If you’re an Intel guy, you likely know i3, i5, i7, and i9. The Apple equivalents are [base], Pro, Max, and Ultra. (You would think Max would be the top one, but the easy way to remember it is to look at the brand, it’s Apple so it doesn’t have to make sense. Therefore, Ultra is above Max.)
I think it’s more like Pro is two base chips, Max is two Pro chips (four base chips), and Ultra is two Max chips (eight base chips) or something like that. They just scale up the cores, but they might do more than just scale up the core count. I’m not sure though, but I know they’ve said in the past Ultra is just two Maxes mashed together, or they said it about one generation… or maybe they said it was like two Maxes mashed together.
So if base M5 is just 4.3% better than the top dog in Windows/Android computing, wait to see what the Pro, Max, and Ultra do.
I’ve heard it said that M5 Ultra might touch [Nvidia GeForce] 5090 performance, and that’s just nuts to me. You’ll also spend around $5k or more on it, and I don’t think you need quite that much to build a Windows PC around a 5090. So comparing a Mac chip to a gaming GPU is kinda laughable. Yeah we just got Cyberpunk (I’m a Mac user — I have an M2 Pro Mac and a base M2 MacBook Air) and that’s kind of a big deal, it plays, kinda looks like ass a bit, I’d rather play on Xbox, and I’m more excited about Blue Prince… but no one buys a Mac for gaming.
So let’s be real. These numbers aren’t for gaming. They’re for AI. And Apple Intelligence is still in beta, still coming soon… and yet, when they doubled the speed of the M5’s storage over the M4, they said it was to load LLMs faster. But they still aren’t taking Apple Intelligence seriously, and they’re hemorrhaging talent to the competition. But no one really buys a Mac for AI, either. They’re building computers with beefy GPUs for that. People buy Macs for art, for creative production… or just because they don’t want to be Windows users (and for whatever reason don’t want to delve into Linux).
Not an expert on Apple’s CPU, but we are looking at single-thread results, I believe single thread results do not really scale across Apple’s computer CPU brand portfolio.
AFAIK, Geekbench scores are extremely CPU-specific and are not really relevant for GPU compute performance. We would need a different set of benchmarks for that.
That would be wild if a SoC approaches 5090 performance. In this Blender benchmark here, it shows a M3 Ultra with 80 cores being similar to a 5070 Ti, though you’re going to pay several times the price for the M3 machine. At this rate, it’s quite possible that SoCs will make discrete GPUs the less practical choice for most GPU-intensive workloads in the not too distant future, though the opposite is true today, even despite the silly power requirements of top-end NVIDIA GPUs. I think NVIDIA is especially digging themselves a hole with the VRAM nonsense, and we will all rejoice when we can run GPU workloads with 64Gi of shared, cheap RAM. It would certainly be ideal if other competitors could develop equally powerful chips, though, since being stuck in Apple’s walled garden is a fairly undesirable tradeoff.
Nvidia isn’t standing still, they made the SoC for the DGX Spark, so they’re definitely going to be ready if the market shifts that way. I heard there might be laptops using that SoC too.
To be clear, you’re only stuck in Apple’s walled garden in any meaningful sense on a couple Apple devices. The Apple Watch, for example, doesn’t work with anything but an iPhone. It might do some basic stuff with Android OEMs, but it won’t do as much. AirPods work on Android, but not all features. iPhones can’t officially sideload (there are ways). Mac is wide open. Apple TV (the box) doesn’t care what phone you have, though it has tighter speaker integration with HomePods.
I feel like those who say “walled garden” are speaking on something very specific or they aren’t very savvy. I’ve never felt limited by Apple’s “walls”. I use their tech because they’re the best for what I need, for the most part. I also have an Android phone (and it’s 5 years older than my iPhone), and there are a couple things it does better. Like the keyboard. While I do acknowledge that the “walled garden” means I have to give advantages to Apple tech because it talks to Apple tech (and nobody else really has this kind of ecosystem), it doesn’t do much to stop me from going outside of it. For example, my wife has an Android phone (and only the one) and she has just as good an experience on the Macs and Apple TV. She does also have an iPad though, but she’s not locked into the ecosystem, and she’s far less tech savvy than I am. She uses a Mac because that’s what I bought. She doesn’t care as long as it runs Firefox.
I have 2 Linux boxes for different gaming purposes but macOS/Apple on everything else. It’s the ecosystem. There just isn’t any native support for Android in Linux (yet). Things stopping me from switching:
performance per watt for laptops
native texting app (similar to iMessage that uses cellular numbers) on Linux (RCS desktop client)
scrcpy needs to be less obtuse
Linux theming needs to be more resilient to OS upgrades (this may be wrong, but it’s been a bit difficult to see how themes won’t be broken between major KDE/gnome updates)
phone notifications on desktop through btLE (I’m not always on a wifi network)
continuity between form factors
voice assistant support (I’d LOVE Gemini for desktop)
Out of everything, the last three are the most important for me because I depend on those apps every day. Linux is just so damn close, and KDE connect is just a few features away from being perfect.
Can’t you text on Android from a computer via Google’s site? I seem to remember reading about that. I’ve never tried it, though — and it would be through a web browser (and likely requiring a Google account/login, though the latter could be said about iMessage/Apple account).
Yeah, Google messages works great from the web. I just really want a native client for RCS messages; granted Google was supposed to open RCS for others to implement but never did. I could totally live with a web app, but it’s still a painpoint nonetheless.
What I’m thinking being that this is Linux and I feel like that gives you more options — some kind of dedicated browser or like a web app. So it could be done. Like I always have iMessage open on my desktop. I have a loose grid of apps I keep open. I don’t see my wallpaper. I wonder if you could do that with a web app or a web view, like no toolbars, just the page in a window.
