New Apple M5 is the centerpiece of an updated 14-inch MacBook Pro

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jackmactamas

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Lol, all that memory bandwidth and it still can't support three external monitors + laptop like my ThinkPad could 10 years ago.
On the other hand, the number of pixels that it can push per second (especially taking into account Hz) is ENORMOUSLY higher on these new Macs.
 
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NetMage

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Apple software makes the iPad something other than a computer. It is not a fully useable computer.

Keyboards barely work.
It is a fully usable computer, it just doesn’t work the way you want it to. If what you wanted was a MacBook, that’s what you should’ve bought.
 
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It would also be a negligible feature for them to implement. Like I said, literally every Windows laptop since forever has supported this.
<Looks at IdeaPad I bought in August 2022 (with support for a single external monitor over HDMI>. Either forever is remarkable recent or literally isn't literal.</Looks>.
 
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NetMage

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For reference, memory bandwidth is sill lower than prior generations Pro and Max versions.
Why compare the base M5 to the prior Pro and Max versions? The M5 is 1.25x the M4’s bandwidth and 1.5x the M3’s bandwidth, very good generation on generation increases. Assuming it scales, the M5 Pro, Max and Ultra should also gain about the same amount over the equivalent M4s.
 
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For those complaining about lack of memory bandwidth and fewer monitors being supported, remember that I/O cost money, especially for smaller die sizes. Plus memory and high speed I/O has a lot of analog circuitry that doesn’t shrink very well. Makes total sense that the low end chip would limit these features.
 
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Yes, and that's enormously less practical than being able to use the monitors I have around for more real estate.

It would also be a negligible feature for them to implement. Like I said, literally every Windows laptop since forever has supported this.

People give Apple way too much forgiveness for dictating that everyone has to throw out their old monitors and go buy a new single giant one because Apple couldn't be bothered supporting basic Display Port and HDMI protocols that literally the entire rest of the industry does.

Looking at the Thinkpad P14sG1 specs right now, and they're exactly the same:
Supports up to 3 independent displays (native display and 2 external monitors via HDMI®, USB-C® and Thunderbolt™)
Or the current X1 G13
Models with U or H series processor: supports up to 4 independent displays (native display and 3 external monitors via
HDMI® and Thunderbolt™)
Models with V series processor: supports up to 3 independent displays (native display and 2 external monitors via HDMI®
and Thunderbolt™)
This is a totally unremarkable level of display support for midrange business laptops. Few regular people will need more than 1i+2e, and for them, all the major vendors have better spec options available (eg. M4 Pro/Max)

(Edits because Google doesn't understand Thinkpad generations)
 
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OrangeCream

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I bought the M4 iPP last year, and it has been a total disappointment.

iPadOS 26 is a one step forward and two steps back.

Apple software makes the iPad something other than a computer. It is not a fully useable computer.

Keyboards barely work.

Tim and Craig need to resign or be pushed out, boycotting Apple till then.
Sounds like you should have bought a MacBook Air instead.
 
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Green-PEAs

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Meh.

OK if you're typically buying at the base model price point, otherwise pretty much everyone is going to wait till Q126 or till the alleged "touch screen refresh" which..... hard pass. I don't need a professional laptop to double as a tablet. If I want a tablet I'll buy an iPad (I know "convergence" is all the rage with Apple right now, but hopefully this too will pass - form should follow function and typical use cases).

Also not yet knowable, but if they go back to "amazingly thinner" as a selling point and lose non-Thunderbolt ports as a result, that's a mistake IMHO. Granted, I'd much rather the current design have a USB-A port than an HDMI port, and I think many others would as well given how many common peripherals use USB-A (mice and printers being the most obvious examples) and how easy (with a simple USB-C to HDMI / DP cable) it is to connect those types of displays via Thunderbolt.

In other words, the downside is not the existing ports adding thickness, it's that they chose the wrong kind of port(s). Correct solution IMO is roughly same thickness and if you have to pick and choose, choose to design in 1 or 2 USB-A ports (one each side would be ideal), not HDMI. Given speed limitations, also question the inclusion of SD slot. There's no downside to using a bus-powered reader for that. Whereas making it a high speed CFx slot would probably serve serious photographers / video professionals better (for example). Would mention Ethernet but we all know that's not happening.

I understand what you’re saying here, but that’s never going to happen. The design ethos has been backwards compatibility via add-ons and dongles, not built-in features, for 25+ years - ever since they made the decision to drop the 3.5” floppy drive.

You’re going to get the minimum variety of ports possible and that’s just always been apple. Where they keep screwing up is also reducing the quantity of ports.
 
