M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent Intel processor. Great!
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
Looks like you might be replying out of context. The parent comment had asked why their mac doesn't feel thousands of times faster than earlier models because they've misinterpreted the marketing claims.
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.
Their "peak GPU compute performance for AI" is quite different from your unqualified "performance". I don't know what figures they're quoting, but something stupid like supporting 4-bit floats while the predecessor only supported down to 16-bit floats could easily deliver "over 4x peak GPU compute performance for AI" (measured in FLOPS) without actually making the hardware significantly faster.
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.
There was a time when Apple decided throwing random technical numbers shouldn't be the news (those were following the times of Megahertz counting). These times have been changing post Steve Jobs. This said, it is a chip announcement rather than a product announcement, so maybe that is the news.
They also lost big during the megahertz wars. Consumers made it clear that they wanted to see number go up and voted with their wallet. There is probably still some cultural remnant of that era.
Apple has also seemingly stopped caring about the quality and efficiency of their software. You can see this especially in the latest iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 versions of their operating systems. They need their software leadership to match their hardware leadership, otherwise good hardware with bad software still leads to bad product, which is what we are seeing now.
> Apple has also seemingly stopped caring about the quality and efficiency of their software.
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.
I see this sentiment a lot, but I've found the OS26 releases to be considerably better than the last few years' OS releases, especially macOS which actually feels coherent now compared to the last few years of janky half baked UI.
It is frankly ridiculous how unintuitive it was to add an email account to Mail on iOS. This is possibly the most basic functionality I would expect an email client to have. One would expect that they go to their list of mailboxes and add a new account.
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.
I think the most most basic integration w.r.t. email I want from Apple is that I want to set up another email program besides “Mail” as the default email program, but without having to set up Mail first.
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.
Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Apple Silicon CPUs are entirely based on ARM architecture, and they elected to use ARM architecture, among other reasons, because it has lower power consumption and lower heat generation compared to CISC architectures.
“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.
> 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 regular MacBooks (not Pro’s) for new employees
Regular MBs are not really a thing anymore. You mean Airs?
In 2021, we bought everyone M1 Pros with 32 gigs of ram. Historically, keeping a developer in a 4 year old laptop would have been crazy, but nobody is really calling for upgrades, like we did back when we got rid of the Intels.
> 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.
Not possible given the anemic memory bandwidth [1]... you can scale up the compute all you want but if the memory doesn't scale up as well you're not going to see anywhere near those numbers.
[1] The memory bandwidth is fine for CPU workloads, but not for GPU / NN workloads.
Probably synthetic benchmarks that don't represent actual bottlenecks in application usage. How much of what you are doing is actually CPU bound? Your machine still has to do I/O, and even though that's "very fast" these days, it's not happening inside your CPU, so you'll only see the actual improvements when running workloads that benefit from the performance improvements (i.e., complex calculations that can live in the CPU and its cache).
What scares me is that my M2 started seeing performance issues in macOS recently. Safari is sometimes slow (I admit I stress it with many tabs, but it wasn't like this a year ago.) Somehow the graphics in general seems slower on Tahoe, eg the effects when minimising a window.
I am deeply concerned all the performance benefits of the new chips will get eaten away.
You are probably actually witnessing the reduction in performance of swap as your drive fills up. Check the memory pressure in activity manager. The fix is pretty easy (delete stuff).
Ack. It’s not that then. This has been the main issue for me on my m1 air. Still a great laptop for my needs, although the ui no longer feels lightening fast like it did when it was new.
26.0 is very much a dot-zero release. It is missing a lot of optimizations and there are some open bugs like memory leaks. Initial reports on 26.1 show a lot of improvement in those. The 3rd beta of 26.1 just came out yesterday. They will probably launch this new version with improved optimizations by end of October.
Says M5 is 4x faster than M4 and 6x faster than M1 for AI compute on the GPU. Basically M4 was only a little faster than M1 at this task. Ex. if M5 is 24 AI TOPS, M4 is 6 AI TOPS, and M1 is 4 AI TOPS.
Unless you're looking at your MacBook running LM Studio you won't be seeing much improvement in this regard.
User experience (for most things, unless you sit there encoding video all day) isn't really related to raw performance so much as latency. Processor power can help there, but design and at the limit memory latency is the key constraint.
Agreed, if I have 40 tabs opened on Chrome, my M1 macbook is no longer responsive... I'm not sure about their performance claims, apart from some niche GPU rendering for games, which constitutes about 0% of my daily laptop usage
It states it is "peak performance". Probably in a very specific use case. Or maybe it reaches the peak for an extremely short period of time before it drops the performance.
They are not 4x more powerful than the previous generation at everything, or even at the same thing every time, so it does not stuck up. Here 4x refers sth wrt LLMs running on the GPU.
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.
Because there's more to "actual user experience" than peak CPU/GPU/NPU workload.
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!
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?