Oh for sure, I could always use a web wrapper app for Google messages and keep it in a workspace like I do with iMessage. There’s a bunch of them out there that turn websites into desktop apps.
It’s also only the base M4.
If you’re an Intel guy, you likely know i3, i5, i7, and i9. The Apple equivalents are [base], Pro, Max, and Ultra. (You would think Max would be the top one, but the easy way to remember it is to look at the brand, it’s Apple so it doesn’t have to make sense. Therefore, Ultra is above Max.)
I think it’s more like Pro is two base chips, Max is two Pro chips (four base chips), and Ultra is two Max chips (eight base chips) or something like that. They just scale up the cores, but they might do more than just scale up the core count. I’m not sure though, but I know they’ve said in the past Ultra is just two Maxes mashed together, or they said it about one generation… or maybe they said it was like two Maxes mashed together.
So if base M5 is just 4.3% better than the top dog in Windows/Android computing, wait to see what the Pro, Max, and Ultra do.
I’ve heard it said that M5 Ultra might touch [Nvidia GeForce] 5090 performance, and that’s just nuts to me. You’ll also spend around $5k or more on it, and I don’t think you need quite that much to build a Windows PC around a 5090. So comparing a Mac chip to a gaming GPU is kinda laughable. Yeah we just got Cyberpunk (I’m a Mac user — I have an M2 Pro Mac and a base M2 MacBook Air) and that’s kind of a big deal, it plays, kinda looks like ass a bit, I’d rather play on Xbox, and I’m more excited about Blue Prince… but no one buys a Mac for gaming.
So let’s be real. These numbers aren’t for gaming. They’re for AI. And Apple Intelligence is still in beta, still coming soon… and yet, when they doubled the speed of the M5’s storage over the M4, they said it was to load LLMs faster. But they still aren’t taking Apple Intelligence seriously, and they’re hemorrhaging talent to the competition. But no one really buys a Mac for AI, either. They’re building computers with beefy GPUs for that. People buy Macs for art, for creative production… or just because they don’t want to be Windows users (and for whatever reason don’t want to delve into Linux).
Not an expert on Apple’s CPU, but we are looking at single-thread results, I believe single thread results do not really scale across Apple’s computer CPU brand portfolio.
AFAIK, Geekbench scores are extremely CPU-specific and are not really relevant for GPU compute performance. We would need a different set of benchmarks for that.
That would be wild if a SoC approaches 5090 performance. In this Blender benchmark here, it shows a M3 Ultra with 80 cores being similar to a 5070 Ti, though you’re going to pay several times the price for the M3 machine. At this rate, it’s quite possible that SoCs will make discrete GPUs the less practical choice for most GPU-intensive workloads in the not too distant future, though the opposite is true today, even despite the silly power requirements of top-end NVIDIA GPUs. I think NVIDIA is especially digging themselves a hole with the VRAM nonsense, and we will all rejoice when we can run GPU workloads with 64Gi of shared, cheap RAM. It would certainly be ideal if other competitors could develop equally powerful chips, though, since being stuck in Apple’s walled garden is a fairly undesirable tradeoff.
Nvidia isn’t standing still, they made the SoC for the DGX Spark, so they’re definitely going to be ready if the market shifts that way. I heard there might be laptops using that SoC too.
To be clear, you’re only stuck in Apple’s walled garden in any meaningful sense on a couple Apple devices. The Apple Watch, for example, doesn’t work with anything but an iPhone. It might do some basic stuff with Android OEMs, but it won’t do as much. AirPods work on Android, but not all features. iPhones can’t officially sideload (there are ways). Mac is wide open. Apple TV (the box) doesn’t care what phone you have, though it has tighter speaker integration with HomePods.
I feel like those who say “walled garden” are speaking on something very specific or they aren’t very savvy. I’ve never felt limited by Apple’s “walls”. I use their tech because they’re the best for what I need, for the most part. I also have an Android phone (and it’s 5 years older than my iPhone), and there are a couple things it does better. Like the keyboard. While I do acknowledge that the “walled garden” means I have to give advantages to Apple tech because it talks to Apple tech (and nobody else really has this kind of ecosystem), it doesn’t do much to stop me from going outside of it. For example, my wife has an Android phone (and only the one) and she has just as good an experience on the Macs and Apple TV. She does also have an iPad though, but she’s not locked into the ecosystem, and she’s far less tech savvy than I am. She uses a Mac because that’s what I bought. She doesn’t care as long as it runs Firefox.
I have 2 Linux boxes for different gaming purposes but macOS/Apple on everything else. It’s the ecosystem. There just isn’t any native support for Android in Linux (yet). Things stopping me from switching:
Out of everything, the last three are the most important for me because I depend on those apps every day. Linux is just so damn close, and KDE connect is just a few features away from being perfect.
Can’t you text on Android from a computer via Google’s site? I seem to remember reading about that. I’ve never tried it, though — and it would be through a web browser (and likely requiring a Google account/login, though the latter could be said about iMessage/Apple account).
Yeah, Google messages works great from the web. I just really want a native client for RCS messages; granted Google was supposed to open RCS for others to implement but never did. I could totally live with a web app, but it’s still a painpoint nonetheless.
What I’m thinking being that this is Linux and I feel like that gives you more options — some kind of dedicated browser or like a web app. So it could be done. Like I always have iMessage open on my desktop. I have a loose grid of apps I keep open. I don’t see my wallpaper. I wonder if you could do that with a web app or a web view, like no toolbars, just the page in a window.
Oh for sure, I could always use a web wrapper app for Google messages and keep it in a workspace like I do with iMessage. There’s a bunch of them out there that turn websites into desktop apps.