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SirOmega

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<Looks at IdeaPad I bought in August 2022 (with support for a single external monitor over HDMI>. Either forever is remarkable recent or literally isn't literal.</Looks>.
Up until recently, Dell was selling a lot of laptops that not only supported only 1 monitor output over HDMI, but they didn't support resolutions above 1920x1080. I had bought my scientist wife a new 27" 1440p monitor and she had to run it at 1080p until we got her a new laptop a few years later.
 
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NameRedacted

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otherwise pretty much everyone is going to wait till Q126 or till the alleged "touch screen refresh"

Oh yeah, I remember hearing about the alleged upcoming “touch screen refresh” in 2007.

At this point, that rumour is old enough to buy a MacBook Pro for their college courses.
 
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LexaGrey

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Yes, and that's enormously less practical than being able to use the monitors I have around for more real estate.

It would also be a negligible feature for them to implement. Like I said, literally every Windows laptop since forever has supported this.

People give Apple way too much forgiveness for dictating that everyone has to throw out their old monitors and go buy a new single giant one because Apple couldn't be bothered supporting basic Display Port and HDMI protocols that literally the entire rest of the industry does.
Umm. The article literally says it comes with an HDMI port. And as for protocols they still sell a VGA adapter for gosh sakes and there are tons of third party USB-C dongles for every port type which are fully supported so the protocol comment is wrong too. If you are throwing out old monitors you aren’t doing any research first.
 
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adamsc

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Yes, and that's enormously less practical than being able to use the monitors I have around for more real estate.

It would also be a negligible feature for them to implement. Like I said, literally every Windows laptop since forever has supported this.

As many people have noted, you're either wrong or lying about this from a factual perspective (my number is 2, as in the number of pro-branded laptops on dell.com I had to look at before finding one which had the same limit) but you're also wrong about this from a screen real-estate perspective. Unless you're using one of those displays to watch something like a security camera feed, having multiple small displays is less productive than a smaller number of higher-resolution displays both because they don't constrain the maximum window size as much and because it's physically less convenient to have to turn your head sideways like you're looking out a train window all the time (I test this every time I'm at work, where I have 2 external displays but feel cramped compared to the single high res external display I have at home). This is especially true if the external displays are limited – for example, that second Dell I looked at topped out at 1920x1080 so I'd need eight of those external displays to hold as much information as I can display on the single 5K iMac screen I'm using now and that's a lot of wasted physical space creating distracting gaps.

Now, to be clear, there are other pro laptops which can do higher resolution: for example, the first Dell I looked at can do two external 8K displays (as long as the lower-resolution internal display is off) or 1x8K 2x4k so it's not like there hasn't been a lot of progress pushing ludicrous numbers of pixels in the years but also if you're buying multiple 6-8K monitors which each cost a couple grand, you presumably have a budget which can include spending a few hundred on the Max model which can drive 4 external displays.
 
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Lol, all that memory bandwidth and it still can't support three external monitors + laptop like my ThinkPad could 10 years ago.

Wait! You're saying that Apple isn't going out of its way to support a 1% corner case of users? Have you alerted the media about this yet?
 
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MilanKraft

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What else would be the point of a new base model? Did you post a bunch of speculation just to argue against it?
Not arguing against the base model, just saying it's a pretty modest update (but not unexpected in that sense). THen I went on to point out most MBP users will wait for one of the next two revisions (AFAWK early next year and late next year), then pointing out what i hope will / won't happen with that. Most of what I was arguing against was a touch-screen variant and possibility of returning to "thinner than evar!" design ethic. Not sure how that isn't clear but is what it is.
 
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dmsilev

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Wait! You're saying that Apple isn't going out of its way to support a 1% corner case of users? Have you alerted the media about this yet?
It's an even stupider point than that, because Apple does support this particular use case: Buy one of the MBP models with an MxMax chip, and it'll drive more external displays. Either buy now with an M4Max, or wait until the winter (most likely) for an M5Max version.
 
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twilightomni

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I am curious about Apple's claimed M5's 6x faster than M1 at AI tasks (presumably with Apple's MLX framework).

The OSS-GPT-20b model, which is pretty good for local offline coding, can hit 25 tokens/sec on an M1 MacBook Air, 90 t/s on my M3 Max, and over 105 t/s on an M4 Max (for comparison, a 5080 can do 140 t/s).

If 6x means 6x, then presumably a base M5, at purely local offline AI tasks, would beat an M4 Max and nearly match a 5080. What then would an M5 Pro or M5 Max do...
 
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SeanJW

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One other note not in the article was faster storage (in addition to more storage). It says 2x faster, which I read as they upgraded to a newer version of PCIE (4 to 5?) for the SSD interface.

The SSD controller is on the Mx chip - there's no PCIe separating the raw chips of the flash and the SoC. If its faster, it's the internal interconnect or the chips themselves. The only place they use PCIe externally is in Thunderbolt (the Mac Pro unbundles it from Thunderbolt but really doesn't have that many actual lanes in the first place)
 
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