly easily choke anything that's not NVIDIA's flagship model. Even the latest local image gen models are so large that they can be frustratingly slow with non-optimal hardware even if they fit in the VRAM. IIRC when I had an M2, it was about 4x slower at running the venerable Stable Diffusion (and SDXL) than my meager RTX 3060.
replyI do not do anything with AI Video, but I imagine running this locally would be a hog on a Mac - especially if not optimised for Metal.
replySounds pretty beefy. What kind of local LLM is that thing capable of running? Does it open up real alternatives to cloud providers like OpenAI and Claude, or are the local models this hardware is capable of running still pretty far behind?
replymy m4max runs fan at high speed! just have few electron apps open..
replyYeah I have an M1 Max, and I really want to upgrade, but there’s no reason to.
reply[flagged]
replyJust because you don't usually use local models doesn't mean others don't, especially with their 192 GB of RAM.
replyYou might have confused Hacker News with your e-mail inbox again. This is an Apple press release, directed to everybody in the world who might be interested in a new computer or their first computer.
replyWhat’s with the attitude? My machine is aging like a fine wine, I’m acknowledging how resilient their custom silicon is despite the world demanding more and more compute.
replyIt was a joke, should have put a smiley face. But every thread on a new Apple product here on HN have the same "why should I upgrade" comment, forgetting that there are people who might have very old devices they want to upgrade, or they might want to switch from Windows/Android to Apple.
replyEven if a new device is a small upgrade from last year's model, it can be a giant upgrade for other people.
Are you one of the folks thinking of upgrading? If so, from what generation? What makes you excited? Isn't this a more interesting way to have the conversation?
replyGot it. I guess it feels unfair to gaslight people who are celebrating not needing upgrades, anecdotally sharing their experiences - because some people just need a new computer for xyz reason in time.
reply